Info: Films re-color timed on video releases — Page 5

Doctor M said:

TheDigitalBits had an interesting article a little while back regarding color changes made for the 3D version of Top Gun which has a shift towards orange. ( http://www.thedigitalbits.com/columns/the-3rd-dimension/update-on-top-gun-3d )

The important bit is this:

Many colorists, especially when mastering for video have been trained to hate the color red because of the bleeding issues with NTSC televisions.  As such, they instinctively avoided it, which is one of the reasons why “the film has never looked this way before.”  The last master for Top Gun was run at least 7 years ago, and in that time we’ve jumped several generations of technology in terms of digital color timing tools.  In 1986, everything was chemical – you did the best you could to get the colors you wanted.  Today, you can turn everything any color of the rainbow you desire.

 

It makes me wonder how many of the changes we perceive is more because of our familiarity with old home video masters and not the theatrical colors.

DI's for new films are great but they ruined the mastering of older movies

There is way too much scope to play and Top GUn looks horrible and almost video like in places.

I understand why they degrain and regrain 3d conversions, but why for the love of god can we not get the unmolested scan they started with??

I was under the impression the the "new" colors on the FOTR EE Bluray were a  mistake made during mastering. This makes sense as the other 2 films were untouched. Until they make a new Bluray I would just watch the dvd or use You_Too's color script.

Yeah I think I may end up trying that script, it's really bad when you see a side by side comparison. The whole film bathed in green :(

Harmy said:

My guess is that the green tint may have been a mastering mistake but the over-all colder color palette was probably intentional. Plus as far as I know, they never admitted there was anything wrong with the colors, so I wouldn't expect a fixed version any time soon - the films came out as individual releases since, which would have been a great opportunity to fix the colors, since even people who have the boxed set, could just buy FOTR separately but that would mean they'd have to admit the timing to be wrong and then people could demand a replacement. And to market it as a remaster would be weird too, since the original EE BD release was already marketed as a remaster.

I have the boxset but would gladly shell out the money for a "fixed" version of FOTR if it were re-issued without the green.  Them not admitting the mistake makes total sense though. If it really was intentional, wow :(

If I remember correct, there was a screening of it just before the boxset release, where it opened with Peter Jackson talking about the new color timing. Not sure though.

But since Peter has gotten so many fans after his LOTR trilogy I can't imagine he would just ignore all the critique about this color timing. I bet they will fix it after The Hobbit trilogy is finished and released. Like, release it without the green OR the new color timing.

I really doubt this will happen, a re-release that is, if you wade through the 1000's of posts at blu-ray.com Forums I believe this was approved this way, that is why this discussion was dropped a long time ago, but I see not here lol, but time will tell, I certainly am not going to hold my breath on it, that is why we are here, Team Blu lol, this is our specialty.

Doctor M said:

TheDigitalBits had an interesting article a little while back regarding color changes made for the 3D version of Top Gun which has a shift towards orange. ( http://www.thedigitalbits.com/columns/the-3rd-dimension/update-on-top-gun-3d )

The important bit is this:

Many colorists, especially when mastering for video have been trained to hate the color red because of the bleeding issues with NTSC televisions.  As such, they instinctively avoided it, which is one of the reasons why “the film has never looked this way before.”  The last master for Top Gun was run at least 7 years ago, and in that time we’ve jumped several generations of technology in terms of digital color timing tools.  In 1986, everything was chemical – you did the best you could to get the colors you wanted.  Today, you can turn everything any color of the rainbow you desire.

 

It makes me wonder how many of the changes we perceive is more because of our familiarity with old home video masters and not the theatrical colors.

For me that quote reads add what we could not do chemically on the day, they can alter now.

As in they could not shoot with a green tint but now they can put one in.

If Peter Jackson comes out and  says fotr was meant to be green but we goofed at the DI then would people accept the new version as definitive?

@Harmy: If the problem was only the green tint, then colourlike would work, but before that tint was applied they've made more changes. Scene by scene, that is. Some changes are global though, like grey and some blue being changed into dark teal. If we release our own version later, it will have the green tint and global color errors fixed as good as possible. But I wouldn't have the time or will to do a scene by scene correction.

As for the theatrical, get the HDTV broadcast. It's got no DVNR and I don't think it's very compressed either.

Harmy said:

So when you apply colourlike, it doesn't do it on a frame by frame comparison basis? I would have thought it would analyze each frame in the DVD and recolor the corresponding frame of the BD accordingly.

Oh how I wish that was the case!

Colourlike works this way: You specify two videos or images, it will then generate histograms as textfiles for both. Then you can use the plugin to do a conversion using those files.

You can also specify if you want it to create average histograms by scanning whole video clips, but it will take a long time if I remember correct.

This is the reason why g-force created RGBmatch, which can work frame by frame, but just like colourlike it works by balancing RGB. In many cases with films, RGBCMY have all been adjusted separately in hue, saturation and luminance, and there's no plugin that can automatically fix that.

Well if You_Too is up to it, which he already said he was but only after getting some of these releases we have now out the door, we can do this, I am in, so after we get some of these projects we have now going out into the wild I will rip the video of FOTR EE to my BD and we will get started, because this will pretty much just be a video fix, there is nothing extra to add to this and audio on this is fine.

1 other thing I wouldn't mind doing also is I believe the EE is spread out on 2 BD's, would be nice to have the movie on 1, but that is just me.

CatBus said:

Verrry doubtful.  Every few weeks on AVS somebody claims to have somehow gotten a Blu-ray without the green tint.  The difference is not in the video, it's in the viewer's ability to discern the problem.  I'm nearly positive it's the same "difference" with the iTunes version.

Perhaps you are correct.  I'm travelling, and won't have a chance to download and watch the iTunes version until next week.  But as I'm very familiar with FOTR, and the green tint problem (which is very apparent to me), and rest assured if it's there I'll recognise it, I know what I'm looking for.  And if it's not there, well so much the better.  Anyway, I'll post caps here once I've downloaded it...though if someone else has the iTunes version, or first hand info on the colour timing, I'd love to hear about it before I buy.

I know there are HDTV caps of FOTR floating around w/o the awful green tint, and while the colours are warmer and seem to match the theatrical presentation, unfortunately the video quality looks to be nothing more than an upscale of the DVD.  It's my favourite of the LOTR films, and I'd really love to see a corrected version of this, because I don't believe for a second this is intentional.  I have no doubt Jackson wanted to change the colour timing, and even make it look more green, but someone along the production lines just f**ked this up and no one wants to admit it.

@Nick66: The so called HDTV extended versions are the HDTV theatrical with the extended scenes upscaled from the DVDs. I don't think any HDTV channel ever broadcasted the extended versions. So you're right, they aren't worth it.

Another sweet Team Blu fix!  I'm all about the movie being on one Dual Layer BD-R, like Harmy said make the commentary lower bitrate so the movie stream isn't too compressed.