TServo2049

Also, I think I figured out my issues with the Slave 1 shot. First, there is a lens blur effect across the entire shot, when in the OT this would have been a composite which would not have had consistent in-camera blur of that kind. This looks like it was shot live in Panavision (when as I said before, they were actually separate elements shot in VistaVision - the only part that would have been shot Panavision would have been the actors)

Also, I haven't seen AOTC since the original release, but is the Slave 1 just stationary on the platform in this shot? In the OT, a shot like that wouldn't have been done with a miniature of Slave 1 / the platform, but with a matte painting. Matte paintings didn't incorporate those sort of lens artifacts.

Have you thought of cutting out and separately grading/blurring different elements to give it that optical-composite feel (though it would make the project a lot longer and more difficult)? I know they were trying to make sure disparate elements blended together, but the actors, Slave 1/platform and ocean should not all look like they were shot through one camera lens, should they?

Your version looks like a miniature in a water tank, and even then that's not what ILM would have done, since water is the same scale no matter what scale you do the miniature in. For the shot of the clipper in Raiders of the Lost Ark, they combined an authentic plane shot on dry land, a matte painting of the dockyard (and Pan Am livery on the plane), and actual water off an actual pier. An OT Kamino would have probably been a live plate shot on water, plus a matte painting of the whole platform including the Slave 1, and live footage of the people in the middle.

Maybe if you cut out the platform from the water and applied separate blur filters (and not anamorphic ones, since again, the effects were filmed in VistaVision for higher clarity and less grain in optical compositing)? I'm not sure...maybe this would just be too much work.

And I certainly don't completely understand how all this worked, nor will I pretend to. It's just that to me, while your shot looks better, it looks wrong in a different way. (Though I will admit that in your grading, the thin white matte lines around the platform towers seem to give it a little bit of an optical-composite feel, even though they were there in the original version.)

I have been looking over this whole thread, and I have a few questions:

1. Why are you adding chromatic aberration? The OT were shot in single-strip Eastmancolor, and (aside from those dye-transfer UK prints of the original) were printed in single-strip Eastmancolor. The fringing of Technicolor came from the fact that three color records were merged - most of the world wouldn't have seen the first film in 3-strip Technicolor, and nobody would have seen Empire or Jedi this way because no IB prints were ever made.

2. Why would miniature shots have anamorphic blur? The effects were shot in VistaVision, which was not anamorphic - they were only printed down to 4-perf anamorphic 35mm in the compositing stage. So the only anamorphic distortion would be from printing the effects elements down to Panavision, there wouldn't be any anamorphic lens distortion in the actual filming of the miniatures. (Though I'm sure they took the distortion of the live-action scenes into account in the optical compositing process, especially in Empire and Jedi - this article for example)

I hope I got my info right. Anybody who knows more than me (because I certainly don't completely know how all this stuff worked), feel free to chime in.

Could someone more knowledgeable in film projection (poita?) explain again why garbage mattes are not perceptible when a print is projected in a theater?

Through simple deductive reasoning, I have determined that LDDB listing is wrong about the doc being 20 minutes longer on the Japanese LD.

The poster may have been under the mistaken assumption that the 74m version from the DVD was also on the Japanese LD; it couldn't have been, since on both the U.S. and Japanese versions the documentary fit on a single CLV side (meaning that both releases had the same 52m version that later appeared on the R2 DVD).

So now we don't have to waste our money on the 25th Ann. Japanese LD. (Though I still think it could be a good idea to get the original Japanese release, for a non-time-compressed mono track.)

Can you put up a screenshot of Luke's lightsaber training? Preferrably one of the shots where the saber looked white in all the video transfers...

A comment on the LDDB listing of the Japanese 25th Anniversary LD claims that it has a version of Fear of God that's 20 minutes longer than the U.S. LD. So does that mean the Japanese LD has the complete documentary?

LDDB also says that the 80s Japanese LD had analog mono (still not CX) - and lists it as having 3 sides instead of 2. So could that be a better source than the 1979 LD? There are three copies on Urabanchou - they ship to the States. There's two of the original pressing and one of the budget-priced 1989 reissue; they're all listed as 2 discs, and are all $25 (without the hefty charges to import to the States, of course).

Would it be worth it to import the first Japanese LD just for a non-compressed version of the mono? And would it be worth it to track down the  Japanese 25th LD for the complete doc? (That version isn't listed on Urabanchou, though LDDB lists an Obi-less version for $50, and a sealed copy for $67.)

Doctor M said:

Since CAPS films aren't animated with the slight differences in shading for cells on different layers, what exactly distinguishes a 'theatrically accurate' version of a CAPS film?

By the mid 90's film stock was pretty mature.  Unlikely Technicolor in its infancy that required answer prints, the difference between what the CAPS computer generated and the final film print should not have been that different.

Then why does every digital transfer of Beauty and the Beast not only look different from the theatrical timing, but from the other digital transfers? Were they regraded at the DI stage for no reason in particular?

