Spaced Ranger

Beware that the Extended Edition is that way because they messed with, actually messed up, the colors. When processed in my trusty paint program, you can see crushed colors that no longer have any information in them (original screen-cap is from the Blu-ray movie review website):

Here, any R-G-B-separation plane’s “0”-value pixels are inverted to “255” to make them stand out for examination. Note that only Red is crushed in this picture. Also, the black boarder, at 0-0-0, becomes 255-255-255.

Any color correction will suffer because of these wiped-out areas. For a proper color correction, those crushed areas must from recreated from other separation plane(s) that are not crushed in those areas. This procedure is demonstrated in The Wizard Of Oz restoration documentary (I added code to the link to start it at this appropriate playback time):
YouTube - Prettier Than Ever: Restoration of The Wizard of Oz

Taschen's The Stanley Kubrick Archives is good for all Kubrick’s film works (Amazon.com has a pre-order for the newest, most affordable version … for at least a year now; still not out) …

However, Taschen's The Making Of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is the same treatment but only of 2001:ASO (I discovered this book early on in this thread) …

It looks like this book has everything-2001:ASO in the Archives book … and so much more!

BTW, notice the design on the cover-sleeve of the TMOSK-2001:ASO book. I thought, with “the monolith” book layout, they were just filling in the area with prominent pictures of the movie. Okay, fine, and then we move on. But … if you look at it and think “why these particular pictures?”, “what profound meaning might be hidden here-in?”, you would surely conclude "there must be something more here with this being a work honoring Kubrick".

And you’d be right (in Super Panavision 70 no less) …

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The Senitype cells are printed from a single, selected frame of the actual film (70mm in the case of 2001:ASO) – so they are all identical. But as this was a special item, I would think they’d put in the extra effort needed to get it right.

Senitype® - About Us webpage:
The creation of Senitype® begins with the careful selection of a single frame of film that is digitally scanned and expertly reproduced onto paper using intricate state-of-the-art imaging and printing techniques. The film footage is an actual 35-millimeter/70 millimeter or other size(s) film frame reproduced from the original motion picture negative by master film technicians.

These were originally included in the collector’s edition DVD sets released in 2001 (see it in that YouTube video, previous post).

Also, what’s off-topic cool is that they’ve made LOTS for other movies we all know and love, here, at OT!
“Gentlemen, start your search-engines!”

And speaking of their best .		. , how is The Senitype cell from the 2001: A Space Odyssey Deluxe Collector’s Set?

The printed picture looks like the Blu-ray (blue hue’d), but the 70mm cell reproduction looks spot-on with a grey space station (and Earth colors to match from that):
YouTube 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY COLLECTOR’S EDITION DVD REVIEW - COLLECTION UPDATE (set to start at 3min 14sec for a close-up view)

Wow, this is a super project! How about skipping the Blu-ray part altogether and go for a straight-out UHD

right from film?

Your pictures look super! It’s good to see bad man with bad beard stubble! However, there is a tendency for darkest shadow to be a little too Blue. I’d slightly bump up the Red and Green in the dark end – to neutralize that and to expand those very dark shadows for details to show. See how it affects the rest of the picture by letting the curve-increase taper-off at the high end. Otherwise restrict it to that low shadow range (only if it shows this way on the wet-gate scan, too, of course).

SilverWook said:
They used a really really old analog video master for the Blu Ray.

What?!?

So … Whoa! That’s excellent about the film!!

It always comes back to …		… (and hopefully a good pedigree).

Film is an imperfect archive, and Hollywood (representing the entertainment industry) is just trying to sell soap for $$ (dollars) on the ¢¢ (pennies). That said, inside documentaries like this one are more reliable, and less subject to twiddling, for it’s original presentation look … well, as good as the stock’s longevity, and some were devastatingly bad. And should we mention that Star Wars was a rushed job (so much so that Lucas had to be hospitalized for exhaustion)?

So, this documentary has an early source and it’s “an extra” for less-to-no twiddling. Variations? Of course, but due to the quality original stock – as demonstrated in that last picture group:

Luke’s tunic show reddish in the 1st shot but properly balanced in the 2nd. And great overall color in that 2nd shot, too! I would take it as a better Rosetta Stone over some guy with a new digital camera he barely used, taking screeners, in a darkened, soon to close theatre, for a last showing of Star Wars.

Otherwise, we’d end up with a Deathstar of green-tinted interiors. Oops. 😃

Rikk Wolf said:
We’re on the cusp of hiring a lawyer to aid us in tracking down a physical print, so I hope that route pans out. I’ll keep you cats updated!

