RU.08

Yep. It’s all very well and good to say we’re going to have this “massive community effort” to do 4K restorations of 29 animated classics from film, but it requires: time, money, 10s of 1000s of hours of labor, and prints. Unless you find a pristine print of each and every film (which you won’t), restoration of just one of this films by a small devoted team would take longer than until the 80th anniversary of Snow White even if you started today. Also, there’s really no point in restoring these classics in 4K anyway as they are hand drawn animations with only up to 2K detail in the source.

As mentioned though, if you have a source of funding I and others here have prints we can send off to scanners for 4K scanning right now if you want.

Papai2013 said:

The theatrical cut as is, exists on the DVD in good enough quality. HDTV versions are also theatrical. There are ways to watch the “flawed” film.

Sure, the theatrical version (it’s the same cut of the film) is available as HDTV or DVD. But that’s not the point, we have a print of the film now that we can make our own release from. 😃 As you can see from the samples I’ve posted the print is in great condition, archival quality even, and I don’t think it’s going to take us very long to fix the damage.

Plus we will also have both the DTS audio and the optical audio. Our scanner has run a few reels through his projector and said the optical mix sounds terrific. Speaking of which, is it best to simply leave it a a Dolby Surround 2.0 PCM, or should we decode it to 4.0?

I have a sample showing the extent of the damage to the print on reel 10. It appears as small green lines. Our scanner believes this will be the worst of the damage. As you can see it’s not too bad and shouldn’t take too much time to fix digitally. I think we’ll plan to fix all the damage before release, but not bother with the dirt at least for the initial release.

yotsuya said:

My point was that your characterization of what JC has done to Titanic is an exaggeration.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration, but I think we can both agree that GL went further with his revisionism.

So I am all for preserving, but I do not think such extreme comments are called for when a director just goes in and cleans up his work with modern tools. Yes, preserve both, but there is no need to call such a minor tweaking (compared to what Lucas has done) a major reworking.

This isn’t “minor tweaking” though. Minor tweaking in a restoration would be to re-composite bad quality elements but make them as faithful as possible - that’s not at all what was done here. They re-composited elements that didn’t need restoration purely to create a precursor for a 3D conversion. They went through and re-did everything. A good restoration has a “light touch” and only retouches where needed to bring the poorer quality elements up to the quality of the rest of the film. But as I’ve mentioned, this film was not in a state that it needed such a restoration!! Star Wars on the other hand WAS in a state that needed restoration. And of course they went way too far with it and introduced changes we all hate. 😃

yotsuya said:

Again, compared to what Lucas has done, what was done to Titanic is nothing. It is literally insignificant in comparison.

I don’t think it’s insignificant, remember most people are actually happy with the Special Editions, just as most people are probably happy with the version of 2012 Titanic, or the re-graded versions of The Good The Bad The Ugly and Jurassic Park.

What editing changes were made?

There were no editing changes made to the 1997 Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi either, and of the two important editing changes in Star Wars, the Jabba Scene and the Luke/Biggs scene in the rebel hanger, I think most OOT fans actually like the second of those scenes.

From all the previous posts I’ve read, nothing was changed that affected he story or even the run time. Where even Blade Runner has been edited in ways that affect the run time (though he was nice enough to include the 4 previous releases if you bought the full set). And Star Wars has been edited with every new release going clear back to the original 77 releases (at least three effects shots were replaced after the film was released). JC just cleaned things up and tweaked some sky shots for the HD released. That is not a new thing to do. If that was all Lucas had done to Star Wars in 97, I don’t think this site would even exist.

The 1997 Special Edition was made under the same mandate. To remaster the badly degraded effects shots - optical wipes, the speeder scene through Mos Eisley, reduce visible black matte lines, etc. That is a restoration, but it’s not a preservation of the films.

JC has gons through a number of his old films and digitally “fixed” errors/mistakes/limitations of the originals, including Titanic. This transforms a film that was shot and edited entirely on film into something it’s not.

Anyway it’s fine if you like the 2012 version, just as it’s fine for people to like the Special Editions. All I’m interested in is preserving the original theatrical version.

OK then. If you have a source of funding I can get several of those titles scanned in 4K right now…

yotsuya said:

You know, you are on a site devoted to Star Wars, so calling this subtle difference “obscenely revisionist” is taking it a bit too far. Now the Star Wars SE, DVD, and blu-ray could be called obscenely revisionist, but what Cameron has done to Titanic involves minor tweaks of the sort I wish Lucas had made to Star Wars.

There’s nothing “minor” about digitizing the whole film from the camera negative and then re-compositing everything. By comparison Blade Runner was digitised from the camera negative for the unedited shots, and from the master positives or intermediate negatives for all the shots with optical effects. And that’s standard now for a 4K remaster.

