Film logo preservation and talk thread

[Onti]

Larry Cohen's "It's alive" (Shout Factory) also has the Warner logo designed by Saul Bass but.... 1.85:1.

[dwalkerdon]

Here's a really big one for me and it's one that absolutely infuriates me every time I remember it... TOY STORY.

Y'know the iconic 3D animated version of the Disney castle logo they created specifically to go with the fact that TOY STORY was the first fully 3D computer animated film ever made? That was so key to the film that they made it part of the film's score, giving it an equally iconic (and now intensely nostalgic) orchestral soundtrack, which on the CD soundtrack is the beginning of "Andy's Birthday"? Yeah, they butchered it on the Blu-ray for no good reason.

Well, I had a look at the original UK DVD and decided that it's perfectly watchable as is, so I don't really see much point in faffing about with the Blu-ray for the time being. It actually looks extremely good despite being a fairly low-bitrate DVD transfer, probably in no small part because it's a direct-from-digital transfer with zero grain (which is a shame but even the DTS LaserDisc transfer looks extremely digital and grainless so I'm not convinced it's from 35 mm either, it's a pretty late LD).

I took the DTS from the LaserDisc and aligned it very very carefully with the slowed-down-to-24/1.001 fps UK DVD video. *All* editing of the audio was done by calculating which DTS frames needed removed to align it well, and then cutting the data directly in a hex editor. I also fixed the DTS headers in a hex editor before doing the editing itself, since they're not quite right straight out of DTS parser. The only edit that wasn't a straight trim was at the start, where I had to remove a small bit of the tail end of the THX logo sound (which doesn't appear on the DVD): here I just checked for the best possible edit point so as to not cause an audible pop then dropped in 49 frames of pure silence encoded as DTS from the very beginning of the LaserDisc capture, replacing 49 frames of unwanted sound, right before the film soundtrack starts in earnest.

Each DTS frame on a LaserDisc DTS bitstream begins with a header which starts with the following bytes, after the header has been corrected from how it's spat out of DTS Parser:

7F FE 80 01 FC 7C DF F2 62 C0 0D 3A 80

I put together a pretty detailed breakdown of the header in a spreadsheet, the most relevant bit of which looks like this:



Note that "fsize" = 3583, which means each DTS frame is 3584 bytes long. So I can just search for "7F FE 80 01 FC 7C DF F2 62 C0 0D 3A 80", then highlight blocks of 3584 bytes and cut them as necessary, which is exactly what I did. For example, to select 25 frames of DTS, 25 x 3584 = 89,600‬ bytes. The bits highlighted in blue in the above image/spreadsheet are bytes that are written somewhat inaccurately by DTS Parser. It writes fsize as 00111000000000 (binary) which is 3584 in decimal, but it should count from zero which makes the correct value 00110111111111 which is 3583 in decimal. Similarly, it interprets the bitrate as "open", as in "unspecified", which I don't think is exactly "wrong" but LaserDisc DTS is 1234 kbps (DTS CD format) which should ideally be coded in the header as the binary value 10110.

Similarly, each frame contains 32 blocks ("nblks" = 31) of 32 samples ("short" = 31), which is 1024 PCM samples. That was useful for looking at the waveforms in Audacity and seeing where each frame started and ended.


EDIT: Here's the fixed opening with the LaserDisc DTS over it!

pw =

One-Eyed Bart

For comparison, the Blu-ray:

did you do a comparsion of the DTS mix on the LD vs the Dolby EX/DTS on the DVD?

[pipefan413]

did you do a comparsion of the DTS mix on the LD vs the Dolby EX/DTS on the DVD?

No, but I'm of the belief that the DVD track is a new mix rather than a faithful reproduction of the original one. It's something I do plan to eventually look into, but... well, this thread is about logo preservation, so it won't go here if I do. I only diverged slightly off topic because it was in connection with me finding the right logo on the UK DVD (which doesn't have the DTS track, incidentally).

[williarob]

We found this CBS TV logo attached to the beginning of a 35mm IB technicolor print of Dr No:



Which initially led us to believe this print was used for television broadcast. However, according to this page at MI6 HQ:

https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/articles...on_tv.php3

The American Network television premiere of Dr No wasn't until 1974 and that was on ABC.