Also, the early-90s films still had a traditional color timer. Dale Grahn had to have done SOMETHING.

You're probably right, I may just be partial to the way film degrades the image and makes it look more "filmic", even if that may not be what the filmmakers fully intended.

Doctor M said:

Disney still has unaltered/unrestored film scans somewhere of their oldest films that may yet get a proper restoration.  I fear the newer films that were modified for IMAX have had their digital data altered and might not be able to be restored to their theatrical version.

Even if the CAPS files were altered, original 35mm film-out elements of the post-TLM films must still exist in the vault. (And keep in mind, truly theatrically-accurate versions of those films would have to come from film, not digital files. Sure, they wouldn't look crystal-clear perfect like Disney seems to want everything to appear these days, but hey, they never looked like that in the first place!)

I know it will almost certainly never happen, but it would be neat to see "original theatrical versions" of at least BATB, Aladdin and TLK, scanned from the 90s film elements (and not de-grained!)

dvdmike said:

Thats the look I was going for! damn my memory for film detail is good lol 

More golden and one of that awful 90s telecine pink 

Yes, that wonderful "LPP gold" look that 80s/90s prints had. Not many transfers replicate that look - old transfers had "telecine pink", modern ones either have a neutral palette or teal/orange. (Though sometimes it's hard to tell if some transfers are teal/orange'd, or faithfully timed off an original print; people criticized the 2012 remaster of Lethal Weapon for having a teal/orange shift, and I can see a bit of that, but it also looks quite similar to the original 35mm from '87 that I saw this past Christmas!)

A 35mm print just turned up on eBay.

Not sure how these images were captured, they show soundtrack and sprockets, but the same seller has a print of The Land Before Time with screengrabs that show a "double-image" of two adjacent frames.

Point is, could these images be a good color reference? (Perhaps someone could buy the print...)

Empire of the Dark is freakin' RARE, there was a VHS release but Amazon lists it as out of stock, so yeah, a copy of that film is just as good a find.

Any LDs of Neverending Story in 1.85:1 are cropped. The film was shot in Technovision, which was a Panavision clone, so the original AR is 2.35:1-2.40:1.

This isn't meant to be a discussion of copyright, anyways.

Here's an odd one. In every transfer of The Land Before Time, going back to the VHS, the early scenes with baby Littlefoot have him looking gray or even purple, instead of brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJg3GP4tH94

But I found this image from a recently-ended auction for a 35mm print:

The same scene looks warmer, and Littlefoot looks more brownish - closer to how he looks in the rest of the film.

In fact, I have a 720p MKV of the HDTV transfer, and looking at it against the other screencaps from that auction, the whole film seems to have a warmer cast in the 35mm.

I wonder, has every transfer been inaccurate to the theatrical timing, and nobody ever realized it?

(The screenshots also show that it has a bit more picture on all four sides than any of the 4:3 OR widescreen transfers. Would be cool to get that print if it were ever relisted - it was $260 and ended with no bids.)

It's a much bigger issue than Disney, trust me. There are other parties who were pushing for the same thing - the Gershwin estate, the Rodgers estate, probably the Berlin estate too. Disney just gets singled out because everyone knows Mickey Mouse.

All this aside, the issue with color grading is often (but not always) filmmakers being given carte blanche to change their movie because it's their movie, and possibly (as someone theorized) as a condition of participation on commentaries or documentaries.

In a lot of other cases it's post/transfer houses who seem to have no understanding of what an older film is supposed to look like, and regrade everything in line with modern sensibilities, or to make it pop on a digital LCD display.

If only someone grading an older film were required to have worked as a film projectionist, like poita was...

The catch-22 is that if all these films were public domain, we wouldn't get these 4K original-negative restorations of them. The studios would still have the original materials, but would probably be unwilling to loan them out for some outside release that wouldn't make any money for them.

Culturally significant old PD films do sometimes get great restorations, but also keep in mind that films whose copyrights lapsed in the States, like Metropolis and the British Hitchcock films, always looked like absolute shit until we got restorations bankrolled by the German or British rights-holders.

It's certainly a double-edged sword, but the modern near-perpetuity copyrights at least keep them secured under the control of deep-pocketed entities that can fund restorations.

It's not the studio who is to blame in this case - it's the director, and that has nothing to do with copyright, and everything to do with how prominent directors are given control to tweak their earlier works due to their high regard in the industry and the film culture.

The shot is also grainy because the lightsaber scenes were shot in regular 4-perf 'scope, and 35mm gets noticeably grainier with each extra generation (exactly the reason why ILM chose to use VistaVision for the effects).

I think the only live footage shot in VistaVision were the bluescreen cockpit scenes, and the splinter unit footage in Guatemala; so all other live scenes with effects added were standard 35mm, which is why every shot with lightsaber glows or laser bolts looks grainy as shit, and why (as much as we hate it) Lucas chose to recomposite everything for the SEs.

