It's been ages since I watched this film but I remember it looking pretty sickly, which I thought might have been an intentional choice (this was before I knew a damn thing about colour grading). But I just threw the old Image LaserDisc against the Blu-ray and uh...


... Yeah, I don't think it's meant to look like that. The LaserDisc looks very photochemical (i.e. like a film print) to me but the Blu-ray looks pretty minging.

It looks like the US release is probably more or less the same thing, just released by Lionsgate rather than StudioCanal/Optimum. Although the US releases seem not to mention a 2-channel LPCM audio track, but my GB one does have that.

I take it this film is stuck looking weird in HD? No other different releases?

All versions on blu-ray seem to use the same scan. The German Koch Media disc does have a higher bitrate as well as being tinted slightly different color-wise, but that is about it. With this one what you see is what you get.

https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?d1=14170&...1&go=0&l=1

(2021-03-13, 04:39 PM)PipperPiper Wrote: All versions on blu-ray seem to use the same scan. The German Koch Media disc does have a higher bitrate as well as being tinted slightly different color-wise, but that is about it. With this one what you see is what you get.

https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?d1=14170&...1&go=0&l=1

This looks like a significant improvement though: the green tint does appear to be slightly reduced. The low-bitrate encode is somewhat less upsetting than the green tint common in loads of old masters that have been regraded for modern displays. It seems to me that they start off grading them for CRTs which results in that magenta push, and then they try to fix it later to release a Blu-ray off that same master, which results in a green push instead.

Man, this one's a spoiler so don't click on it unless you've seen the film but thematically, this is clearly wrongly graded on the Blu-ray:

It's been a long, long time since I've watched it but I do remember it being a very vivid looking film - nothing like those BD shots.

(2021-03-13, 07:04 PM)Hitcher Wrote: It's been a long, long time since I've watched it but I do remember it being a very vivid looking film - nothing like those BD shots.

I've only ever seen it on home video so I've probably never seen the right colours (well, the LaserDisc looks like it's more or less about right apart from the excessive magenta). I'm sick of this, mate, honestly.

My viewing would have a VHS rental.

The Blu-ray is also squashed:

https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?a=1&x=467...0&i=2&go=1

(2021-03-13, 07:52 PM)alexpeden2000 Wrote: The Blu-ray is also squashed:

https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?a=1&x=467...0&i=2&go=1

Aye, seems like it. Can see it against the LD.

Wait, have they literally just cropped for 16:9 but then squashed it to 1.85:1?! Oh my GOD.

The framed image on the Blu-ray is 1920 x 1040 which is more or less 1.85:1 (would be more accurate at 1920 x 1038 but y'know, it's 2 pixels). But if I resample that to fill the 16:9 frame, watch what it does to the geometry:


Not perfectly the same as the standard def presentations, but a lot closer. To get the geometry about the same I'd have to crop in a fair bit on the bottom and some on the top, because the Blu-ray's cropped on the sides compared to the DVD. Doing it to the DE rather than GB Blu-ray in ResampleHQ with ImageSource for convenience's sake, you can get to about here, for example:


Pretty heavily cropped so would have to check the framing of basically the whole film but could probably sort it like this. I'd fine tune the geometry more than this v quick fiddle with it. I'm trying to sort the audio in the first instance.

EDIT: I think the sweet spot might be a crop to 974 px then rescale to 1038. For some reason FrameCompare doesn't like the DVD frame, it's only letting me upload the other ones... http://www.framecompare.com/image-compar...n/KG6YGNNX


Here's the UK one with a 1040 frame rather than 1038 to allow symmetrical letterboxing (20 px at top and bottom rather than 20 px + 22 px, needs to be mod2 unless I resample the colour, which I might do anyway if I end up re-grading it as well at some point).

https://postimg.cc/gallery/0vKHNFB