TServo2049

Actually, I believe what was located was color silent negative just for the stuff that was cut out for The Menagerie. A couple scenes that were used in The Menagerie had extra lines of dialogue on Roddenberry's print that didn't show up in any of the official releases, so I am assuming they were missing from the negative. (Not sure why they weren't in the hybrid version either; regardless, the only way you can hear these scenes are audio recordings from a sci-fi convention that are on YouTube.)

There was apparently a color print of The Cage, in private hands, that had completely faded to red. It was on eBay once, but I believe the reserve was not met, and now it seems to have been chopped up into individual frames to be sold as collectibles (not by CBS/Paramount, to be absolutely clear). I guess we will never know if it had the missing stuff that was only in the B&W 16mm.

So it does seem there are 35mm prints out there with two different color palettes - the print Tyler saw, and seemingly the print that was camcorded on YouTube (more in line with the blue/orange of the video transfers, but possibly even more pushed to blue; possibly with the biker bar stuff having additional blue pushing that's not in the home transfers?), and the prints kaosjm and Beber saw (blue-blanket scenes less pure blue with more teal and purple, orange stuff is more yellow).

What they seem to have in common (with each other and with the IP/IPs used for home video) are that the night scenes are tinted/pushed - unlike the trailers - and the steel mill stuff is pushed, but to where/how far they are pushed seems to differ. The Wikipedia article on internegatives says that color timing is done between IP and IN - based on the answer print?

This is all so intriguing...

338 makes me feel like I'm seeing projected in a theater, 340 not so much. I understand this is probably to minimize clipping, but 340 feels too neutral to me in terms of dynamic range, and is starting to remind me of the GOUT.

But if you and everyone else like 340 more, whatever. (Maybe it will look better in MPC at 0-255...)

Beber and kaosjm both describe seeing the blue-blanket scenes with more teal and/or purple, and the orange scenes having more yellow than orange. On page 2 there is a picture of kaosjm's notepad saying "teal Sarah hospital" and "Cyberdyne arm purple".

Beber is in France, kaosjm is in Texas. TylerDurden389 said he remembered the more familiar blue blanket, and the screening captured on YouTube seems to be more blue and more orange than what Beber/kaosjm saw.

Maybe it's not America/Europe, but something is up here. It could just be regular color variance between prints/print runs, I have no idea. I believe everybody here. I know photochemical development was not always accurate; I know there is an LPP print of Jedi out there where there is a blue cast in a lot of scenes, I think Team -1 says they have another one with a heavy green cast, but since it's LPP, those can't be chalked up to fading and have to be down to how the prints came out of the lab.

[It's said that no two prints look identical, but that doesn't mean every print varies wildly from every other - for example, I have seen two separate prints of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure that looked to have very similar color. They were at the same theater, even - I know they were different prints because I noticed a weird lab glitch the first time where there was some green-yellow image with visible sprocket holes double-exposed over a couple frames, and when I recently saw it again I did not see that anomaly. But that's all a tangent...]

Your quote:

I saw T2 at a theater in downtown Manhattan a few years back, and I know it was an actual print due to the blemishes and cigarette burns (reel change markers). The night scenes were still their usual blue/black combo look.

poita said:

TServo2049 said:

Weird, I always thought those pictures looked greenish too, but if you think they don't...

I know the Senator print had color differences from the IB print(s) the reference stills come from - the shots in the light saber duel of Ben and Vader in front of the big doorway looking out toward the Falcon had an overpowering blue tint, but there is a picture of the same scene from the Senator and the colors looked more "normal".

 This is most likely due to the automatic white balance on the camera taking the photos of the screen.

Sorry, my post was poorly worded. I said that at least one of the IB Tech prints had the shots with a blue tint (the one from which Harmy's reference stills came), but the print shown at the Senator DIDN'T have those shots with a blue tint (if the photos are any indication, inaccurate as they may be).

There could be multiple prints that look different, possibly from differemt print runs or different labs or something. Beber is in France; perhaps there was an intermediate used for European prints that had less blue/orange and more purple/teal/yellow? (This could explain why there seem to be color similarities between the print Beber saw, the Derann Super 8, and possibly the original VCL DVD too...)

TylerDurden389 said he saw one that looked blue - Tyler, do PDB's images resemble what you saw?

Weird, I always thought those pictures looked greenish too, but if you think they don't...

