TServo2049

I wish you well too, poita. Good luck with the surgery.

I think ww12345 or poita or someone has a print with those frames in it? I remember a screenshot on the old AMPS...

poita said 5TB Seagates are the only Seagates that have failed for him. (Which sucks because I bought five of them for him - though he specifically requested 5TB Seagates.)

I don't think the color changes, I think the whole thing is out of balance. It is just less noticeable at the beginning. (Normally, it looks blue at the beginning.)

This transfer may have been out of balance - I'm almost wondering if they were trying to make the colors look more neutral in the night scenes or something. I'd love for someone to get their hands on this and try to see what the colors of the entire film end up looking like if the Carolco logo is corrected to be silver.

There are a couple copies on eBay Germany, but none of the sellers ship to the USA, so I can't buy a copy myself like I did with T1.

The VCL T2 seems to come from a low-contrast interpositive like the other home video transfers; it just seems to come from a different one with different color. If it had come from a theatrical print element like T1, it would look much different.

Awesome clips! This proves once and for all that the lightsaber was always blue in 1977. There are only a couple shots where the color is faint (nowhere near as many as the home transfers), but even in those, you can still see some light blue in there.

So for the most part, the "white" lightsaber was a consequence of home transfers boosting the gamma, causing the color glow element to get obscured. I will never understand why the 97 SE recompositing made it even worse (forget it Jake, it's the SEs).

That sucks. Reminds me of when I saw a Fathom screening of Ghostbusters that I'm pretty sure was the Blu-Ray version blown up (not even the 2K source master, literally just 1080p on a theater screen).

Stamper said:

Kaos, what was the general color in the biker bar at the opening? I remember it not being as brown as the DVD, more Blue like. Saw it 14 times on year of release, so I'm certain Cameron changed this for the VHS/LD and all the other versions.

On YouTube there is a compilation of camcorded footage from a fairly recent 35mm screening (within the last couple years), one of the clips is the biker throwing his keys to the T-800, and it looks way more blue/teal than any home version I've ever seen.

Again, I hope I get to see a print someday. (The reopening of the New Mission under Alamo Drafthouse management can't come soon enough...I hope San Francisco will get more 35mm revival screenings.)

OK, maybe I was wrong. I wonder if it will just be the old master that every Blu-Ray is based on...

TylerDurden389 said:

I don't even like that the Matrix has green color whenever they're plugged in.

Good, because that's not how it looked in theaters anyway. The green is pure revisionism; the whole "green" feeling came from the computer text stuff, got extrapolated into the sequels, and was retconned back into the first film for Blu-Ray.

Everyone "remembers" The Matrix being green/being associated with the color green, but they are as wrong as people who remember "Episode IV: A New Hope", or "To Be Continued..." at the end of Back to the Future.

dvdmike nails it, these digital remasters have color/balance problems that sort of cancel out a closer resemblance to the theatrical timing. (See also: The Neverending Story. The U.S. transfer may actually be closer to the theatrical timing than people give it credit, but it still has huge problems both with color and with brightness/contrast.)

With T2, I'm not so sure what's right. Beber and kaosjm describe one look, which lines up with those 8mm screenshots. But TylerDurden389 says he saw another print that still had the "blue blanket" over the night scenes that we're all used to.

And there's a 35mm screening clip on YouTube that still seems to have the blue/orange look, albeit more nuanced with some teal and yellow in it. Is it the print Tyler saw at his screening? Is it the print kaosjm saw at the Alamo Drafthouse?

I hope I get an opportunity to see a 35mm print. (Thankfully, there does not seem to be a DCP of T2 yet - and also, Sony/TriStar still handles U.S. theatrical distribution, so StudioCanal would have to send them a DCP master, much like how Disney sent the Blu-Ray transfer of The Muppet Movie to Universal - who still has the ITC theatrical rights - for purposes of DCP screenings.)

Thanks for the observations, PDB.

I still would say the BD has flaws - for example, the ending scene has the sky looking greenish. I don't care how much teal or green was in 80s prints, from the prints of other movies I've seen, clear daytime skies still didn't have the same color as styrofoam packing peanuts.

I'd love to see a regrade of the BD trying to approximate the German DVD colors, and keep the BD color scheme but take away the brightness/contrast/balance/tint issues that give it that modern revisionist look.

Your T2 looked very good, actually. I certainly don't have a problem with it. I think it's the best colors you can get without definitive knowledge of how the colors looked in theaters.

I'd say that the TeamBlu is probably the best presentation of the classic "home video" color scheme of T2, superior to any of the official HD releases.

OK, I checked the German T1 DVD, and it does have cue burns at the reel changes. So this does seem to be from a German theatrical source. (The Orion logo has the German theatrical distribution company notice optically superimposed at the bottom, and as I said before, there is absolutely no mention of Harlan Ellison anywhere in the closing credits.)

The letterboxing is also inconsistent from scene to scene; the telecine seems to have been electronically letterboxed at about 1.55:1 (and it's one of those transfers where the bars are at a slight angle and "bob" up/down into the next line partway across the screen), but in some shots the actual in-camera hard-matting extends further down at the top or up at the bottom.

This reminds me of old Hong Kong video transfers that were taken from theatrical prints, and looked blown-out and overly contrasty, with dark scenes being too dark and bright scenes being too bright (because the higher contrast of theatrical prints did not transfer well). If anybody's ever seen any HK movie transfers with burned-in Chinese+Engrish subtitles, cigarette burns, 1.85 films having fully visible in-camera "hard matting" that shifts position from scene to scene, that's what this transfer is like. Poor quality or no, it's from a theatrical source.

It also reminds me of some of the old Academy screeners that came from theatrically-timed print sources (like The Dark Knight).

