Looking for the "right" Alien³ color grading...

[spoRv]

I prefer the LD look of this one.

I'd have to agree that the LD looks nicer

Me too!

[spoRv]

Jetrell, may you check your three different DVD editions, and see if there are some color differences? I wonder if the older one has a color grading like the PAL LD, as some seems to claim.

Many of you remember that my main color matching script, despite the fact it produces wonderful results color wise, has some problems in the clipped whites, producing nasty artefacts; today *it seems* I have fixed somehow that problem... can't be 100% sure unless I'll encode a complete movie - with this brand new wonderful script, and my fast NASA-like computer (yep, like a 1969 NASA one, more or less), it will take just a tad more than a week to encode it - but, according to several screenshots I focused on, the artefacts seems gone or they are so greatly reduced that is impossible to notice them - at least, that's what I hope.

To stay true to the spirit, to the look & feel of the PAL LD, I decided to leave some of the clipped whites untouched; yes, it is possible to fix them further, using BD luma, but doing so will alter the color balance of this result, that seems nearly perfect to me.

Here you are an example of the latest color matching: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/199684

Note: for the ones worried about the clipped whites, they are noticeable just in few shots. like the last one in the previous comparison, when there is a great explosion, on sometimes in the very hearth of the brightest flame; as I have watched the whole movie as LD capture just yesterday (and the fact the regraded version is something like I think about 95% close to it, and up, but with clipped whites partially fixed), I can tell they are not so distracting in motion, because last for few frames (explosions) or are very tiny (flame hearts), and don't occur in all of them, and with the same intensity; as you can see in the next image, in the regraded version the clipped whites are partially recovered, as in many shots apart few ones - top LD, middle BD, bottom BD regraded:



EDIT: actually there are some explosion shots on Blu-ray with severe clipped whites; these are unrecoverable and, eventually, should be replaced with footage from LD, or older DVD not affected by the problem.

[spoRv]

Found a nice comparison between four different DVD editions: http://sd.caps-a-holic.com/vergleich.php?vergleichID=65

Their color grading are quite similar, while the PAL UK LD is different from each one of them; even when desaturated, colors are always different, in particular the blue out of the window in Andrew's office; I took the first DVD just because it has the biggerst image size in comparison to the others.









EDIT: I have a theory about why the PAL LD has different colors... as wrote before, in the opening credits, it has the name of Charles Dance (an UK actor) before Charles S. Dutton, while in all other known releases (including workprint, and excluding, maybe, UK VHS and/or DVD) the contrary is true; don't know if it was done just for video, but I presume it was made in the prints themselves - I think UK was/is the second market for importance for American movies, so it could be credible. So, when they put their hands on the movie *maybe* that is the moment they changed the colors.

I must add that the scene I referred before (blue out of the window in Andrew's office, during his talk with Ripley and 85) is not there in other versions (it is greyish instead), while it is there in the previous scene with Clemens, in all versions... then, I would not state the PAL LD is right and all the others wrong, but it is a thing who made me think...

[Valeyard]

EDIT: I have a theory about why the PAL LD has different colors... as wrote before, in the opening credits, it has the name of Charles Dance (an UK actor) before Charles S. Dutton, while in all other known releases (including workprint, and excluding, maybe, UK VHS and/or DVD) the contrary is true; don't know if it was done just for video, but I presume it was made in the prints themselves - I think UK was/is the second market for importance for American movies, so it could be credible. So, when they put their hands on the movie *maybe* that is the moment they changed the colors.

Can you post the opening credits as a video file, I'd like to see that! It could certainly be possible they had a different billing order for the UK release.

[spoRv]

Sure, here you are the link - I included the soundtrack only.

As you can note in the starfield, there is not a simple swap shot.

[Valeyard]

Thanks, yes it definitely was not done for video. They might have swapped it out in the IN before they ran prints, but scanned the PAL LD from a misconfigured one. Or it could have been the billing order for the UK release. What do the end credits look like? If Charles S Dutton in second in the billing in the end credits then my bet is it was a misconfigured IP or IN.

[spoRv]

Charles S. Dutton is second in the end credits:

may you explain better your thought about misconfigured print?

P.S. Even Aliens (SE) on PAL LD has a different color grading in comparison to THX LD... I wonder which prints Encore used at the time; I should locate Alien UK PAL LD, too, to make the last comparison; also, who knows, maybef AR PAL LD is different from NTSC LDs, too!

[PDB]

See if there is a credit for Giger on the ld. And if it says original or alien creature design.

[spoRv]

It says "Original Alien Design H.R. GIGER".

I checked now, the PAL LD and IT BD (it should be the same all over the world, BTW) have exactly the same end credits - strangely, even if PAL are obviously rolling faster, at the end they rolls faster on BD.

[Valeyard]

may you explain better your thought about misconfigured print?

I'm pretty sure they didn't use a print. A print should have resulted in more scanner noise and light smearing, but all the bright white text is clearly defined. As we know, until more recently the original negative reels were rarely used for video transfers - instead they were used to strike the inter-positive. With today's technology Labs can skip the IP and strike the inter-negative directly. The IN's are then used to strike theatrical prints. Typically movies were scanned from the IP. I say "the IP", but really there would have been several IPs that are made, and as I understand it they are then sent around the US and the world to local labs in various markets to make theatrical prints for screening. It's cheaper and probably a lot easier than trying to produce all the required prints in a single lab.

Each film lab has their own procedures, and some of them etch reel change markers directly into the inter-positive or the inter-negative rather than into prints. For PAL regions the best quality was obtained by scanning the film separately, as video standards conversions that went from NTSC to PAL lowered the quality quite substantially. Also worth noting I think is that local distributors were the ones that had that task, rather than the US distributor. In this case "Encore Entertainment", whoever they are.

So EE gets a license from the film's US distributor to make a local PAL LD. Then they search for and find a locally held IP, scan it on a telecine, and bingo they have their master tape of the movie ready to go. How did the IP end up with incorrect credits? Well the film was released May 1992 in the US, and August 1992 in the UK. One would think they have already sent the IPs to UK film labs before the film's domestic release. This was likely an early IP possibly used to make test screening prints, and reconfigured to the theatrical cut but no one ever noticed the incorrect order.

Now true all that is speculation, but I did find clear evidence that the original billing order was Waver, Dance, Dutton and later changed:

UK quad poster:



Australian poster:



US poster 1:



US poster 2: