I’m curious Dr. Dre, why is it that so many home releases of movies have a revisionist colour timing like we’ve seen with Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park or the Original Star Wars trilogy? and it’s not just the Blu-rays, they’ve been doing it since the VHS days.
The studios (and sometimes artists) like to tinker to make things more palatable to what they think the current consumer wants to see. Home video releases up until the last 10 years or so were created from low contrast prints which had the theatrical color timing as a base, but they were tweaked using analog (and later digital) tools, usually in a more general way in terms of tint and exposure.
More recently they have been going back to scan the camera negative, which offers better resolution, but is all over the place in terms of exposure and color (because it comes from different cameras, lighting conditions and film stocks). This process requires a totally new shot by shot digital color grade because the original photochemical color timing only exists downstream from the camera negative. In theory, they should attempt to faithfully re-create the original theatrical timing. The reality is that wholesale color and exposure changes are often made and more “modern” color schemes are used. This is why there has been so much uproar about many recent HD transfers. The reason for this is to make old films look like modern, pristine HD video. Supposedly so they will sell better.