From Film to Delivery.

[spoRv]

An interesting article about The Godfather saga restoration: http://web.archive.org/web/2008072415044.../page1.php

[PDB]

Wasn't sure if this was the best place to post but since we were talking about scope films here...

Cooke Optics has a great youtube channel. Particularly interesting is DP John Mathieson's discussions on the differences between anamorphic and spherical shooting:

[LucasGodzilla]

I think we need a new thread, sharing opinions and facts about "negative scanning and subsequent digital color grading Vs interpositive scanning Vs release print scanning"... that thread will surely be long and stuffed with great info... but I'm too lazy to start it!

Well then I'll do it for you lazy bum lol

Anyways, I suppose the best way to start a thread like would be to show a drastic comparison or something like that. A while back on the Blu-Ray forums in a thread for Blue Underground's 4K transfer of Lucio Fulci's Zombie, there were a few posts that took a brief tangent away from Zombie and went to talk about Clive Barker's Hellraiser. There was a post by a user under the name of JohnCarpenterFan that was kind of an eye-opener for many: It basically compared high-quality stills from a preserved archival print of the movie with the Arrow transfer, ranting about their differences.

It is very interesting that you brought up Hellraiser. 

I recently managed to get my hands on a well-preserved archival print, watched it, took some scans, made sure they were representative of how it looked correctly projected and compared it with the Arrow Blu-ray.

Be aware that I really liked the Arrow Blu-ray despite the peculiar grain, and didn't have any problems with the color timing... When I watched this print, I couldn't believe my eyes. This film when viewed on film looks absolutely incredible, very stylish, quite a lot of blue lighting. I had no idea this film looked that good, home video has just done it a complete disservice.

One thing I will say is that this print was not grainy at all, even in low-light conditions there was nothing out of the ordinary, I wasn't even aware of it most of the time. 

When I flicked through the Arrow disc not long after, it looked flat and orange compared to what I had seen, it looked ugly and noisy. In the scene where the cenobites appear at the hospital, the room in the print appeared more blue with Pinhead's skin also being bathed in blue which helped draw attention away from the make-up, on the Arrow the room is more neutral and the make-up job on Pinhead really stands out. Also in a scene near the end (see last picture below), in the print, there's clearly blue lighting in the background and the characters directly in front of the camera are covered in a warm glow from a fireplace (IIRC), yet on the Arrow, everything is again flat and orange.







It was like watching the film for the first time. I'd love it if every studio/label took the Warner approach and used answer prints (or at the very least view multiple theatrical prints) to assist with color timing. This "Hold back on the colors/contrast, keep the shadows intact, make everything look natural" way of thinking has got to go. It's not purist in the slightest, in fact it goes directly against what film naturally looks like.

Reading this, I decided to do a bit of a comparison and ripped my Arrow copy of Hellraiser for comparison and well, the differences are pretty big. I weren't able to find the exact frames for all of them but I was able to at least pinpoint frames that were nearly the same.

Screenshot Comparison Here

I highly suspect that what we have in the Arrow transfer is a 2K scan of the negatives with a brand new color grade subsequent since the colors are quite different. I can't prove whether or not that's true since it's just officially detailed merely as a "Brand new 2K restoration approved by director of photography Robin Vidgeon", however it's quite obvious that there's some sort of going inconsistency here.

Certainly makes me wish there's some release of this movie now that addresses this issue. Maybe some of y'all could give a crack at making a restoration of this color grade if you want a challenge or something.

On that note, I'd just like to say my opinion on the topic of "What to scan?": I wish companies tried to use scanned camera negatives as an HD base and a telecine or scan of a theatrical print (the less faded, the better) to base the digital color grading off of.

[Stamper]

Agree with JCF, the "natural" school of color timing old films is destroying the original looks.
On a note, that guy is very criticized on forums for taking his stand, but he is always right.
Basically he's a guy who really knows it vs knows it all who don't know s**t.

[Bigrob]

You might want to check out the recently released Turbine release from Germany. Same 2K restoration but a shaper picture by all accounts

[deleted user]

Thanks for sharing, awesome info.

I wonder if a regrade from those frames could put it on the right tracks.

[LucasGodzilla]

Another movie I feel inclined to bring up is Dario Argento's Phenomena. For those of you who don't know, similarly to how The Thinghas two considerably different transfers by Shout! and Arrow, Phenomena has two different transfers put out by Synapse and Arrow within a fairly short timespan. The main difference between these two is that, unlike the Synapse transfer, the Arrow transfer makes use of a new 4K scan of the original camera negatives. Obviously, you can see where this is going, so I'll just quote JohnCarpenterFan again since he summed it up pretty well as he did with Hellraiser.

Arrow have made as much clear by their stance on framing and stylish lighting/color pushes that they're not doing some kind of Warner-level job when it comes to accuracy and outside their releases with DP/director involvement it shows. These are just improved masters of older films which had shoddy treatment in the past, I'm not going to pretend they're anything more or act as if they're how the films originally looked. I know in the case of Phenomena that blue gels visible in 35mm prints are gone or almost gone in Arrow's remaster.

Caps-A-Holic Comparison Here

Let me also take a quick tangent to mention that you can also look at a comparison between several even older transfers of the movie on Mondo Digital.

On a personal note: I prefer the Arrow transfer, not only for the extra detail and improved audio but for its naturalistic look actually. For some reason this movie looks better to me with less emphasis on the blue hues, especially the opening sequence, I think it looks too dark in the other transfers. And it's not like the blue color scheme is completely gone, there's still definitely some blues throughout, but I am glad it's been toned down to allow other colors to saturate the screen.

One thing I thought of since my last post in this thread was that it'd be interesting to see a company provide you on a separate disc—as a part of a limited edition perhaps, like Arrow does with alternate cuts—the raw scan of the release print that was used for color grading and the raw, inverted scan of the camera negative. I highly doubt these would be superior cuts over the final product but it'd be interesting to see as a "the option is there" oddity.

[spoRv]

On a personal note: I prefer the Arrow transfer, not only for the extra detail and improved audio but for its naturalistic look actually. For some reason this movie looks better to me with less emphasis on the blue hues, especially the opening sequence, I think it looks too dark in the other transfers. And it's not like the blue color scheme is completely gone, there's still definitely some blues throughout, but I am glad it's been toned down to allow other colors to saturate the screen.

Agree, and I add Arrow get a much bigger frame size in almost all examples there... but, screenshot 10 is like they swapped the image (and it's not the case), where Arrow is too blue and skin tone too pink!

[LucasGodzilla]

On a personal note: I prefer the Arrow transfer, not only for the extra detail and improved audio but for its naturalistic look actually. For some reason this movie looks better to me with less emphasis on the blue hues, especially the opening sequence, I think it looks too dark in the other transfers. And it's not like the blue color scheme is completely gone, there's still definitely some blues throughout, but I am glad it's been toned down to allow other colors to saturate the screen.

Agree, and I add Arrow get a much bigger frame size in almost all examples there... but, screenshot 10 is like they swapped the image (and it's not the case), where Arrow is too blue and skin tone too pink!

I can confirm that weirdly enough, they are not swapped out: The Arrow transfer is blue and pinkish whilst the Synapse transfer is cleaner, whiter and more correct (skin-tone wise).

Really took me aback when I went to check this out for myself.

[spoRv]

I can confirm that weirdly enough, they are not swapped out: The Arrow transfer is blue and pinkish whilst the Synapse transfer is cleaner, whiter and more correct (skin-tone wise).

Well, it should be *quite* easy to regrade Arrow using Synapse as color reference for this (and other) scene...