Could somebody explain what all of this technology is doing to the film?
To get rid of the green tint DrDre decided to regrade the whole movie using reference camera negatives (35mm) which were delivered to cinemas back in the day.
Do you have some more info. on the negatives (straight up negatives or scans?) he is using? I mean, you say they are ones delivered to cinemas back in the day, so why use the HD EE BluRay as source and not the negative (in terms of detail)? From reading other replies I assume that the issue is that the Bluray sourced from the original camera negative, and not some copy-of-a-copy type negative:
Well, these are sourced from the Extended blurays, with a custom colorgrade based on the 35mm. The colors should be similar, but the 35mm ones will probably have a bit more grain or scratches maybe, or just general lower quality since the bluray source here used uses the original camera negative and not some copy-of-a-copy 35mm print. Just a guess though, I haven’t seen the 35mm ones yet.
So, what is Dre using? If he is using a degraded copy, does that mean that a 1080p compressed Bluray (as far as Bluray is compressed compared to full scans) sourced from original camera negatives (what about the vfx?) still looks better than 4k scans of cinema negatives like the one Dre has?
*Sorry for being an id–ot and not knowing what I’m talking about at all, but would be nice to get some explanation if anyone has the time 😛.
The only 35mm-scans I know of (and have actually downloaded and seen) are those on this platform (which I think were made by a private entity and not by a high budget Hollywood studio). These LOTR-35mm-4k-Scans are quite noisy and have a lot of imperfections (scratches, brightness fluctuations, …). Cleaning them up would be a painful job and I don’t think it would give you a better source material then the Extended Bluray. The 35mm-scans are still good enough for matching color grading though.
I’m actually amazed on how much detail DrDre was able to extract from those Blurays. And how much cleaner and consistent the grain looks.
As far as I understand this is the process DrDre uses:
Source-Material: REMUX of the Extended Blurays
Reference for Colorgrading: 4k-scans of 35mm negatives
Steps:
- Regrade the movies based on the 4k-scans (35mm)
- Using AI to get rid of the edge enhancement to make the movie look more organic
- Using AI to upscale the final result to 4K
Trust me: You won’t be disappointed by the resolution or encoding. Its top-notch.