[In progress] Hellraiser (1987) [Project: Celluloid]

[LucasGodzilla]

So I've had an interesting development. JohnCarpenterFan got back to me after I sent him a PM months ago involving this thread. I'll just quote him here down below.

Sorry I didn't see this sooner. Your stills are very interesting but I feel like there's more blue in them than I remember seeing in the print.

I did discover something very interesting though. I hooked up my LD player to a CRT and had a skim through the deluxe collector's edition of Hellraiser on LD. To my surprise, it was abundant in the sort of blue lighting seen on the print I saw, at least when viewed on a CRT screen. I also checked out some scenes such as the hospital scene and both the confrontation with the cenobites and the Engineer chase are bathed in blue as they were on the prints. 

I think this would be a useful reference to assist with grading and overall consistency as it is by far the most faithful home video release of the film I'm aware of, it also states on the packaging that the film was transferred from an IP under the supervision of Clive Barker himself. I'm not sure how different it would look viewed on a modern TV but on a Sony 4:3 CRT, the colors looked very nice and in line with what I saw on that print.

Having read all of that, I went to look up this mentioned "Deluxe Collector's Edtion Hellraiser Laserdisc" and this came up on the LDDB.

Hellraiser: Deluxe Collector's Edition (1987) [LVD9536]

I'm wondering if anyone here has this somewhere in their inventory and is in the position to make a rip of it?

My idea now is to sort of a re-do of the regrade (supposing I get my hands on a good rip) by first regrading the Arrow blu-ray to the Laserdisc as a base-line, and then I do a second pass on the grade to the 35mm stills. Or, well, something like that. Again, this all depends on what I can find or get on this. I would actually put in the money to buy a copy since one is not super expensive, but I do not have any of the equipment necessary to do a rip of it.

[spoRv]

I'm wondering if anyone here has this somewhere in their inventory and is in the position to make a rip of it?

Wonder no more...

[LucasGodzilla]

I'm wondering if anyone here has this somewhere in their inventory and is in the position to make a rip of it?

Wonder no more...

Oh that would be amazing if you could rip that sometime! I'm certainly curious to see what differences may be held between that and the stills. Out of curiosity though, what are your thoughts on his remarks involving CRTs possibly skewing the colors?

[spoRv]

I'll rip it, sooner or later, but if you have to rely on this... well, prepare to relax!

CRT: sure, every laserdisc ever made had video material "calibrated" to be shown on CRT - even if plasma, and possibly some LCD were out at the very end of the format, most display in houses were CRT.
Sure CRT had deep blacks - better than any non-LED backlight LCD displays - and overscan; in modern FALD LEDs and OLEDs blacks are even better, but sadly laserdisc low resolution would not show its best on such displays; at least, we can get some more image on the borders, as most modern displays (and all capture card) are not "forced" on overscan.
Color wise, I haven't made a direct comparison, but I do clearly remember that on my CRTs, laserdiscs were always great, and in most cases colors were better than DVD (connected via composite cables) - but probably it was due to difference in masters used, as I discovered later; I distinctly remember that Raiders of the Lost Ark, one of the very few titles I had on LD and DVD at the time, had better colors on the PAL LD.

P.S. I still have a Sony 28" 16:9 CRT in my parent's attic... if only I had enough room to place it here, it would be great to use it to watch LDs and play with vintage videogame consoles!

[bronan]

CRTs will not skew colors unless its improperly calibrated. Some older masters had a red push, but beyond that it should look identical between displays.

Edit: After thinking about this more, I might be wrong depending on situation. In general, the tubes are very accurate, but the problem lies in the NTSC decoding. Each model TV uses a different jungle IC that will decode the NTSC to RGB, and in this stage its possible for colors to come out pretty different. PAL is probably a better bet for color accuracy since it tracks the hue.

[zoidberg]

I have captured the PAL VHS of Hellraiser, I'll try to upload later this week. Might be of some use

[LucasGodzilla]

So I took a bit of a look at Zoid's PAL VHS and I've found a few aspects that it did a good job carrying over from what I can tell but still falls into a lot of the pitfalls that came with most other transfers of the movie. It's a bit odd really since I'm not sure what to say about some of the things I saw.

For one, in some areas, the colors look more akin to like any other transfer with some of the added blue colored lighting practically missing.

But at the same time, it does more things right than most, such as the blue overlay during the Cenobite-Hospital confrontation (albeit not as well as spoRv's Italian LD in my opinion).

It also seems to boast an overall more consistent color scheme for the night-time scenes (except for that last still there which uh, highlights the keyphrase "more consistent") which have colors that are more akin to what I have seen in that one outlying YouTube trailer (albeit not as intense) and expectations.

This VHS also raises the question for me about how off my blue color scheme has been throughout my regrade. Take this still into consideration and then look at a previous version of the regrade.

With that said, I'm not taking this VHS as a real truthful source due to the still prevalent number of inconsistencies between scenes as well as between literally frames with no cut in between. This is truly something that baffles me since I have no possible explanation as to how this could even happen, but basically, during the Engineer chase sequence in the hospital (approx 1:05:09), there's a couple of frames at one point that looks blue and more akin to the original stills, but then suddenly, the blue tone literally disappears between frames.

These were taken approximately 7 frames apart. As I've said, it's the exact same shot and yet it's as if someone accidentally misclicked and deactivated a node in Resolve mid-preview. Anyone got any ideas as to how this could have even happened? I highly doubt it's the actual lighting itself since the still I used to compare it was a latter frame.

[spoRv]

Well, the fact that sometimes programs fails could happen (even if it should not); but I wonder, before releasing ANY movie on home video, isn't more than one person watch it, for a quality check?!? This also SHOULD not happen!

Luckily, we are here to fix any mistakes!

[deleted user]

There used to be hardware image adjustment thingies. Maybe those had programmable states and somehow they weren't able to do anything digitally properly, so they had to switch on-the-fly and thus switched slightly off? Seems very unlikely though, I dont see why anyone would take that risk, unless it was a live TV airing where it doesnt matter much.

[zoidberg]

I'll check that section out tonight. Could be a flaw in the film transfer, more likely it's down to the timing of the print itself

Edit: It looks to me like a small blip in the colour correction applied during the transfer to video