RU.08, if you don’t want to listen to it, you’ll need to take my word for it. No telecine prints. Not a single one in over 200 movies he transfered. The studios didn’t use them for home video transfers. That would be a TV station specific thing.
You’re missing the point entirely. Telecine machines were not designed to transfer projection prints. They work well with low contrast film (negatives, inter positives, master positives, telecine prints, etc).
You should provide proper references. I’ve listened to part of the interview and so far he doesn’t say anything like what you claimed, so no I’m not taking your word on it. Here are some quotes from it:
11:19- “It wasn’t until Rank Cintel came out with film transfer machines in the 60’s that any scene correction was done at all. They did what they call a ‘one light’ which was a single pass of the move through the projector and record it all through the camera, and then distribute it however it was.”
12:58- “To operate it everything that controlled that machine was on a little stick and cards in cages in the front of the machine and every morning I’d have to go through and do basic alignments on that machine before they ever started, because it would sit overnight and it would drift. It would take me roughtly an hour and a half every day to tweak that machine on a calibration frame, and then we’d check in in motion because in motion the light level and the colour would change slightly.”
20:33- “When we got that film (Star Wars) that entire series they were in good shape. I think we had to put one splice on the interneg. The interneg is actually another film stock, I looked it up a few months ago, and there’s a Kodak site that talks about internegs and the typical film stock for it. We put one splice in that because the interneg that we did get had been used so much that it broke once. So we had to splice it and we were really careful with it. We didn’t often do a fast-forward or a ree-to-reel take because the Rank was so strong that when you put the brakes on it would stop so hard so fast that you take a good chance of breaking any film on it.”
21:49- “Yep, every single film has its own little characteristics, chemical psychology, every single film that you get in the transfer suite is slightly different from the one you just did or the one after it. Another example, an extreme example is Yentl because that particular film Barbra Streisand had shot it with a yellow-cast to indicate that it was a period piece, and when we put it on the Rank and looked at the first frames of the video it didn’t look right. It had that yellow cast. And we went through and had done the typical set ups, zeroing everything out, and when we did that there was this yellowish looking, almost mustard looking, film over the film. While she had done that on purpose and our studio wrote a letter at my request to her, and she replied back and she was pretty upset. Robert Altman had shot a film about Buffalo Bill that had a colour cast to it. Every film, even the black and white films, come through the film transfer and they’re slightly different colours depending on age. Even those films have to be handled and calibrated before we actually do the transfer - every single time. And that can take up to half a day. Because not only do you have to calibrate the transfer machine before the film, but you have to look through the entire film and find out ‘are my calibrations going to last me all the way through this film or is there some scene in this that is going to be so extreme that I’ve got to adjust the window of acceptability to that scene and then hope the rest of the movie fits into it?’ Because it happens.”
What you said was this:
Also of note, in the interview Mr. Cook states that they didn’t constantly adust the transfer. So each scene is not individually color corrected. It is one setting for the entire film. So the scene by scene color, saturation, and contrast, at least of the transfers he did, are true to the original print.
Well, if you listen to the interview, he was the one doing it and they set the setting at the beginning if the day and only changed things if the machine started to drift. That probably was between reels. From what he said, the machine was too strong and if you moved the film you risked breaking it. So I believe that his telecines on that machine had a uniform setting for every reel and they tried to stay consistent between reels. When you really think about it, there shouldn’t be any need to change the settings in the middle of a properly timed and processed itermediate.
That’s not at all what he said in the first 25 minutes (unless he said it later?):
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Calibrating the machines each day before transfer did not mean further calibration didn’t happen. In fact he specifically says that further calibration did happen and could take up to half a day per film (clearly he is referring to the “rehearsal”). He even mentions that specific scenes can be problematic.
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He didn’t say that he didn’t do fine adjustments throughout.
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He didn’t say you couldn’t do scene-by-scene adjustments because the “machine was too strong” he simply said that you couldn’t do a fast-forward or entire reel transfer when using a negative because of the strength of the machine. All that means is that you couldn’t fast forward through scenes in the rehearsal by the sound of it. And it would only apply to lab film as it’s much much thinner than prints - I would think the prints for telecine were more durable with thicker base just like projection prints are.
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He doesn’t say they always used internegs/interpositives to transfer the Star Wars films throughout the 80’s and early 90’s. He was clearly talking about his own experience.
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You claimed he never used telecine prints, yet he clearly says he sent a letter to Barbra Streisand because the film she had sent wasn’t suitable for home video transfer - what do you think they asked for her to send? Where does he claim he only ever worked with dupe-negs and interpositives? I never claimed you can’t transfer those, just that you don’t usually transfer release prints as they don’t transfer well.
And the lightened black level would hide any variation so it would be pretty forgiving.
That’s not going to make a film with an inconsistent black level more consistent.
Plus, the shadows are all very bright and full of details. The black levels of the Technicolor print and Blu-ray show both of them have crushed blacks while the release prints (see the 1982 LD) and interpositives don’t. So there would be no need to make the tweaks you think were made and that he denies making.
Prints don’t have “crushed blacks”, they have lower levels of detail in the shadows.
Nowhere in the first 25 minutes of the interview does he deny tweaking specific scenes - when exactly do you claim that he denies doing this?