I'd guess that the PCM mono track from either widescreen Jaws laserdisc would sound very good. There was the 1992 disc, and the 1996 Signature Collection.
No idea how many of these color differences would be lab variations, and how much would be timing differences in the sources used for the transfers. Any idea how all the other sources compare? (Criterion LDs, the P&S Embassy transfer, etc.)
As for LPP, 1982 is the year the stock debuted. In an article on low-fade stocks on in70mm.com, the author said the earliest LPP print he owns is of John Carpenter's The Thing. That released on the same day as Blade Runner, so it's conceivable that it would have had LPP prints too.
The only odd part is it being mono. I thought Dolby Stereo was fully mono-compatible by 1982, and so separate mono prints no longer needed to be made. (Heck, I was sure that the mono compatibility issues were worked out not long after Star Wars; I had never heard anything about general-release 35mm mono prints of any other Dolby film after it.)
The theory of the LBX LD mix being based on the Vistasonic mix is interesting, though unfortunately it couldn't be proven unless the Vistasonic mix were to surface. I guess they would have taken the stems, collapsed the split surrounds into mono, and converted it to an LCRS matrix?
The late, great disclord wrote on LDDB that the Dolby Stereo and 70mm mixes were basically directly converted from the Vistasonic mix, but if there are differences between the DVD and LBX LD, and between the P&S and LBX LDs, that could be evidence against that claim.
The P&S Dolby mix needs to be preserved. The only problem is that it was only ever released in the U.S. in analog. (There isn't even an LDDB listing for a stealth digital re-pressing, like they have for that supposed PCM issue of Grease that SilverWook and I could never actually find a copy of.)
I'm curious if the Japanese P&S/PCM disc, released three years before the U.S. LBX, has the same mix as the U.S. P&S, but in digital. There's a copy available on LDDB for $20...
I fully agree, this is the best reference until then.
The bank robbery does look very good. Basically as I remember it...
I will warn, I'm not sure that the white balance on the screener is theatrically accurate in ALL scenes. Specifically, at least some of the Bat-bunker scenes have a blue cast to everything, when I always remembered the ceiling lights being essentially pure white. That's my memory of the 35mm, and what I saw in the IMAX.
The "how blue was Hoth" question is still not fully resolved. VideoCollector's bootleg and the Puggo 16mm print show a lot of blue, but nobody has seen a 35mm LPP yet, with the possible exception of poita.
The story I've heard about the separations is that they were incorrectly made back in 1977 and one of the three channels was duplicated in place of the third channel, or that one of the three was found to be missing when they were pulled for the SE restoration.
(And this isn't the only time I have heard of this happening; when Disney restored Pollyanna in the late 90s/early 00s, they were working from a faded original negative, and when they pulled the B&W separations out of the archive they found that they had only two of them, with the third being a duplicate of one of the other two.)
Is the dye-transfer print you saw an original, or a 70mm print of the 1995 restoration? I know that the Castro in San Francisco still runs the film in 70mm sometimes, and I presume it's the restoration (especially considering that said restoration's world premiere was at the Castro).
(And BTW: Have you ever seen the 70mm print at the Castro? And if so, does it have the infamous 5.1 remix that was on the original laserdisc/DVD?)
I will provide both, but please be patient.
In the meantime, does anybody still have any screener rips or anything for Begins? Since that was three years earlier, anything from '05 fell out of retention long ago. All I found were a couple long-dead torrents.
I may even have to go visit an old mule and see if he still has anything after all these years...
rockin said:
The DVD screeners had the same colour timing as the official DVD and Blu-ray.
Actually, no, this one doesn't look to. This is a screener made in August 2008, long before any official video transfer. Either way, there are lots of parts in the DVD screener that remind me of what I saw on the IMAX print (though the blues sometimes go too blue when they looked more cyan on the IMAX). And as I said, my memories of the 35mm prints line up with the IMAX (though my memory could be unreliable).
Yesterday, I was able to get a full-size IMG of the screener off Usenet, and I got a German camrip off Usenet too. (These took a lot of trial and error, many of the NZBs were missing parts or were outside my newsreader's retention period.) I think both versions could be of use.
The Japanese release of 4 is on eBay from an Australian seller: http://www.ebay.com/itm/181660062635
Why the heck do the U.S. LDs seem to be so rare? Did Fox only do one short pressing run of each?
I decided I'd actually try to comb the Internet to see if there is any footage still lurking on YouTube from camrips or screeners or anything prior to the official home release that would have been taken off of a 35mm source. And miraculously, there are still summer/fall 2008 postings of clips from the WB screener disc that survive on YT.