Whoa … that is super! Now that it’s mentioned in the thread, expect the universe to magically deliver it to … (wait for it) … (wait for it) … eBay!!

Yes, of course …

I thought that previous picture looked familiar! All they had to do was straighten their necks and …

… now I recognize that shot! But who are those two old guys?

That is excellent!

And just like last time (with the film trailer) … all we needed was to post about it here, and the universe filled the order!

(BTW, did I mention I’m dying to see how this goes?)

That was my reason for the DD7.1 suggestion – that all 6 channels would remain intact. The MGM 1998 DVD lists a “New Dolby Digital 5.1 Soundtrack”. How did they make the 5.1 from the original 6 track? Are we getting a pure or a “balanced mix” translation? I guess that boils down to … “has anyone got the 6 track” file?

captainsolo said:
You can plainly hear it on LD because they simply ran the 6 track mix through a Dolby prologic encoder. if you added in two extra speakers in the front and were somehow able to feed them in, it would recreate the proper experience …

So, Kubrick’s sound guys were only outputting 2 track stereo, at most, and mixed-in mono’s. And the laserdisc’s soundtrack has the original 6 channel’s Left/Center/Right/Surround …

LDDb - 2001:ASO Criterion Collection laserdisc - Digital & Analog tracks

… but not those deliberately mixed Left-Center/Right-Center channels. Is that true, or just a good assumption?

Then are the DVD’s (and HD’s) following the same laserdisc approach? Or are they a total rework from which we can extract nothing useful (for rebuilding the original 6 tracks)?

hairy_hen said:
To get the six-track mix onto home video without any alteration at all, there would have to be a home video format that supported having five channels across the front.

Oh, 2001:ASO-fanatics won’t mind picking up speakers and moving them to the appropriate locations …

The left-center and right-center fronts most likely only contain a mix of the LCR channels anyway, … to fill in the space in a gigantic cinema environment. … beginning with Star Wars, they were reassigned to the purpose of being dedicated low frequency channels instead.

“most likely” – is this a definite known for 2001:ASO? (I’ve never read anything definitive on the sound; video takes up most of my time.)

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skoal said:
… the 1998 MGM/1999 Warner DVDs are the best for both audio and video.

By themselves, mostly. Together, definitely. MGM has severe sharpening halos. WB has bad coloring. But together (using the better color of the MGM with Hue and Saturation, and the better quality of the WB Luminance), they are greater than their parts [here zoomed-in for inspection]:

And here is the result full-sized (note that it should be trimmed to the smaller picture, as it’s empty space doesn’t add require information to the bigger one):

@ suntech

Then definitely check out DVDBeaver’s “DVD Review 2001: A Space Odyssey” and know that you saw it the best way. Every home-consumer release (Blu-ray, too) as been all over the quality-map!

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@ skoal

However, the MGM 1998 DVD (and speaking of DVDBeaver’s review) is interesting to see compared to it’s fellows (including the Warner 1999 DVD). It comes out looking color-closest to Criterion Collection’s “Kubrick’s Blessing” laserdisc releases (thanks to PDB & althor1138 for their captures).
Of course, like the rest, the MGM 1998 has it’s issues (worst of which is sharpening halos).

BTW, realize that the original six channels into 5.1’s five channels would be a loss by deletion or mixing. That was the reason for suggesting 7.1 – keeping the original six as fully discreet channels on digital media.

skoal said:
Spaced Ranger, you have 2001 in 70mm? In Todd-AO?

I wish!				Ode To Joy to reach over and hold up something like this to the light …

Actually, I was thinking if we could get the 70mm (or from whatever) 6 channel soundtrack

and redistribute it in 7.1 (w/ the center dropped),

that would be ultimate!

skoal said:
… I prefer the 1999 Warner DVD for the audio.

Aside from what was discussed before (missing dialog, panning, etc.), does anyone have any idea which of these is quantifiably, sonically superior? Since audio seems to be the weak-sister with video taking center stage, is there any definitive way to analyze the audio quality?

Maybe we just should go back to the film, with something like these …

All 10 canisters of a 70mm print of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

That would be punishment indeed!

I CAN’T BREATH IN THIS THING!!

Now that we have samples of all the laserdisc releases with Stanley Kubrick's direct involvement, here’s an updated comparison of their aspect ratios with the Blu-ray (color-corrected to conform to the Taschen book) as a backdrop:

Oops, pardon me . .		. . a case of context confusal with a touch of clever-itis.

Makes perfect sense now. (Too bad it was the waste of a great smiley.)

Oh, sorry about the obscurity. It was for the humor value.

