The Thing Regrade

[Croweyes1121]

A simple regrade of John Carpenter’s The Thing. While certainly revisionist, some felt that Dean Cundey’s color grade for Scream Factory’s 2016 2K scan served the film better than Arrow’s likely-true-to-source grading on their 2017 4K scan. This project seeks to marry the two. Using Arrow’s superior scan as a base, I’m doing a SHOT BY SHOT color regrade to the Scream Factory color grade using Dr. Dre’s fantastic color matching tool by creating custom LUT .cube files for every single shot in the film. I’m up to shot 234 at the moment and am nearly 1/4 of the way through the movie. I’ve also created a custom mask so as to not incorporate the color changes in the letterbox bars as, in a few shots, they were raising the blacks in the bars a tad. I’ll be muxing the finished video product together with the untouched 4.1 70mm audio and releasing as a BD-25 on myspleen.

[PDB]

Sounds great. I’m in for any version of the Thing. Good luck

The problem with the letterbox bars can be eliminated by cropping them out before color grading and putting them back in when encoding an AVI or other intermediary.

[Croweyes1121]

Sounds great. I’m in for any version of the Thing. Good luck

The problem with the letterbox bars can be eliminated by cropping them out before color grading and putting them back in when encoding an AVI or other intermediary.

Yeah, that’s essentially what I did, but with a mask. Had I actually cropped them, I’d have had to re-encode the video once for the crop, and then again for the export. I wanted the color re-encode to be from gen one and not gen two, if that makes sense. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy with Premiere once you create one mask that’s correct. You can just paste it into subsequent clips without having to manually drag the corners on each clip - which would’ve taken two forevers. lol

[PDB]

Got ya. Well good luck again.

Love to see some pics when you can.

[Croweyes1121]

I’m 500 shots into the film, which looks to be about halfway there.

Edit: 580.

[Croweyes1121]

Color grading is completed. This will be up at myspleen either tonight or tomorrow. I’m calling this 4K16, as an homage to the excellent Star Wars print scans. The 2K scan was done in 2016, and the 4K scan was done in 2017. This is what a 4K scan might have looked like in 2016, with Scream Factory’s color palette - hence “4K16”.

[deleted user]

Do you have any comparison screens?

Also, does the screen you posted imply you changed up the end credits to include yourself?

[Croweyes1121]

Do you have any comparison screens?

Also, does the screen you posted imply you changed up the end credits to include yourself?

Here is a quick comparison...and any of the caps-a-holic comparisons between the Arrow and Scream Factory disc should be good for color compare/contrast.

Scream vs Arrow:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/126674

Scream vs Arrow (Color-Corrected to Scream Colors):
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/126675

Arrow vs Arrow (Color-Corrected to Scream Colors):
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/126677

And yes, I changed that one credit card to include a credit for myself. I couldn’t resist.

[deleted user]

Thanks for the links. Do you by any chance have a comparison with thumbnails all across the movie?

I feel like you should have resisted. Even the people who spent years and thousands on making 35mm scans have never, to my knowledge, altered any credits. Nevertheless thanks for putting in the work.

[Beber]

I feel like you should have resisted. Even the people who spent years and thousands on making 35mm scans have never, to my knowledge, altered any credits. Nevertheless thanks for putting in the work.

I agree. That pretty much ruins it all to read a fake Internet name included in the movie runtime. You should have resisted and, if you feel necessary to sign your work, just put an additional card at the very end, once the end credits are over.