I know the Senator print had color differences from the IB print(s) the reference stills come from - the shots in the light saber duel of Ben and Vader in front of the big doorway looking out toward the Falcon had an overpowering blue tint, but there is a picture of the same scene from the Senator and the colors looked more "normal".

I think a lot of Tech prints of the time had a green shift? Or at least a lot of the Star Wars IB prints?

Though to be fair, there is similar "green shift" in AntcuFaalb's VHS bootleg (not taken from a British IB Tech, but from a regular USA Eastman Kodak print), and on the official 70mm collectible film cells (which were from a new 70mm positive - 1995 LPP stock, according to the edge codes - and came from an "original internegative", which apparently had near-fully intact color as recently as 20 years ago!)

Also, back in 2012 someone posted this in the DeEd thread:

"I have owned and/or had access to multiple Star Wars (the original) 35mm prints and screened numerous others as well (been in the theater exhibition biz for a long time). I remember seeing SW in the theater probably a dozen times during its 77-82 runs. The one fairly unifying factor in all of those prints (including mine) was the muted colors and almost greenish hue. There were a much smaller percentage that had excellent color that was more robust (but never popping mind you).  But by and large, especially at the smaller theaters, the prints always looked more muted."

So maybe the green "shift" was on most/all of the original theatrical print run? (Verta? Can you weigh in on this?)

France, (West) Germany and Spain got the crawls translated in original release, and they weren't redone in 1981, so none of those countries got to see "Episode IV" until the THX home video releases and/or the '97 SE.

Yes, I think poita said that some of the IB prints had a green shift. (I'm assuming this would not be due to fading - since IB prints don't fade - it would be due to the color getting shifted in the original printing process itself.)

And again, be very careful with publicity stills - they weren't timed to match the theatrical color timing. (FWIW, the 1979 book "The Movie Brats", in a reference to the Nazi imagery of the villains, said "Tarkin lives in a gray-green world with gray-green uniforms", so what people would have seen in theaters - not just on IB prints, since those were only in the UK - has to have had at least a smidge of green in it.)

Great exercise, though - this color script is absolutely amazing.

It says the images were moved or deleted - are new ones coming?

Honestly, I don't see anything wrong with capturing it locked at 25p and slowing it down later.

Publicity stills are a bit dangerous to use, they do not necessarily have the same timing. Notice it's a slightly different angle.

I guess this looks good, but it's not contrasty anymore. I do agree that those print frames are probably too saturated - digitizing a film frame won't necessarily reproduce how it looks projected, either. But I would love to actually see a print (either in a theater, or scanned). It could answer more of our questions...

alexpeden2000 said:

Not sure if anyone's seen but there are some 35mm film strips for sale on ebay UK:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2060353.m570.l1313.TR10.TRC2.A0.H0.Xterminator+2+35mm.TRS0&_nkw=terminator+2+35mm&_sacat=0

Seems to suggest that trailer that's on youtube may be fairly accurate

Actually, those film strips are from the same trailer. Notice:

1. They are not anamorphic

2. One of the strips is the Kyle Reese scene

3. Another strip is the "T2" logo.

The majority of film strips on eBay UK come from trailers. I've only seen strips for a couple movies that look to have come from actual theatrical prints.

On the other hand, this (sold) listing seems to be strips from an actual print - they are anamorphic, and look to all be from the same scene:

http://m.ebay.co.uk/itm/Terminator-2-35mm-unmounted-film-cell-lot-x75-/252029253300?nav=SEARCH

Don't 35mm prints have crushed blacks and whites too? It's not the kind of "posterized" crushing of digital, but to provide one example, I recently saw an LPP print of The Goonies where those overcast/rainy Astoria skies looked almost white at times. Though there was still visible cloud detail, those skies were noticeably blown out white-gray.

With the limited color space we're working with, isn't it impossible to completely avoid crush/blowout/detail loss? Again, 35mm prints had less detail than the higher-generation sources these transfers are coming from, but the characteristics of photochemical timing/printing, print grain, and theatrical projection make it less obvious and less blatant and more "natural" than in the digital realm.

Good grief, the WOWOW looks almost monochrome by comparison.

And for all of dvdmike's carping about the orange Nazi flags in the Blu color timing, it could well be that they kind of looked orange in the theatrical timing too.

That's the full-screen Image release we discussed earlier. It's mono, it's not time-compressed, but I don't know anything else about it beyond that.