I wonder why the animation comps in Empire and Jedi look better - behind the scenes footage of the lightsaber scenes shows that the film magazines are standard 35mm and not VistaVision...

Another question - IMDB says this:

Recent copies of The Terminator contain some restored footage, not found in the theatrical release. This footage is not selectable bonus material, rather it is automatically incorporated into the film. Among some of the shots restored are:

• (At the factory)
• A shot of Sarah making a final crawl before falling onto an inactive conveyor belt.
• A shot of Sarah crawling on the inactive belt, towards an active one.
• A shot of the terminator shifting to the left, then to the right.
• A shot of the terminator riding on the active belt.
• A shot of Sarah falling off the active belt, before entering the compactor.

Is this true, are there extra shots in either the DVD or Blu-ray transfers?

And here are the altered scenes in the modern transfers I was referring to:

The new MGM R1 DVD releases has two altered scenes, at the request of Lightstorm Entertainment, supposedly to fix goofs in the original picture: a scene set in the future, when a Terminator enters the rebel compound, has been flipped on its vertical axis; the scene where the Terminator leaves the motel in L.A. has been cropped/reframed so that his feet are no longer visible (this was done to fix a continuity problem: the original scene showed Schwarzenegger wearing shoes instead of boots as previously seen).

The first one can be easily fixed by re-flipping the footage to match the old VHS/LD/first DVD transfers. The second probably can't be fixed, at least not without switching to an SD source like the original Image DVD.

T1 never had strong bass. It was non-Dolby, Academy mono, which always lacked low end. To add bass is to alter the mix to something it never was. It was an 80s B movie, it should sound like an 80s B movie.

And changing the FX would be no different than George Lucasing it. (Speaking of which, you are going to unfix the fixes made in the DVD/BD transfers, right? I know there was a shot in the future war sequence of that Terminator infiltrating the bunker, which originally had him facing in the wrong direction compared to the wide shots...)

captainsolo said:

The original film was supposed to have been so dark that people complained. Judging by just how dark Returns was printed, I can completely see that happening. On the untouched still form above you can see all the video nasties from LD era magnified and just how much everything was overbrightened to compensate. This was a common practice then and even is still upheld today. I always have my CRT dialed back a bit to mimic film a bit more, and I do this especially when watching the first film because it feels more appropriate.

I found the bit about the video telecine being brightened in the old Widescreen Review articles on the LDs for both films.

There's a 35mm print of Batman '89 on eBay right now, starting at $500: http://www.ebay.com/itm/BATMAN-ORIGINAL-35MM-FEATURE-FILM-/221355280283?

Anybody wanna chip in so we can find out just how dark the original was?

I'm surprised to see that the WOWOW and DCP are basically identical. Does the DCP have correctly-proportioned end credits, or are they squeezed like the BD? (When AMC did the 25th anniversary screenings, the credits were squeezed - maybe they just used the BD transfer, like the Cinemark screening of Ghostbusters I went to...)

The Blu-ray transfer may well come from the same element, but it looks to be a different scan - it's slightly zoomed, and seems to be horizontally stretched? (And of course, only the BD has white clipping, crushed blacks, degraining, and edge enhancement.)

And it looks like the BD transfer has red boosting. Marty's jeans already look teal in the WOWOW/DCP (I think this was a bluescreen composite, so that would make sense), but in the BD they look almost green...

The presence of red boosting actually gives credence to your "recycled DVD master" theory. Those transfers were usually done at HD resolution, weren't they? (Though that does beg two questions: 1. Why are the end credits squeezed on the BD and not the DVD? And 2. Why would Universal source from an older, inferior master when they had a different one that was better?)

A trick I discovered: If you go to the page with the smaller image, then right-click, you will get the link to the full-sized image even if you don't have an account.

Did anybody ever see this 35mm print auction from back in November?

Yes, the blues look purple, but I think that's an issue with the camera's white balance. Point is, another 35mm source which definitely has the blue push.

Oh, and for the modern generation of digital color graders - notice that the blue/orange dichotomy is not in every single scene.

Wow, I know people said the Death Star originally looked green, but damn, it REALLY looks green here. The green shadows/pink highlights really remind me of that 1978 bootleg tape AntcuFaalb has...

I assume this is still from the LPP print?

Hello,

SilverWook pointed out this 16mm print of the theatrical cut of The Warriors on eBay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/16mm-cult-feature-film-THE-WARRIORS-1979-Walter-Hill-/151204927400?pt=US_Film&hash=item23348417a8

Right now, there’s a little over a day left. Starting price of $300, still no bids. Unless someone is waiting to snipe it, it may be wide open for one of us to get. I’m not going to buy it (never seen it), but in the spirit of preservation, I would gladly chip in if someone else wants to.

I’ve also posted on AMPS.

That "screenshot" is from the mthr bootleg. As in, actually from mthr's color-corrected version.

Can't tell from the picture of the actual film how faded it is...