The answer to your question is “yes” (if I read the thread) … only because I wrote about 1/3 of it.

timemeddler said:
Uh, they’re already on bluray.

Thanks, but I already knew that.

Dek Rollins said:
Did you even read the rest of the thread?

(You should know that if you had read the rest of the thread.)
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And now, back to my disguise as “Spaced Ranger, mild-mannered poster for a great Internet web-forum” …

Thanks althor1138 for another (and excellent) capture to preserve/restore these laserdiscs. I received your sample & color-bars snapshots and I’m sure PDB will be interested in them, too (not having color-bars on his laserdisc) to use as a Rosetta Stone for capture correction …

Thus far, these are the captures for the two releases of 2001: A Space Odyseey from Stanley Kubrick’s supervision of its remastering:

									2001: A Space Odyssey – Criterion Collection laserdisc

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	PDB: CLV					althor1138: CAV [re-issue]

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Right off the bat, the hues look the same. However, the brightness/contrast is different. A quick eye-dropper read shows the CAV’s brightest area is 236 while the CLV’s is 208. With different quality laserdisc players, a capture from a better/best player will improve it. Also, Antcufaalb has been assembling extra hardware to fix the laserdisc signal, which will help more with quality.

I’m greatly disappointed that the off-the-laserdisc image doesn’t look exactly like the Taschen book photos. If I had to guess, I’d say that the laserdisc production didn’t properly translate the “work prints” Kubrick critiqued and approved. Can anybody with the details of of laserdisc production chime in on this?

Me, personally? In the meantime, I’m going with Taschen (they had access to everything in the Kubrick estate) and my previous demonstration picture of Taschen-to-laserdisc:

Spaced Ranger said:
In fact, if I take the Taschen photo and apply the reverse of my LD-to-Taschen brightness (& contrast & saturation) increases (end of page 3), I get the LD coloring …

Taschen photo top
brightness reduction bottom

So, moving on with that, here’s what I’ve come up with …

First, the picture is very noisy and that would interfere with saturation processing (a little later on). I reduced that noise with the paint program’s JPEG artifact remover. It looks like this process takes out-of-place pixels in JPEG compression and deals with them. It’s not intelligent and can misinterpret, but I’ve found it does an excellent job without the smear/smoothing of other de-noisers:

Next was a hue correction, as per the color-bars. By turning the color wheel (shifting all the colors simultaneously), the captured color-bars R-G-Bs change their values. When the capture R-G-B’s come closest to what would be the color-bar’s ideal (checking them with an eye-dropper), that’s the “1-for-1 match” we want in a capture:

As can be seen, the capture’s tint was off only by 1 degree and it’s correction is near unnoticeable. That’s a good capture.

Next might be contrast adjustment but I’ve found that it’s range expansion causes color anomalies to show with a following saturation increase. So, the saturation comes first. I could’ve used a simple saturation increase, but decided apply my “technicolor-izer” technique of over-boosting only the color-wheel’s RGB (with their application areas expanded into the secondary colors, for R-G-B to cover the entire spectrum) and then globally reducing the spectrum by some lesser amount. This spikes only the R-G-Bs without blowing out the entire spectrum, for that Technicolor® look:

It doesn’t look like allot when done in this sequence, but it showed when applied after the contrast adjustment (which would be a good approach to pre-determine the saturation adjustments).

Now, the contrast adjustment. Just move the spectrum out to get a nice picture. For this process, if one uses a normal contrast adjustment, the picture takes on a tint due to the built-in algorithm. Instead, adjust the contrast identically on the individual R-G-B channels. (Here, again, using the normal contrast would be a good approach to pre-determine the contrast adjustments.) This does the same thing as before but without that algorithmic tint:

Finally, to counter the initial de-noiser’s over-reach, a slight sharpen gets it back and gives it a little bit more for good looks:

Put it all together, and out comes like something Stanley Kubrick should recognize (yes, even from laserdisc):

My demonstration wasn’t meant to be a final result – only a proof-of-concept of getting any film (including fade, bleached, different film stock) to look like the original “technicolor film”. (Normally, I would’ve posted the aim and procedure in detail, but didn’t due to my present time constraints [I hate when that happens]. Sorry if my abridge presentation didn’t convey that.) Of course, if used, the project team would fine-tune that approach for their desired result. Considering this is a Disney film, one would expect powerful colors and I would think Technicolor did just that.

The particular look of Technicolor is due to it’s use of independent color filters with a tighter primary-colors range than those embedded into the film itself, which were wider spectrum that produced a relatively muddier result.

Check out The American WideScreen Museum: Technicolor for the fascinating history and details of Technicolor.