Universal will be forced to remaster in 4K when the eventual 4K home format comes around. Until then, there's not really any incentive because as much as we dislike it, the existing master resolves fine.
These films are just crying out for a 35mm scan project.
Capturing 70mm sound would require some way to capture magnetic audio. I know poita did it for that Fantasia print...
Couldn't Buster check the end of the Japanese LD and see what's at the end? If it's the regular 70s/80s "Distributed By" logo on the red background, it'd just be a matter of finding a Blu-ray that keeps it. (But if they had it over black with the same color scheme as the end credits, it'd be harder if not impossible.)
Actually, I just thought of something. Can you check with Buster D and see if the movie originally had the Distributed By Warner Bros. "worms" logo at the end after the Aspen logo? If we're going for theatrical accuracy, shouldn't the end also be accurate? (The Castro always closes the curtains and cuts the picture the end of the credits, so I didn't get to see any end logos on the 35mm.)
I know this is a minor thing, but it cheeses me off too. I'm a fan of the old logos (I'm actually one of the original members of that Closing Logo Group thing) and if you want the movie to be theatrically accurate, the original logo HAS to be there. No question.
Warner Bros. is one of the worst with this practice on movies; most studios will only replace logos on movies (as opposed to TV shows) if they re-release the movie in theaters and/or are doing some Special Edition, but WB has screwed with their movies since the dawn of video. So I was so happy to see the correct logo at the front of Pee-Wee when I saw it in 35mm. (Though even their repertory 35mm of Caddyshack has the later Orion logo - much as I love that logo and think it fits just as well with the Kenny Loggins music, someone should do an HD preservation with the PCM mono mix from laserdisc, and the correct Orion logo at the start...)
I've seen II and III in DCP in theaters, but they were just the BD masters, as was the first. (The BTTF III preview at the end of II had the "Coming Summer 1990" that was seen in theaters in 1989, removed on every pre-2010 video master, then restored on the BD.)
Actually, I'd bet that II and III weren't ever distributed as DCPs until the BD masters.
As I said, it has to be a Shining-style gaffe where a particular HSL range was seemingly adjusted to different values, and it altered everything in the frame with those colors.
I still can't fathom why this would happen - could it possibly have been an attempt to hide some kind of emulsion damage that just happened to be on top of something pink/red? I am noticing that in the example from The Shining, it's green stuff getting changed to pink, and in BTTF it's yellow getting changed to pink. (Again, look how the yellow road stripes in the background also got changed to pink.) Whenever I see emulsion damage on a print, it always seems to be green or yellow - maybe that's it?
It sounds like this is the 1956 SuperScope widescreen reissue, not the actual 1940 roadshow version. (Meaning the extra Deems Taylor stuff isn't in it.)
Doesn't this also mean the mag track is the phone line recording of the Fantasound track, and not the true original 1940 Fantasound? IMDB says the phone line transfer was done by RCA for that '56 re-release...
This is still an absolutely awesome find, make no mistake.
I don't understand what causes this. A particular section of the color space is altered - look at the road lines in the left of the frame, they are pink too. It reminds me of the bizarre red-to-green changes in the 1993 Star Wars masters.
I found a film cell on eBay UK with this frame, but the picture is too dark and too low-res to see what color the wheels are.
There are/have been 35mm film cells on eBay UK that could be helpful at determining color, even if it's not the same as projecting them. (Also, the auction pics are low res.)
The sound mix is a major problem with the Blu-Ray. It's been processed to within an inch of its life; the tape hiss removal sounds to have taken a lot of the ambiance and echo with it. I've also read complaints that the directionality was messed up.
I find it interesting how we're seeing theatrical color timings for films like T2 that turn out to be more teal than we've gotten used to with the earlier video masters, yet clear daytime skies are never that sickly greenish teal we sometimes see on Blu-Ray regrades.
I bet those skies will look about 10% greener on the eventual remastered release. Is it that the modern grades are skewing toward the wrong shade of teal, or is it just that digital grading pushes the skies in ways that photochemical grading didn't do?
And especially if said prince will throw in the uncut Land Before Time taped off Finnish TV, along with some more missing Doctor Who episodes. And the 134-minute cut of Superman IV taped from Armed Forces Network in Korea. (Only people who were on Superman Cinema in 2001 will get that last one.)
Actually, if you fish around you will find a promo code that is effective until June 2. You just need to Google something like "Samsung Expansion 5TB newegg 119.99" and you'll eventually find the newest promo code.
And they'll probably soon have another promo code when the current one expires. I've found at least three over the past couple months.