Also, does anybody have the original Thorn EMI/HBO transfer? I read that had burns too, but I believe it was also overbrightened, as a lot of 80s transfers were.

Hey, do you happen to have any screens of another training shot, one of the ones where the lightsaber always looks white on the video transfers? Mike Verta has confirmed that it was clearly blue in every shot on theatrical prints in '77, and the bootleg videos from the original release seem to confirm this. But I'd love to see another screen from this "inferior" print if you have one.

And is this 11-minute promo indeed a longer version of what was in the YouTube clip I posted?

Actually, this may be something rare. In early 1983, some time prior to ROTJ's release, a Nickelodeon series called "Standby, Lights, Camera, Action!", hosted by Leonard Nimoy, showed a featurette on the ROTJ creatures that has never surfaced anywhere else. It still referred to the film as "Revenge of the Jedi" (this show ran the featurette after the title had been changed, so Nimoy had to explain the concept of a working title).

Here is the featurette excerpt that was aired on the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr8s-CDOSMI

That clip is obviously abridged, and I've long wondered if it came from something longer. The fact that Team -1 referred to the reel they have as "The Creatures from Revenge of the Jedi" leads me to believe that it is in fact the full source of the clip from "Standby, Lights, Camera, Action!"

Yes, that T1 master is bad, but it looks almost like it was transferred from a theatrical print, or a theatrical print master, or something. No American home video release has colors anything like it (and there's no Harlan Ellison credit, meaning this is from a source around the time of the original theatrical release, before Ellison sued and his name was added as part of the settlement).

Theatrical prints have much higher contrast than the elements used to make home video transfers, so they often look blown out like that if they are transferred. (See also: Bootlegs and screeners transferred from theatrically-timed sources.)

So it may be a poor transfer, but there may also be clues to the theatrical color timing. That's why I bought that disc.

I have the German FSK18 T1 disc, I've already ripped and uploaded it. Anyone who wants it can PM me for the link.

However, I don't have T2.

Nice! Drafthouse is renovating the New Mission here in San Francisco, maybe they'll run 35mm there too (when they actually reopen, it feels like it's taking forever).

FYI, the theatrical version just does a smash cut from white to the end credits. The DeLorean flies at us, and BOOM, screen goes white and then cuts to the credits. This has actually been preserved on every home version since 2002, and I see no reason why this 35mm wouldn't be the same.

Curious, where are you? I wish I could see BTTF in 35mm, I saw it at a theater that regularly shows 35mm prints, but they only got a DCP.

Maybe two different interpositives, or two different print runs? I know I've also heard that LPP and Fuji have different tendencies to them (Fuji is supposedly more purple? I've seen some SW SE film cells that look purplish...)

And I know how I talk about how prints I'd seen of 80s/90s films had more teal, not just pure blue, and fire and explosions and stuff looked yellow instead of orange (Beber's various descriptions of 35mm screenings of 80s/90s films match with the kind of stuff I've seen), but I also saw a print of John Carpenter's The Thing that had blue blues without much teal at all, and a good bit of orange in all the fire we see in the film. (Yes, it was likely a repertory print struck much later, but still, these repertory prints always seem to be fully timed, or struck from an earlier-generation element that does have the theatrical timing.)

Also, I've seen film cells on eBay UK of various films that say AGFA-Gevaert, not Eastman LPP. Maybe Eastman, Fuji and/or Agfa prints of films during a theatrical run looked somewhat different from one another?

So you could both be right.

Red Dwarf said:

Out of curiosity, would the SE prints be of higher quality than the originals? Due to age, the cleanup it underwent and being produced by more modern equipment?

I really don't know. I'm pretty sure the first film would look worse on an SE print, because the negative fading ate away detail and color information that could not be recovered even by the restoration. (I remember anecdotal reports from old timers like Treadwell that there were visible color shifts *during* scenes. Also, I read someone who said that the opening corridor shot looked grainier and fuzzier on the SE than on a revival screening in 1994. And I definitely know mverta has said the SE looks worse.)

Also, the digital work was done at 2K, so anything that was digitally scanned had its resolution reduced (though once you get to a theatrical print generation, it may not be easy to tell).

Yeah, I remember my reactions to the Fathom DCP of the Fellowship EE being along the lines of "This is different from the DVD, but feels strangely familiar...like I saw this color timing in theaters in 2001." I don't even remember noticing a green tint (either my eyes got used to it, or maybe the DCP master doesn't have as strong a tint?)

This could be another case of "we get used to the home video grading and forget how it looked in theaters, then complain that the BD grading is revisionist, when it's actually closer to the theatrical than we give it credit" (see: every James Cameron remaster)

And 35mm prints (especially LPP) can have a slight yellow-green tint in general, too. I've seem film cells, they have that yellow green look. White is almost never pure white in 35mm, there is always some slight color to it (usually yellow or yellow-green). Is it due to the film base not being 100% clear, or is it due to the chemistry of the developing process?

If only we could have gotten our hands on the 35mm prints that were for sale a while back. I'd love a regrade based on the actual print color schemes. (Though obviously we'd have to wing it for the extended stuff - and now I wonder how the heck the limited 35mm print runs of FOTR EE and TTT EE looked...)

I enjoyed the preview, but I also am a bit disappointed by the lossy look. It seems like many of the previews of reel 1 over the years have looked mushy like this, but some have looked better - I have an old 1080p preview of the crawl/flyover, a 25Mbps MOV file, and while it didn't have the cleanup, it looks clearer and more of the grain structure is intact. I'm flicking through the same frame on both, and some of the faint stars looked brighter and clearer in that old preview, for one example.

Can you try the same encoder/bitrate you used for the ESB Grindhouse? That looked nice and crisp. Not trying to be overly critical, I'm just trying to be constructive. You guys still did a great job with this preview, but I know you can do even better.