Minority Report [spoRv]

[spoRv]

Minority Report [spoRv]  (special preserved or Restored version)

| Released project | Projects in progress | Future projects| Mission & setup |

updated: 2017-01-26

Mission: to restore Minority Report color grading.
Video sources: Blu-ray, DVD.
Audio sources: Blu-ray, DVD.
Subtitles sources: Blu-ray, DVD.

Project info:
“Minority Report” Blu-ray has a very natural color grading… a bit too much natural, for a sci-fi movie like this. The DVD has a different color palette, colder in most scenes, but sometimes more colorful than the Blu-ray.
So the Blu-ray will be regraded using the DVD as color reference.
Some references about colors:

For Minority Report, Spielberg once again allocated the skills of Janusz Kaminski, a rather ingenious Cinematographer who knows how to put DVD’s capabilities to the test. Minority Report is not a very colorful film, and is in fact quite the opposite. The look is hard, drab and cold.
…
I would say that grain is a problem, but the grain visible is obviously a product of the bleach-bypass process used to achieve the film’s amazing look.

http://www.dvdactive.com/reviews/dvd/min...port2.html (about DVD)

Kaminski’s most interesting trick, however, was to desaturate and mute the film’s colors by employing a “bleach bypass” system. Normally in negative processing, the film emulsion is bleached. By skipping this step, the film ends up looking like a simultaneous color and black-and-white image, resulting in increased grain and contrast. Kaminski said, “The process pulled about 40 percent of the color out of the image, but we worked to get that back in by adding more color to the lights. Overall, the image has a bleached-out quality with deep shadows and blown highlights.”

http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article.html?isPreview=&id=650696|648300&name=Minority-Report (about DVD)

The grading process began with Levinson matching an answer print. The answer print consisted of individual reels that Steven Spielberg had selected as best representing how he wanted the movie to be seen. At that point, Janusz Kaminski came in to work with Levinson. The grading was done while viewing the 4K files rather than a lower resolution proxy.
Steven Spielberg was also closely involved in the remastering and the resulting HDCAM-SR master represents how the creative team want the movie to be seen by viewers today.

http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=4078 (about BD) – bold added by me, you know why…

Source Material

Video:

• Minority Report – EU Blu-ray
  
• Minority Report – IT PAL DVD
  

Audio:

• Minority Report – EU Blu-ray
  
• Minority Report – IT PAL DVD
  

Subtitles:

• Minority Report – EU Blu-ray
  
• Minority Report – IT PAL DVD
  

Project status: advanced

Final format: BD-25

First regrade test clip (first 3m33s): https://vimeo.com/200171806
First regrade comparison clip: https://vimeo.com/200184533

Latest regrade screenshot comparisons: https://fanrestore.com/thread-1263-post-...l#pid24980

[spoRv]

Here you are the screenshot comparison of Blu-ray, ColourMatch'ed Blu-ray and DVD:

These were made years ago, using the old script; the new one is fundamentally the same, with a slightly better matching, and a lot less (maybe none) artefacts; as you can see, match is perfect in many scenes, while less than parfect in few ones - 5th has paler face, while 11th has more saturated face and not that green wall.

I tried to rematch those scene using many different color matching, but results are worst, so we could like with them as they are... all in all, I'm pretty happy of the result, never possible to achieve it by hand, unless someone would like to spend a lot (and, I mean, A LOT!) of time regrading scene by scene, shot by shot.

---

OK, computer crashed (as usual), so I took this opportunity to watch the encoded part; I was forced to watch it in slow-mo (due to lagarith mammoth-sized file and thanks to my slow CPU); but it was useful to spot eventual problems...

Result? Taken both the test clip (3m33s) and encoded part (16m12s), for a total of almost 20 minutes, no artefact detected; colors are faithful to DVD, without problems so far. So I continue to encode; on monday it should be finished, then I'll encode a test clip to see if there are problems in the rest of the movie.

[PDB]

Looks great spoRv. I definitely like the DVD's colors better.

[nafroe]

Sounds like a great project!

Do "we" happen to have the Cinema DTS disc available for use?

[spoRv]

It seems "we" do not have that, but fear not, a DTS-HD MA in English could be included...

[spoRv]

Update: after many crashes, I've finished to encode about 40%. Result, as reported before, seems good. Let's see the final encode put together...

[jerryshadoe]

Good luck Andrea

[spoRv]

I need it... after a lot of crashes, reload, reinded, resave (repeat previous steps lots of time) I'm still around 75%... what it hurts is my dear PC thinks well to never crash when I'm using it - right now, but only during the night, when it's alone, and nobody is looking at it... often an hour after I go to sleep, so the whole night passes without encoding... that's why I'm still here... I suspect the problem lies in the 4TB HDD; I split it in half, because with XP (yep!) it's the only way to let it work, but, while the first half works well, the second (the dark!) half sometimes has strange behaviours... let's finish this first, then more investigations will come!

[captainsolo]

Wow, I'm not a big fan of MR or anything but to alter the image style like that is ridiculous. Good thing I never upgraded.
Thanks for all the hard work and best of luck!

[spoRv]

Finally the lossless encoding is finished!!!

I made a quick comparison between BD and regraded version, and everything seems OK; but to be sure, I'm encoding a test version to watch in the morning, to detect eventual problems - I strongly hope not... wish me luck (again), I need it (a lot!)