Theatrical prints have always been more contrasty than video transfers. Theatrical-print contrast has never read well on TVs, which is why most transfers have come from low-contrast interpositives (except for more recent restorations scanned from original negatives and such). Even when they do boost the contrast, clip the whites and crush the blacks, it looks nothing like a theatrical print. We always see too much mid-range fill light. That shot of Alfred Molina looks so much better in your prediction than in the "before" image.

PDB said:

Those color matches look great Dr Dre. I'd love to use your program sometime if you ever release it for public consumption. Color matching is a laborious process.

Concerning the whole discussion of what Raiders really looks like. One of our members here tracked down a rare 1982 LPP of Raiders. There were only 200 made for the '82 re-release. It was mastered from the same 35mm materials as the 1981 prints only unlike the '81 prints there is no fading. As usual the only thing stopping us is the approximately $600 to $750 it costs to scan it. So would anyone be interested?

You know I would be. As per usual, I'd be willing to put down some for this. Anybody else?

My point was that the movie was sped up by 4%, the same rate that a film's speed has to be increased to get a pulldown-free PAL transfer. (PAL transfers ran the film through the telecine at 25fps and picked it up at 50i, with a straight two fields per film frame, while NTSC transfers ran the film through the telecine at 24fps and applied 3:2 pulldown to get it to 29.97i.)

For this, they either converted a PAL transfer to NTSC, or just applied the same rate of 4% time compression to a native NTSC transfer. (Ironically enough, I think the actual original PAL transfers were different - I believe the original PAL video transfers kept the Orion logo, and didn't have the fake stereo.)

Not a surprise; I feel like 90s CGI looked a lot less sore-thumb-y when timed for theatrical projection than it did on any official video transfers. Yes, people did still complain when CGI looked fake or rubbery (Spider-Man is a good example), but the different timing, higher contrast and overall "look" of 35mm theatrical printing seemed to hide the fact that CGI/digital composite stuff was rendered at a lower resolution and dynamic range than the live-action (at least before digital intermediate). In a lot of (low contrast, IP-sourced) video transfers of such movies, I've always felt like the dynamic range seems to take a hit when it switches from "pure" photochemically-timed live action to anything involving CGI or digital compositing; you suddenly get flattened off-white highlights and flattened grayish shadows.

For example, I remember noticing the duller contrast in every CGI shot when I saw the 2013 re-release of Jurassic Park (even projected in 2D), but in the 35mm preservation, the shots with CG look so much less jarring in comparison to the adjacent shots (and mind you, that is a movie where I've always held up the quality of the CGI, even though I've only seen it on video).

I also remember noticing as far back as 1999 that the direct-digital DVD transfer of A Bug's Life looked brighter, and that the textures looked more "plastic", than I remembered from the theater. (I remember thinking the characters almost looked like claymation at times - Tuck and Roll's surface textures combined with their designs kept making me think of the Chevron cars.) Of course, Pixar's texturing caught up, but I swear that these technical imperfections never occurred to me in the theater, even though I quickly picked up on them watching a DVD on a regular CRT only about a year later. On the other hand, the 35mm-sourced trailers in the extras seemed darker and more like what I remembered from the theater (again, I was thinking this in 2000, not just in 2015).

Does any of this make any sense to anyone, or am I just nuts?

Wow, this version really IS sped up, at the same percentage as PAL transfers. I put this against an actual PAL version, and the speed/pitch is identical.

I am wondering why this had PAL-style 4% speedup? The movie would have fit on a CLV LD and T-120 VHS regardless, there was no need for speedup shenanigans to fit it to a single tape/disc, like the original VHS of Superman or the original LD/CED of Star Wars.

Asaki said:

Hey man, don't be so hard on Disney. Look at how generous and completely unselfish they were with The Thief and the Cobbler.

That's not really a good example. AFAIK, Disney does not actually own the movie - Miramax does (or at least has U.S. rights), and they are no longer part of Disney. (And at one point, the Weinsteins claimed ownership, but the reconstituted Miramax were the last to release it.)

Disney gets a lot of blame for what happened to that movie, when they really had nothing to do with it, other than owning Miramax. There were a lot of rumors that Disney had all the master elements that were under Miramax's control, but that was all before the Weinstein split. I don't think anything more will ever be answered as to who has what and who owns what.

Wasn't the "workprint" (aka the source for Backstroke of the West) just the theatrical version with a time code? I don't remember any dirt or cigarette burns, so it was from the DCP version, right?

Was the 35mm theatrical cut of III different from the DCP theatrical cut, as with II? (And was the Russian bootleg, the one I once saw a classmate watching on his iPod or similar device, taken from 35mm?)