TServo2049

Yeah, as much as teal/orange is maligned, the Dark Knight Trilogy did a great job with those colors (at least the way they showed up on film prints). Their home transfers are a rare case where that kind of coloring was actually *dialed back.*

Just as I recalled from 2008, some scenes like Bruce and Alfred in the penthouse after Rachel's death, and Joker in the holding cell, were almost entirely blue/teal.

On the other hand, the chaos at Loeb's memorial didn't look as obviously green as the trailer screenshot shows (but neither was it as warm as the Blu-ray). Same with Joker with the machine gun, I don't believe it was *as* green/yellow as the trailer, more the gold/brown we associate with a lot of the streets-at-night scenes in BB and TDK. (Though again, not as warm/reddish as the other screenshot.) Not sure how much was my eyes automatically white-balancing, I just didn't perceive it as THAT greenish-yellow.

OK, I just saw an IMAX print screening of TDK, and the colors do look in line with the more "green" images. Maybe not as green/yellow, but certainly not as pink/red as the Blu-ray. Either blue/teal with some green, or yellow/orange/brown, in line with how I remember the film looking in 35mm in 2008.

The 25gb MKV is no longer on the Spleen, only an AVCHD downconversion. Anybody still have the original 25gb one? Thanks.

The problem is that a lot of people judge the old effects based on the home video releases, and most likely the original pan and scan ones from the 80s. The video transfers of the time had the brightness and gamma increased so the image would "read" better on tube TVs, causing separate elements which matched well in the theater to suddenly stick out like a sore thumb because the density differences between the elements were magnified.

Go back and watch older mid/late 80s VHS versions of big studio releases, everything is bright and neutral. This is why 90s remasters like the last pre-SE versions of the Star Wars trilogy looked so revelatory (at least to me) - even with the DVNR, the contrast was much improved over the older versions. You could still see garbage mattes and stuff, but it was nowhere near as bad as the old videos.

My point is, people who complain about the effects based on the films looked on home video need to read the old ILM book, they knew full well that video transfers exposed/magnified a lot of their tricks and seams (garbage mattes, partially transparent exposures, etc.) and they were dismayed by it too.

The Vaseline thing does confuse me. I assumed it was on the plate, but the SE doesn't show it. Maybe that was an intermediate optical effect before they duped the ground on top of the wheels and created that discoloration? (Yes, as described in the interview I quoted, that orange or pink blob was an optical that ended up not matching the color of the live plate. (Notice the white lines around the guy's legs when he walks in front of it. That's where they rotoscoped him. And the footage must have been blurry by the time it got to that pass, because look at how eaten away his legs look. Looks like they had to sort of guess the outline, probably because the shape was so vague.)

But yeah, I see how it follows the speeder. And actually...maybe it was in camera but they digitally sharpened for the SE? I swear I can still see a little diffusion on the remaining original bottom of the speeder.

Not sure about the mirror. The pickup shots done in California (Look, there's a droid on the scanner) used the mirror, but notice that when they're going to Mos Eisley the speeder is behind a rock outcropping. That indicates to me that they hadn't hit upon the mirror trick while in Tunisia.

The sandcrawler shot was a pickup done in California months after the Tunisia shooting. Gil Taylor wasn't involved, nor any of the other camera crew from the original shoot. They may have used a different stock. And it was degraded by an extra generation because it had a wipe.

msycamore said:

Yeah, the first row of ships actually disappear entirely on the fifth frame of this shot, looks like you kept that flaw intact even though that's one thing that most people would find tempting to smooth over if they had the chance.
One of those little quirks in the original compositing I discovered when I found out about the alternative version of this shot.

Corrected or not, in motion neither would make a noticable difference anyway.

I forget, are the disappearing ships only on the "cloudless" composite, or are they also on the original one with the moving clouds?

(To clarify, the original batch of 35mm prints had a few different optical composites, which were actually replaced during the original run. We think it was around the time the film went into full national release with mono prints. msycamore can explain further.)

Yeah, Best Picture winners really should be made available in the version that won Best Picture. (Even the 2.35:1 version of The Last Emperor is on Blu-ray in Japan.)

Yeah, I found one of Andrea's old threads, he linked to that same set, so it's the "pyramide". (I'm not even sure who coined that - maybe Andrea did?)

One of the box sets is known as the "Pyramide" set because of the distinctive shape of the box. I think it's the 1994 one, the LDDB pic seems to show the sloped sides.

Andrea and poita both have that set - I think Andrea is the only person who's given much attention to it (his early proto-spoRv experiments involved using it to try to restore the lost detail to the GOUT).

The 1994 one is the "pyramid" set, right? That uses the same pink-shifted transfer/print as the earlier French letterbox LDs, right?

That one is still interesting and deserves preservation IMO. Nobody has ever truly analyzed that version, what frames are there, and so on. The film source seems to be very similar to the Technidisc/GOUT, except for looking too pink...

The Hobbit was fully done on film, so a PAL telecine wouldn't be hard. I'm sure there are PAL VHS releases out there that were done straight from the film being run at 25fps. But we'd have to actually get the Spanish DVD to find out if it's a true PAL transfer...

If it's a native PAL telecine (not a conversion from an NTSC transfer), it wouldn't have any pulldown, it'd just be just a 1:1 transfer from the film running at 25fps instead of 24, to the video picking it up in 50i. Wouldn't it basically be a 25p image broken up into two fields per film frame?

