Ok so me and DJ (and our friend the menu-guy) have worked a lot on Star Wars lately and sometimes we get tired and need to look at something else. DJ came up with the idea of fixing the horrible blu-ray release of Night Of The Living Dead 1990 remake, and we’re close to finishing it.
Originally, NOTLD 90 was colorful and bright, but the blu-ray was color timed to be dark and blue-tinted, also crushing the shadow detail in the process and even clipping some whites too. The clipping resulted in a loss of the grain that is present throughout the whole movie in the original, which we have restored by sampling grain from scenes where it wasn’t destroyed.
And of course we’ve done a color correction to make it much more balanced. In the new color timing they had set the white and black levels differently for each scene it seems, so we first had to use a plugin to get the whole movie back to a more constant balanced look, and then color correct it. The result is a more true representation of this new color timing, since there was no way to make it look exactly like the original.
We chose to do this because even the highest quality version we found using the original color timing, (which was the VuDu HDX version) looked like it was too compressed to make it a clean-looking blu-ray in the end.
EDIT: After some discussions with DJ, we have decided we’re gonna try and include the HDX version too, since otherwise we’d almost be doing a Lucas here, releasing a “special edition” with no unaltered counterpart. On closer examination of the HDX version, I could see now that it’s oversharpened and that’s why I thought it looked more compressed than it actually is. We’re planning on maybe blurring it a bit to get back the cleaner look from before the oversharpening, and then sample some grain and re-add it over the whole movie to cover up whatever compression is left, and also to restore the grain in all scenes where compression might’ve reduced it.
Here are the specs straight from DJ. (Might edit these if we add something)
Night of The Living Dead 1990
Video:
1080p AVC @ 30Mbps avg
Audio:
DTS-HD MA 5.1, Lossless PCM, Dolby Digital 2.0
Subs:
English SDH
Extras:
- Production Notes scan
- Director Tom Savini’s Commentary
- “The Dead Walk” Making-of Featurette
- Original Theatrical Trailer(BD & DVD versions)
- Talent Files
- Isolated Score Track
- Night of The Living Dead Workprint with Dolby Digital 2.0
- Fangoria #97 The Return of the Classic Dead - Tom Savini’s version of “Night of the Living Dead” scans
- Siskel and Ebert review of Night of The Living Dead 1990
- Joe Bob Briggs Night of the Living Dead reunion from Drive-In Theater in 1992 with the original '68 cast and Tom Savini talking about the original film and the remake
- Tom Savini’s camcorder footage during the making of NOTLD90
- Original vs Remake
- Night of The Living Dead screenwriter George Romero
- Tom Savini Q&A
- Night of The Living Dead 1990 review by “Ain’t It Cool News”
this release will be our first BD50 release
Some screenshots:
If you wanna know more about the film, check IMDB.
We’re probably planning something with the original 1968 version too, and we’ll keep you updated once we get started with that.