But I should note there was absolutely no reason to do an extensive restoration for a recent flick like Titanic anyway, all they had to do was scan the o-neg, grade it to the print, and release it. Easy peasy.

The letters are actually completely different shapes. Maybe the digitised logo always looked that way, but they didn’t use it in the original print. On the bluray the top of the T’s are shorter and the N is narrower, and of course the gold border is way thicker than the original. The ocean and the letters are in a different position relative to each other despite being the same frame of ocean.

Also, the bottom of the letters and the tops of the I letters and the N were originally curved, but have been straightened in the new logo. I can actually show it that was originally curved:

That’s from a 1998 promotional poster. The logo is actually different to both the 35mm version and the Bluray, but those parts on the letters are curved, and it shares the same basic features as the 35mm and bluray logos (gold border, asymmetric Ts, bottom tip of the N protrudes, etc). It appears they had several different versions, which is not unusual, but the version used originally in the 35mm print is gone on the BD.

Donation received from slumberdore - THANKS!

The names “James Cameron” and “George Lucas” are synonymous when it comes to revisionism. I’d be shocked if you didn’t find both their names in a thesaurus. 😄

Hopefully making Avatar 2-5 keeps him too busy to further destroy classic movies!

Papai2013 said:

If you crop the rounded edges out, without cropping the top & bottom, you’ll get around 2.20:1. I was talking about preserving the full height. It can be done. In the 2.39:1, you have cropped the top & bottom out, as visible from the lines.

Oh right. The issue with doing it that way is as Beber mentioned it introduces problems. That part of the frame is allowed to have abnormalities in it, and usually does. Anyway, the preview you see has been cropped but I don’t have the uncropped version.

And even if you did it that way, it won’t be anything like 70mm cropping as that’d done completely separately to a different master print than the 35mm. It’s probable that the 70mm version has more picture on all four sides.

yotsuya said:

That is awesome for a raw scan of a print. I can’t say that the changes to this film bother me as they do for some films. I appreciate the removal of the out of place elements and the correction of the sky. Not sure why they changed the sky in the flying scene. I’d have to watch it and see if I like the new version or not. But as I don’t have this film on blu-ray and my copy is the original version on DVD, I would be very interested in seeing the final product.

The Bluray is obscenely revisionist. Have a look at the Title card:

35mm (optical compositing):

2005 DVD:

Bluray (“glorious” digital compositing):

Papai2013 said:

I have seen images of many Titanic release print film cell strips that were being sold loose on ebay and elsewhere. What I noticed is that when I extract the full height of those cells and crop out the rounded edges at the sides, I get an aspect ratio of about 2.20:1 (around that) not 2.39:1. The 2.39:1 is achieved by further cropping the extra height.

The anamorphic “squeeze” is 2:1. Here’s a cell off the internet:

And here it is cropped and resized:

As you can see it is 2.35:1, not 2.2:1. It’s not possible to reconstruct the 70mm version from 35mm, you’ll need to get a 70mm print for us to scan for that. When cropped it comes to 2.39:1 as so:

No, this is being scanned in the US.

By the way, Face Off isn’t being “delayed” by anything. Although I can see how it might look that way. It was put on my hard drives because I have hard drives with the European scanner for BATB and Alien. For some reason there are delays with those mostly due to the scanner being very busy and unlike Face/Off the prints don’t need to be promptly returned.

Scanning Face/Off was only possible because (as I understand it) the print owner loaned the print for free, paid for half the scan, and no one had to spend an extra €200+ to buy a hard drive and ship it to the US. 😃 You could ask Thxita for more info, but that’s everything I know about Face/Off! I don’t know how he found out that there was a print owner that wanted his print scanned… that’s quite unusual I wish there were more collectors like that out there who want to “partner” with us haha!

I hope that clears up any confusion - we always knew we had to scan BATB & Alien. 😃

JayArgonaut said:

It opens with the Paramount logo, rather than the Fox one. Is this a US release?

Yes that’s right, and as you can see from the photo I posted the logo is an original part of the print. For older prints they used to lop off the logos and reuse them, however that’s impossible with a print like this because it’s DTS timecoded, and the DTS system requires a print ID at the start or it won’t play.

Beber said:

I know it was shot in Super 35, that’s why I’m asking what the status of the print is. So, no chance to have an open matte release out of it when it will be scanned. That would have been a cool addition.

Yeah that’s right, all prints of Titanic are scope. And Terminator 2 which was also a Cameron film shot on Super 35. The only way to get an open-matte release is to scan the lab material. 😃

Do we already know if there are missing frames ? Maybe at reel changes? I’m willing to help but I would be disappointed if there were “holes” in the movie like in the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” scan.

Raiders was a damaged print, and they will need to scan a second print to patch everything up! We don’t have that problem with Titanic - if we do find missing frames we can replace them with the pre-2012 HDTV source, but I’m confident there won’t be very many in this print. There certainly won’t be missing sections like there are with Raiders.