OK, so I guess T2 is the lone holdout. (But then why the heck hasn't Fox actually released Abyss or True Lies on BD yet? But I guess that's not a rhetorical question for this thread.)
Who knows, we may see the eventual new 4K transfer make a "stealth" debut as a DCP, as happened with Ghostbusters, apparently Star Trek II, and possibly some others.
Again, I have a feeling that these are all different permutations of the image harvest done for the Extreme DVD transfer (as in, the original scan - presumably 2K - before any DNR, EE, color correction, etc.)
I have a feeling T2 is not going to get rescanned until it needs to be released in 4K, because Cameron takes forever to do anything these days.
Cameron has been dragging his feet on the promised Abyss/T2/True Lies 4K rescans for years; remember how long it took for T1 to get rescanned? (Though isn't that Cinemax transfer of Abyss "tealed", implying that it may be Cameron-supervised?)
Like dvdmike, I am of the belief that all the Blu-rays are based on one (2K?) scan done some time in the 00s (I also assume for the Extreme DVD), because they all look more alike than different.
Interesting, I remember the bank vault scene being cyan. That's how it looked in the screener too. But the German theater cam rip looked more greenish.
Beber, have you ever seen the screener DVD?
The colors look excellent. It does remind me of some of the photos from that private screening Mike Verta had a couple years back, where he used an actual 1977 projector with an actual 1977 bulb.
I do think late 70s/early 80s prints often had skin tones trending towards orange. Not having been there, for some reason this feels like I'm watching a 70s print as it might look projected in a cinema in the 70s. (I recall Roy Scheider looking kind of orange on the print of Jaws I saw last summer; even though that was struck some time in the late 90s or 2000s, it looked to me like it came off of an intermediate with original 70s color timing. It just felt 70s.)
I don't really want everything to look neutralized and normalized like the old home video transfers, I want to see something that still looks like a print actually would have looked. Just my two cents.
There is also another 16mm that has been on eBay for a long time (Buy It Now, nobody has ever bought it). I agree, it would be great to restore the poster from film. Though I'm not sure it would fully work, since the AR for 16mm scope is vertically cropped to around 2.66:1, there would almost certainly be missing image...
SilverWook, was the Japanese Grease LD you got "burned" on analog? The two Japanese LDs have nearly identical front covers, the only difference I can see on LDDB is the strip on the left side (the original analog one has a purple strip), and the Paramount logo in the upper right corner. PILF-1984 also doesn't have a catalog number on the front (though I can't tell if the old analog disc's purple strip is the Obi, or part of the actual cover).
The Paramount logo is the giveaway, PILF-1984 has a color logo that doesn't mention Gulf+Western.
The PAL LD would be great, would just need to be slowed down 4%.
PILF-1984 is also the one Buster D is on the lookout for. Yes, it would help if you could get it from someone - whoever gets it, as long as they can do a bit-perfect capture, it's fine.
LV011081-WS is the 20th Anniversary, it only has the altered 5.1 remix done for that re-release.
Grease was stereo, not mono. The problem with that one is that finding it in digital stereo is extremely hard. The common laserdiscs are analog - LDDB claims there was a stereo repressing, but SilverWook has bought at least one copy that claimed to be the digital reissue, and just got analog.
SilverWook did do a rip of the hi-fi stereo VHS audio, but it's not actually released to anyone yet. And I've notified Buster D about the 90s Japanese LD (pre-20th Anniversary) that does have digital sound, if he ever locates a copy he will do a bit-perfect capture.
OK, then that would be bizarre. If a DCP was made in 2008, why wouldn't it have been used for the all-2.35 DVD version at least?
When TDK came out, very few theaters were even using DCP. I had always assumed that TDK screened on film everywhere it went.
When the Castro Theatre screened it a while back, I think it was on DCP, but I passed on it, partially because I tend to assume that DCP = HD transfer that is commercially available somewhere else (for example, last summer I saw a DCP marathon of the Back to the Future trilogy that was just the BD transfers in 4K). I am slowly learning that is not the case, and some DCPs are new transfers that haven't ever been seen outside of the repertory circuit.
The description of teal, gold and brown fits my memories of the first-run 35mm (and the IMAX print I saw back in March) to a T.
The Blu-ray transfer was created before DCP was a thing, so I'm not surprised that the DCP would be different/newer. WB has never upgraded the transfer on home media. (Is the version on iTunes the Blu-ray transfer also?)
I wonder if the color timing you saw on the DCP will be retained when WB does a 4K home version. (They probably won't use the 2.35 DCP master, they'll almost certainly go for the 1.78/2.35 variable AR again...)