UPDATE (12/08/25): To be fair, I’m just not in a good mood last night since this is the most difficult project I might have done, so hopefully I’ll find a way to get this completed. It’s just how I’m not allow to mention my collaborator’s name again, and maybe because EPho3nix was trolling me or hopefully he was just joking around, as you can see from the last few posts. We’ll see if it will go on or not.
EPho3nix is not a troll.
So this is something that I and someone I know have been working on for a while. Our job was to revive the leaked 35mm scan to make it the ultimate presentation of the film as originally seen in cinemas back in 1995.
You should leave Trist’s scan alone, I think he made his preference pretty clear.
There’s nothing to stop you from collaborating with someone else and scanning another print, then you can do whatever you want as it’s your project.
Eventually, based on the review copy file I made, his Discord pals approved to let me do it.
No they haven’t, otherwise you would already have the original prores files to work from.
However, looking back at the review copy, I felt like something is wrong with it, especially with the color grade.
That’s what everyone says when they see how Disney’s animated films originally looked, especially the digitally animated ones. The final color grade is done to the film after the digital film-outs and the choices made when animating were based on the filmout process.
I used VEGAS Pro’s Color Match plugin using the LD footage as source.
A LaserDisc is not a color grading source. Here are some videos that recreate the telecine process using a retired Mk3:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7m3CfxR6bI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvh-oPAI-mo
With telecines you don’t even know if the telecine prints were struck off the color-timed negatives or not. Those low-contrast telecine prints were expensive to strike costing several times more than regular projection prints and it was expected that the telecine operators would transfer them how they preferred.
The operator was called a colorist because he decides the color timing on-the-fly and he can do it scene-by-scene. All the preferences for color timing the entire film can be reviewed and saved before the “actual” transfer to broadcast/master tape. That’s why a LaserDisc, a VHS or a DVD can come out completely different each time it is released, why it comes out different each time the movie is broadcast, and why it typically looks totally different to the original theatrical prints. The preference now with professional restorations is to use a reference print supplied by the rightsholder for the color timing of the original negative scans. The gold standard is to set up the screening room to the director/DOP’s specs - or as closely as possible to it.
So long-story short there, the way that TS was scanned it does not require a lot of color grading in post to be theatrically accurate.