This topic will probably be deleted since there’s no project dicussion of any kind, but I feel this is the ideal place to post this so here I go.
As a film aficionado whose interest in the technical aspects of moviemaking has grown over the years and being a member of this forum for as long as I have been I’ve started to notice how many home media releases are so drastically different from their film print counterparts, from changes in colour timing to stuff like DNR and edge enhancement or the level of contrast which has been lowered or heightened to the point of crushed blacks.
What I find truly baffling is that we have reached a point in which home video can perfectly replicate the look of a film-projected image as shown by the many film scans that have either been released or are in progress by members of this online community, yet many blu-ray releases are still far from the original look of the movies presented, with revisionist colour timing, digital “clean-up” that wipes away the texture of surfaces which is most apparent in the actors’ faces looking like wax figures to oddly dim-lit looking images and so on and so forth. It’s gotten to a point where I have grown paranoid about home media and don’t know what to trust anymore, especially with much older movies like Ben-Hur or The Godfather, which I never saw in cinemas since those were well before I was born so for all I know 2001: A Space Odyssey had a bright green tint in the original 70mm film prints, and you don’t even have to that far back in time. For instance, from what I’ve gathered watching online photos of the many film cells of Interstellar it’s clear the movie has a cyan tint and higher contrast, yet the blu-ray presents us with a digital transfer that has a blanket yellow tint, a somewhat desaturated colour palette and lower contrast.
The people in charge of handling digital transfers of movies are supposed to be the best of the best yet we are still treated to several piss-poor transfers on our blu-ray discs, and many so-called amateurs on these boards have taken the time to correct the many issues they present, case in point: Neverar’s correction of the official Star Wars blu-ray which blows the official digital presentation out of the water, or the film scans of movies that despite a few scratches here and there still look way better than the official blu-ray discs.
Maybe I’m being too harsh on the people who work on official transfers as they still have deadlines to meet and sure they’ve a few things right like some of the early James Bond movies with Sean Connery, but the fact members of this forum have come up with improvements in their spare time that put their work to shame leaves me wondering.
Just needed to get that out of my chest, guys.