Here's what I've found so far; I will add more as I find them.
Joker and Two-Face in the hospital
Longer version of the hospital scene
Joker gets his phone call (I think this one's actually from a camrip)
The ending (Contrast with this clip, which also predates the official release date of the DVD, but looks to be from a leaked copy of it? No "Property of Warner Bros.", the frames don't smear, and the colors look different.)
You do have that Cineavision print though. Cineavision prints were pillarboxed so that they would stretch out to the correct 2.35:1-2.40:1 ratio and not have to lose any picture at the top/bottom to fit inside the 8mm frame height.
Nice, I'll take a look, and compare it against both my IMAX print memories and how my brain remembers it looking in 35mm in '08.
Yup, the Begins version is closest to the IMAX print I saw. The 35mm scenes inside vaults later in the film looked much the same.
The IMAX print may have even been a teeny bit less green than the Begins IMAX clip. But it was definitely cyan/teal, it was NOT green like the other two clips.
I also definitely recall the blown-out white skies in the outdoor scenes. I also seem to recall the outdoor shots of the clowns being slightly colder too - a bit more blue/teal, not as much yellow in the skies, maybe even more of a "bleached out" look to everything.
Do you have the 4:3 SD IMAX footage that was on the older special-edition DVD?
CSchmidlapp said:
Just out of interest, I don't know if you will remember TServo2049, but was the Bank Vault in the Prologue Blue (Begins footage) or Green (TDK BLu) ? Im sorry I should of asked you to look out for it.
It looked bluish to me. Maybe closer to cyan. Possibly teal. But it didn't look green.
Can you put the same frame from the two versions side by side? I have a mental image of it, so I can compare them both to what's in my memory banks.
Likely not - but the kind of crushing and blowout on modern transfers is comparable to "loudness war" re-EQ'ing of older music on modern re-releases. The original theatrical prints didn't have the full range of negative detail either, but the way it's handled now wipes out detail that WOULD have shown up on theatrical prints.
The Star Wars films are another example I can think of. The modern releases crush the blacks to the point that many of the stars in the space shots are just gone. But some of us have seen original 35mm theatrical prints, and even though they have higher contrast and less detail than the negatives would, the space backgrounds are loaded with stars.
There are instances where blacks are crushed and whites are blown out well beyond the heightened contrast of 35mm theatrical prints. Ghostbusters is a great example, I saw an original print and it was nowhere near the kind of blown out as the old Blu-ray. And it looked different, photochemical contrast blow-out is one thing, digital contrast blow-out is entirely different.
I noticed something interesting that sycamore would be intrigued by. I checked the three shots that are different between versions, and the "cloudy" Yavin launch composite is there, and so is the temple composite with the blue lines on a couple frames...but the flash frames when the Falcon is fleeing the Star Destroyer match up with sources like the GOUT and Technidisc, not with the JSC or mthr's bootleg. The flashes fill the entire frame, they aren't "behind" the ships.
Interesting...did reel 3 come from a different IP? (I also see that the subtitle-free Greedo scene starts with a very big and dirty negative splice...)
OK, perhaps SW was scanned at 4K, but I thought digital intermediates were still at 2K? Correct me if I'm wrong here.
T2 is at a disadvantage because it has never gotten a 4K scan, so it's amazing how great it looks here.
I do wonder, when we finally get that Cameron-approved (probably overly teal?) 4K-sourced remaster we've been promised for years, will there be any chance of a version 2.0?
Yeah, to make clear, invites on Blu-torrents do not work like on Spleen. They do not automatically accumulate, you earn bonus points with which you buy invites. I offered to invite a few of you not realizing this - sorry about that.
Yes, the recompositing was the least upsetting part of the SE. (And some of it was necessary, because some of the VFX portions of the negative we're on Color Reversal Intermediate and had faded to the point that nothing could be recovered from them.)
Looking at the screenshots: Awesome, you guys re-grained the German cut!
Just to ask again: Any chance of Conan coming to Blu-torrents?
It's weird, the two sides actually do seem to match better when you look at the painting by itself. The perspective of the live plate just messes with the perspective of the painting. (Though I would have assumed it was painted with the live plate being projected for reference - so wouldn't the live plate perspective have been incorporated into the painting? Harrison Ellenshaw did other paintings in the film with perfect perspective, not sure just what happened here...)
But it's far from the worst mangling of perspective and proportion - ever seen the paintings in Star Trek: The Motion Picture when they're exiting the Enterprise to walk to V'ger?
Somewhere, Escher is in a corner crying.
And I especially like the profile view of the saucer that makes the crew look like giants...can't find a picture of that online...