rooksby

Firstly, hello everyone.

Wow poita, SilverWook, you've no idea how happy I was watching the 16mm scan. For years (and years), I've been hoping to someday see a really good version of the original cut. Years too of keeping an eye on this thread, all the ups and downs ... and it might really be happening.

Like everybody else, I have toyed with the idea of trying to clean up the old Laserdisc rips, and dirtying up the DVD or Bluray, and hopefully meeting somewhere in the middle, but your 16mm print opens up a whole new avenue.

I am not sure what else is going on behind the scenes or in your PM mailboxes, and I am very strictly an amateur at this sort of thing, but in the absence of any potential full restoration project, could I raise the suggestion of us taking the lovely crisp luminance from your scan and combining it with the chroma from the disc sources.

Obviously a lot of semi-automatable work to scale, translate and stabilize the scans to match precisely the picture geometry of the bluray ... it wouldn't be quick, but I feel it might just be this side of do-able. (And we can then lean on the eye's poor sense of color resolution to cover any rough edges).

Just for a rough sketch, here's the luminance from the scan, with 50% chroma from the LD, and 50% chroma from the Bluray

Obviously the chroma would be 100% Laserdisc whenever the Bluray heads off into CGI.

I could be wrong. I don't really know if what I am talking about is actually genuinely practical and realistic on full length movie timescales (although I'd love to have a shot at it, or help out), or how frowned upon this mix and match idea is, but I get the feeling that working the geometry and scaling problem  perhaps might give better final results, more easily, than wrestling the print's color-correction problem.

... obviously there would be some rudimentary software assistance required to help with the scalings, but hopefully it'd be shouldering the brunt of the workload, whether that be reel-by-reel or scene-by-scene ... then leaving limited manual tweaks for all the problem frames.

Here comes the point of this post --->

Would it be possible to ask you for a few random 2k frames just to get an idea how this suggestion would work (or come apart) in real life and at higher resolutions than the sample?

(In saying all that ... you know what, I really, really loved the look of the distressed color in the 16mm print version. Genuinely! Watched it with the audio manually synced, it really worked for me. The bleak and radioactive tones, the broken-down dystopian hues, and the 'feeling unwell' color balance, it was great. To me, it suited the tone of the film far better than the too-clean BluRay.

Hey, maybe the 16mm should be left as-is and just call that the new release.)

Anyway, aside from all that, I just wanted to thank you for your time, efforts and skill thus far (and those that helped behind the scenes to bring us here, and all the other contributors in the last 90 pages). It really is genuinely appreciated. Cheers.