I should point out that even the “Silver Screen Edition” of Star Wars has some Bluray frames in it, but you would never known because they’re inserted seamlessly. I should stress the point though that the SSE was a scan of a duplicated print in unknown condition, whereas this print is in great condition. If you’re interested I can send you the full reel by PM and you can check if there are any missing frames.

@Beber the print is scope. But it was filmed on Super 35 because Cameron is wasteful!!

Dear beautiful members - we have access to a fabulous 35mm cinematic print of Titanic. How fabulous you ask? Well here is a four minute preview scan of Reel 1, it has not been cleaned:

Note that’s just a preview scan. It was heavily compressed, and the scanner wasn’t correctly calibrated hence why it’s rough at the start. Also, not all reels will be as scratch-free as this one.

Reel 2 preview:

Trailer:

Preview pics from the test scan:

It is rare to find a print in this condition of such a popular film.

A very generous offer was made by someone to pay most of the cost of this scan. Therefore we only need $375 to get this scanned in 4K (not including storage)! As you can see from the preview, we should be able to get a good quality release of this ready well before the 20th anniversary of the film later this year, and we already have the cinema DTS too.

So what are you waiting for? Donate now! Cpalmer2k will handle all donations.

2017 June 30- UPDATE!

Thanks to the very generous donations of OT.com forum members the scan has been fully funded! You are welcome to donate to help towards the other associated costs, and those donations should be directed to me as Cpalmer2k was only handling the scanning funds. And a big big thanks to him for doing so.

Special thanks go to cpalmer2k, alexp120, Jetrell Fo, and Soupdrinker0.

To me they look like dual-mono, but I’m not an expert.

By the way if there’s any Britons here, Alien is playing in 70MM at the Prince Charles Cinema in London on the 1st, 3rd, and 7th of June (details here). If you go please take notes and then tell us how it compares to the Bluray colour grading, contrast, and black levels. 😃

Check out the soundtracks in the photos - they all look like glorious mono… except the first one that looks to be stereo! We might end up with quite a funky soundtrack. 😄

yotsuya said:

I guess I’m confused why you would want to scub out the green tint in this film when it was original to the production and not added for the home video release. All the scenes (and only those scenes) within the Matrix are supposed to be tinted green. None of the scenes outside the Matrix have that green tint. It was an artistic choice the filmmakers made and it is really cool when you can instantly know whether you are in the real world or the matrix by the tint of the image on screen. It is like that for every Matrix installment. It really seems more fan edit than preservation to make such a major change to the movie.

No, it was never in the original film. If you’re going by what the sequels do then why not scrub out all the guns that Neo uses and loves in The Matrix? But, if you prefer the way the BD looks then just watch that. 😃

yotsuya said:

Well, I can’t say that I caught the green when I saw The Matrix in the theater, but when I saw the two sequels in the theater, I very much noticed it. I can’t say that the extent of tint in the blu-ray is accurate, but I would say the DVD is accurate.

The DVD is a traditional Telecine, it’s not accurate to anything.

In my experience and knowledge, distribution prints are not done with the care and accuracy of color that the many talented people on this site tend to have.

Prints are certainly the result of a careful color grading process. It’s true you can find obvious examples where this was overlooked, but you can also find examples where the film score is grossly overlooked as well.

And it is possible that the prints were not done as accurately as they wanted and what you are seeing on the print is actually an error rather than the correct colors.

Without an LUT the scan is not necessarily projection-accurate. This is unfortunately a limitation we have to deal with. The best way to get a proper grading to the print is to project the film and re-grade it, but this is often beyond the abilities of fan-level restorations.

I’m more inclined to believe the scanned print is in error than there was some drastic change in artistic direction between the first and third movies.

Well you’d be wrong there. The scanned print may well be in error, but the sequels had DIs and were digitally regraded to green - the original was not. That’s two very different methods. They may well have intended all the Matrix scenes to look green, but there is only so much you can do with on-set lighting, especially as many Matrix scenes occur outdoors.

Ah well, you can download Resolve for free. I’m STILL waiting for the scanner to send through some previews, lol. Which is annoying because it’s holding up funding, and plus I have the Alien print I want to have scanned too.

It’s been scanned, but you’ll have to be patient until the other scans are completed and the hard drives are sent out. (Nope sorry it wasn’t).

With BATB almost funded, I have the opportunity to scan an Alien print. This fabulous print is faded red, no doubt missing many frames, and was described as being “splicy”! Here are some sample frames:

Once scanned this will passed on to someone for restoration and release. Special thanks go to Williarob for putting me in contact with the collector.

Funding target: 800€
Donations so far: 300€

List of donors:

• Anonymous
• Anonymous
• Anonymous
• Anonymous
• freedomland

If you are interested in helping please contact me by PM.