I'm very interested in this as well. As far I know, it has only been showed uncut in Germany, so I assume an uncut print would be a German dub.

Any movement on this project?

Experimented with a basic BD25 of the uncut version of Psycho as a side project. Took the German recording from MySpleen, resized to dimensions of BD (bit wider), cropped to widescreen, added a 35mm grain plate, then spliced in.

Comparison (Open Matte SD MySpleen Rip/Uncut Encode)

















The grain plate helps reduce the quality disparity, but it's still fairly obvious. The German broadcast, beyond being SD, seemed to have been sourced from some sort of film print, with a lot of dirt. I was, however, able to get rid of the color artifacts.

For better or worse, I was never satisfied that I got it to blend well, so, after encoding a 1080p BD25, I scrapped the master project files. Willing to share if there's interest, but, again, not perfectly pleased with the integration.

I did something similar a while back (way before that same file got posted on myspleen) and I noticed the same problem: there was no way to seamlessly blend the sources together. The only way to make it "ok" or "so-so," is to encode the whole project at 720p, but to me this defeats the purpose

Indeed. There is precedence, even in commercial BD releases for previously censored footage to appear similarly ropey and overall softer, Dracula '58 springs to mind. But, here specifically, the disparity in quality becomes very apparent because there are shots, subsequent to the uncensored material, that have the same composition, so it becomes blatantly obvious that the uncensored shots are lower in detail.

That being said, the grain plate does help in my opinion. The grain of the BD master does closely resemble it, to the extent I'm wondering whether the HD master of Psycho was DNR'ed then similarly fake grain added (the Lowry process).

Has any attempt to obtain a film copy of this movie been made ? Doeas anybody know it this german tv print was sourced from a first release print or a re-issue ? I thinks there are enough people to get interested by such a print (and have it scanned).

I'd leave it as-is. There's nothing you can really do to re-intigrate properly, since this is a recording of a foreign broadcast and it's open framed trying to match to the BD 1.85. not to mention the BD/Uni source has far better depth than any video or print copy I've seen as its reputedly from the negative or high generation source.

Hitch was supposed to not have to have had made trims to appease the US censor, but apparently either somebody did or he did slight trims for pacing/effect.
Having these cropped to 1.85 as shown above and made as an alternate foreign export version are about as good as we could hope for, short of finding a similar untrimmed foreign print ourselves.
It can't be worse than how the restored King Kong was pre-DVD. They had to source the cut scenes from worn 16mm and it got really ropey during the transitions. I quite liked it still, but for the DVD they found an uncut original dupe print in the UK.

I still think that we need to contact the German tv station and see if anything (even a better digital copy, the one they air versus a rip of a broadcast) could be obtained for educational purposes (such as a film class that wants to compare differences of US versus German releases of vintage films) as I doubt they'll be willing or interested in sharing the film to a group of amateur preservationists. (although u never know, lol)

I know we have a few German speaking members here on the forum and I'm sure one of them could help us word everything correctly. Then, we just need to figure out the name of station, google their contact info and take it from there...

What do you guys think?

(2016-09-06, 12:49 PM)jerryshadoe Wrote: I still think that we need to contact the German tv station and see if anything (even a better digital copy, the one they air versus a rip of a broadcast) could be obtained for educational purposes (such as a film class that wants to compare differences of US versus German releases of vintage films) as I doubt they'll be willing or interested in sharing the film to a group of amateur preservationists. (although u never know, lol)

I know we have a few German speaking members here on the forum and I'm sure one of them could help us word everything correctly. Then, we just need to figure out the name of station, google their contact info and take it from there...

What do you guys think?

It's a long shot, but it's worth a try.

I realize it's a long shot, but I can't think of any other option other than waiting for a German 16/35mm print showing up on ebay and that's as much, if not more, of a "crap shoot" as contacting the TV station