True Lies HDTV (Film4 HD) Preservation

[Valeyard]

The issue is that no matter how bright you think the scene should look the blacks have NOT been clipped. There just is no more detail to be revealed beyond what you can see. Here I give you an example, this is Lady and the Tramp as on Mypsleen from 35mm LPP:



And here is the exact same frame from a Technicolor print:



That's from a short sample scan no a complete scan and unfortunately the quality isn't the greatest, however you can clearly see much more detail in the dark areas that aren't present on LPP. It doesn't matter how much you brighten up the LPP it will never reveal the amount of detail present in the IB print, it just isn't there. That's my point about True Lies - no matter how much you want to brighten those scenes there will not be any further detail revealed in the shadows.

[Beber]

I'm not saying we should brighten the LPP scan. I was saying to Stamper that a project would be better to color match the current official master to the LPP scan than the other way around, as the color probably are more accurate on the LPP, but as for brightness is concerned, at least in the opening scene, we should retain the brightness of the official master. Maybe reduce it a bit, but not to the extent of the LPP scan.

[Valeyard]

It depends what you're going for, if you want it to be faithful to the 35mm you can match the 35mm brightness and you will still be able to see all those shadow details that you can't see on LPP, that's my point. Or you can make it 4-6 stops brighter then the 35mm which is essentially the norm for commercial releases as it is.

[Beber]

I guess both would have to be tried to pick and choose afterwards.

[deleted user]

Or you can make it 4-6 stops brighter then the 35mm which is essentially the norm for commercial releases as it is.

I know I'm being pedantic again, but 4-6 stops is pretty extreme. A positive film's entire dynamic range is typically 6-7 stops. A high contrast slide film like Velvia even only has around 5 stops. So brightening that dark scene by 6 stops would make it lit like a Christmas tree on fire.

Source: Been shooting a lot of slide film.

[Stamper]

I have seen this film on release year, and nowhere was the opening scene so dark. I'm with Beber there. He tries to get why the first reel is so dark for the most part.

[Valeyard]

You saw the film in 1994 more than 20 years ago, memories are fallible.  Did you see it in a US theatre or somewhere else? Foreign prints may have looked different. The opening scene looked perfectly fine to me and consistent with what I have seen on other 35mm films on LPP recently I saw LATT on 35mm in 2014 and I can't tell you now whether I saw it on IB tech or LPP - although I have good reason to think it was IB tech I cannot remember whether it had the detail present in the shadows or not, and I wasn't paying attention for it.

[Beber]

The 20+ year gap is a fair point. However, the country propably is not relevant as it is a 20th Century Fox movie worldwide. At least it is both in the US and Europe, France being the country where Stamper must have seen it. We're not in the case of a Delicatessen properly taken care of in France and sloppily done in the US as the distributor doesn't want to put money into a proper printing process to keep the look of the original film for a foreign movie that won't make a ton of dollars in the box office anyway.

[spoRv]

I'm aware LPP prints are inherently darker than other print types, and of course than negative; still, we had many (a lot?) masters in the past taken from positive prints, still they were not so dark - yep, probably they tweaked settings to raise brightness, but that was not *that* necessary with the CRT, don't you think?

Ready? Fight!

[CSchmidlapp]

The 20+ year gap is a fair point. However, the country propably is not relevant as it is a 20th Century Fox movie worldwide. At least it is both in the US and Europe, France being the country where Stamper must have seen it. We're not in the case of a Delicatessen properly taken care of in France and sloppily done in the US as the distributor doesn't want to put money into a proper printing process to keep the look of the original film for a foreign movie that won't make a ton of dollars in the box office anyway.

Universal had the rights in the U.K. No 20th Century Fox in sight on its original run and Video releases here.
Are we sure it was not the same throughout Europe?