Is it possible that the 1970s airing on ABC wasn't the Premiere? While I haven't yet had a chance to watch the entire film, I don't believe there are any deliberate cuts for sex or violence that might have been required for airing at on TV in the 60s, nor did I see any cuts for commercial breaks, so my guess is that this print was not used for broadcast, perhaps a previous owner had this CBS logo and thought it would be fun to splice it onto the start of this print.

Anyway, I thought this thread seemed like an appropriate place to share it. The original logo was faded of course, so we have restored the color to help it match the Technicolor film that follows it...

[SpaceBlackKnight]

Verrrrry intresting! Im sure the MI6 site is wrong on that 1975 ABC premire since that would be extemely late for Dr No to debut then since all the other Bond films premired on TV way before. I heard the US TV premire of Dr No was on CBS between 1963 and 1967, which sounds more likely IMO.

[williarob]

This page also puts the TV debut of Dr No in '74 on ABC, and backs it up with Newspaper articles:

http://www.007magazine.co.uk/bond_on_tv.htm

[SpaceBlackKnight]

Ah, I see! Odd it would premiere so late in the US. Sometimes, film print owners add random logo reels to replace missing/damaged frames at the beginning/ends or just for the hell of it. One time when browsing through random print listings on eBay, I saw (what seemed to be) a 35mm print of 1980's Flash Gordon with the slanted zero Fox logo at the front (probably spliced off a print of Alien) and the "visit Universal Studios Hollywood" tag at the end. Another time, I saw a 16mm print of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension with the 1990s era Columbia logo (they had nothing to do with the film BTW, certainly not in the 1980s LOL!). These were on eBay US, and if I remember right the sellers were also based in the US as well.

[pipefan413]

Well, I guess I was wrong about the Tanlorn BD of Thesis. I had just discovered that the actual disc uses a completely different transfer than their Remastered DVD (which also came out at around the same time, and  I had assumed both used the same transfer), because we get:



Also, Vacas, The Red Squirrel, and Belle Epoque just have Video Mercury Films with in-credit mentions for LolaFilm/Sogefilm.

Update once again:

An anonymous source has informed me of the 2001-2004 United International Pictures logo being spotted on a 2003 movie called La Flaqueza del Bolchevique (The Weakness of the Bolshevik). He supplied me HD footage from the films trailer on Itunes Spain (capped through his AppleTV 4k via HDMI) that has the UIP logo intact on it.



He says the movie is available to rent/buy in HD on Itunes Spain and France (?) and should have it there too going by a 360p YT rip floating around, so I await what he finds. Ether way, this finding only leaves the long version of the 2004 UIP logo to be found in HD.

Thanks to my best friend JC, we found the 2004 UIP logo in HD, complete and with sound, AT LAST! This showed up on the US Amazon Video and Itunes versions of an Argentinean movie called Delirium  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3778394/?ref_=fn_tt_tt_13



The UIP collection is now officially complete!!!

Does anybody happen to be aware of any Blu-ray Disc - or better yet, UHD - transfers with the old 1957 Universal International (without the "Pictures") globe logo in colour? I have it in 1.66:1 but it's cropped and I'm trying to figure out if I can find one that's opened up to 16:9 or very close to it. Otherwise I'm going to have to upscale and chop the top and bottom off for something (I already did it a while ago in fact, but I'd prefer to avoid/minimise scaling).

[SpaceBlackKnight]

That Uni logo is super easy to find and a good chunk of 1954-61 titles are on Blu that have one you seek per the video link. There's so many that going by title on Wikipedia and checking for a BD on Rewind or BD.com will help narrow down specific ones to check. Off the top of my head, I'm pretty sure Shout's This Island Earth BD is one that has 1.37 and 1.85 versions. Plus, I heard Shout's recent Brides of Dracula Blu has 1.66 and 1.85 versions.

[jonno]

I'm pretty sure Shout's This Island Earth BD is one that has 1.37 and 1.85 versions.

I have this. Sending you a PM, Mr Pipes.