The only PAL DVD release was in Spain. If it was a separate PAL transfer and not a conversion from NTSC, it would also have increased vertical resolution. But since it only got a PAL release in one country, they could have just done a PAL-to-NTSC conversion from the American DVD transfer, like you described (as was often done for stuff that was shot on film but had VFX compositing and post-production done on NTSC video - think Star Trek: The Next Generation, or the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie).

I think it would at least be worth a shot to get that Spanish DVD and find out.

I will get a chance to see an IMAX print of TDK next month. I am not familiar with the Blu-ray colors, I didn't ever watch the Blu-ray, but I will be able to describe what I thought the IMAX looked like, just like I did with Begins.

Perhaps the Blu could be another case of regrading the untimed version almost from scratch to "read" better on the home medium - sort of like how even the original video transfer of The Matrix looks nothing like the theatrical prints. 

But I remember the 35mm of Begins having the same pushed browns and teals, the Blu-ray has too many/too varying colors. I'm thinking of the scene where Bruce confronts Ducard in Wayne Manor, the DVD/Blu show lower contrast and lots of varying colors, but the IMAX was all pushed gold and brown and high contrast and that's what I remember from 2005. (I actually had not watched the film since the original theatrical run back in '05, so all my color memories were what I still remembered from seeing it in the theater.)

Not trying to say you're wrong, but I just remember a distinct color palette, and the IMAX seemed to match up with my 35mm memories.

OK, I saw Begins in IMAX last night. Yes, it's obviously a DMR blowup with degraining and sharpening, but the color still matches up with my memories of seeing it in theaters 10 years ago.

I remembered the film looking brown and gold, but screenshots of the DVD and Blu-ray, while having the brown/gold look, show a more neutral and varied palette. That's not the case with the IMAX print - almost everything is pushed to either brown/gold or teal/cyan, just as I remembered from the original run.

The DVD palette looks closER?, but skin tones on the Blu look too pink. Everyone's skin was quite bronze on the IMAX print. It was also a lot more contrasty than the video transfers, though that is the case with all theatrical prints of anything compared to home media...

I guess I meant sky blue - I thought sky blue and cyan were the same thing.

Yeah, what I've seen from Team -1's Spanish LPP print shows that it also has color in parts of the training scene where official pre-SE transfers show it almost white.

And it amazes me how Moth3r's VHS bootleg reproduces the color of the lightsaber better than any official video transfer.

Yeah, Luke's saber does seem to have been intended to be cyan through the whole film. It's just that in that scene the color transferred over to video and in most of the training scene it didn't.

The Tech Museum of Innovation is playing the trilogy in 70mm IMAX - Begins every weekend in February, TDK in March, TDKR in April. But would the color timing on IMAX prints be the same as 35mm?

My understanding was that George at least wanted the Mos Eisley speeder scene fixed from the beginning of the project? So even when it was just a restoration, that shot would have been altered? Not trying to get off track from the topic, eventually we will get back to lightsabers...

Oh, I was wondering if the original shot had some secondary animated light reflection off the ceiling beam that was incorrectly interpreted by the SE crew and redone as part of the actual impact. I just realized, no, they did misinterpret a light reflection in the live action as part of the animation. It makes no sense, you can clearly see it's still there before and after the impact animation.

I have heard the SE might have been a little rushed because stuff kept getting added to the workload - wasn't it originally just supposed to be a straight restoration with the Mos Eisley scene and some shots of the space battle redone with CG? (Back when it was just going to be a re-release of the first film - remember that the 1995 VHS promos said "This is the last time you will be able to own the original version *of Star Wars.*") 

But I digress.

Some of the work those other companies did could have been wipes/dissolves. Also, don't quote this as fact, but some optical work may have been done at Disney off-hours. Richard Edlund claims the infamous Mos Eisley "orange blob" optical clone-stamping color mismatch was done at Disney because ILM was down to the wire. Not sure if he got his memory wires crossed, or if that could be true. (I know Harrison Ellenshaw's work was done off-hours at Disney, and I think that's mentioned in the Rinzler book?)

And I think some of the lasers were also done by Peter Kuran, who would later form his own company, which was given a lot of the lightsaber animation work in Jedi. I have a Cinefantastique issue with an interview of him, let me check that sometime.

Nelson Shin's story about suggesting the sound does seem embellished. AFAIK Ben Burtt came up with that sound all his own

Also I have read elsewhere that Barry Nolan at Van der Veer Photo Effects did the glows. But maybe that was only some scenes?

I forget, was that glow on the ceiling beam in the original shot there on the whole shot, or was it an "environmental" glow that was double exposed in only during that impact animation?

T2 was on SyFy last night, and I was looking at your version around the same time. Your version's color grading looks better than the official transfer that was playing on TV. Kudos!

They are splice marks (different kind of splicing), I'm just curious why they're BLACK. That means the splices were done on a positive generation?

Did those Stormtrooper shots have lasers in them?

EDIT: I had previously noticed that if I played the m2ts in MPC-HC and set the audio to the 1.0 mono, it went to half speed. When I disabled LPCM in FFdshow and forced it to use LAV Audio Splitter, the problem went away. So word to the wise - don't try to play back 1.0 mono LPCM in MPC-HC + ffdshow.