[Released] (No longer available) Batman 1989 35mmized

[deleted user]

This was already done for quite some time, but I wanted to wait until I would have the JAP LD audio synced and also decoded with my SDU4 and, being as lazy as I am, that took me some time to do.

Started to feel a little embarrassed that someone managed to do an entire other Batman 1989 regrade project and release it in the time it took me to get over my laziness, but that's life!

Either way, this one is based on the UHD instead of the BD, so it's a little bit different. Enjoy!

Batman (1989) 35mmized

UHD 4K HDR Blu Ray regraded using photographs of an original 35mm print of the movie using a blanket 3D LUT. It was created using DrDre's ColorMatch tool and a lot of manual tweaking of the result. It has a few flaws you might notice, but overall I think it's a great improvement over the normal BD or UHD colors and has a nice high contrast "noir" look to it, for lack of a better words, similar to the photos of the 35mm.

In addition, the raw Laserdisc as well as raw Japanese Laserdisc audio is included, synced by bronan. The Japanese audio differs in being slightly quieter and not having the low frequencies filtered out. The audio is of course in English, the Laserdisc was merely published in Japan.

In addition, the Japanese Laserdisc audio was decoded to 4.0 with a Dolby SDU4, and then upconverted to 5.1 using a lowpass filter on all channels and duplicating the back center channel with a -3dB adjustment. In addition, this upconverted 5.1 was converted to a Dolby Headphone track that you can also select if you wish.

Other audio options include commentary tracks and the Dolby Atmos remix that came with the UHD. It's quite different in many ways and while not very authentic to the original, I think it's a nice modern alternative to listen to.

The encode is a 10-bit x264 encode in 4:4:4 colorspace. You will need a reasonably fast computer to play this back smoothly.

I included the encoding script including the 3D LUT in a subfolder, so if you have the UHD Remux, you can just replace the path in the .avs file and do your own encode with other settings if you prefer that. It will also work from any HDR encode of the UHD Blu Ray, but the quality of course won't be as good.

Screenshots:


Project size is 40 GB. That's 30 GB for the video and 10 GB for the audio options, which are all lossless except for the commentary, that's just the format it came in.

Up on Blutopia now.

Much thanks to PDB, bendermac and bronan for the LD audio and syncing work!

P.S. It pains me in my heart that I had to remove 40 beautiful screenshots from the post I initially prepared because the image limit is 50!

[Dek Rollins]

This looks really cool. I would imagine my project is the one that you refer to at the top of the post, sorry, didn't mean to embarrass you .

Mine was also based on colormatching 35mm frame scans, so it's interesting to see this turn out so different here. The screenshots are very high contrast and almost look like a bleach-bypass print. It definitely seems like a cool way to watch the movie, and as you say, emphasizes the noir element of the photography.

[deleted user]

This looks really cool. I would imagine my project is the one that you refer to at the top of the post, sorry, didn't mean to embarrass you .

Mine was also based on colormatching 35mm frame scans, so it's interesting to see this turn out so different here. The screenshots are very high contrast and almost look like a bleach-bypass print. It definitely seems like a cool way to watch the movie, and as you say, emphasizes the noir element of the photography.

Haha, don't worry! I was just joking around a little bit. How could it possibly hurt to have two projects to choose from?

I used the frames from Zauberklang as reference: https://filmcolors.org/galleries/batman-...f_s=batman+

Those are all rather high contrast and I liked that and wanted to replicate it. Sadly the shot-to-shot differences in grading in the UHD are too different to have a perfect match, but I'm still happy with the result. Maybe most ridiculously, there's that shot where the Batwing comes flying down at the Joker and Joker raises his arms while everything around him explodes. On the UHD, for reasons I cannot comprehend, this shot is extremely bright, so that it ends up being almost completely white in my regrade. Luckily, that's a rare extreme and usually it's more in the direction of not quite getting the right tint. For example, that sequence outside of a building where Joker shoots everything up, seems to have gotten a rather blue tint in the UHD and thus even after the colormatching it's not as green as I would have hoped it to be. But that would require a shot-by-shot or at least sequence-by-sequence regrade and I'm too lazy for that!

Edit: Dunno why I forgot to include that screenshot, but, the high contrast really behooves the matte paintings as well imo:


In fact, that's one of the things that made me think it is really required to have high contrast, because like this they actually look "right" whereas in the normal home releases they look kind of amateurish / photoshopped.

[Dek Rollins]

Those are the same frames I referenced as well. And yeah, the color variance of the remaster is is pretty odd, which is why I gave up on it in favor of grading the old BD. Another shot that seems to be affected by the remaster's colors is the bat-signal on the clouds. In your grade it looks completely white, since it is a bright cyan in the UHD. Overall your shots look very filmic, and they do remind me of other 35mm sources I've seen too.

And the more choices the better for classic movies of course!

EDIT: You're totally right about the matte paintings. Beautiful work with a lot of depth that doesn't really show in the low contrast video releases. Here's mine:

[deleted user]

Those are the same frames I referenced as well. And yeah, the color variance of the remaster is is pretty odd, which is why I gave up on it in favor of grading the old BD. Another shot that seems to be affected by the remaster's colors is the bat-signal on the clouds. In your grade it looks completely white, since it is a bright cyan in the UHD.

I'm sure it's full of such little problems, yeah. Out of curiosity, what color should the bat signal be?

Overall your shots look very filmic, and they do remind me of other 35mm sources I've seen too.

That's the highest compliment I could hope for, thank you!

EDIT: You're totally right about the matte paintings. Beautiful work with a lot of depth that doesn't really show in the low contrast video releases. Here's mine:

Yep.

Well this is interesting. Switching between yours and mine, it looks like they used some power windows on the UHD grade and made the bottom/bottom right brighter, which actually might be part of what makes it look more real too. Gee, all this tinkering!

[Dek Rollins]

I'm not sure what the batsignal is supposed to look like since I haven't ever found 35mm sources of either shot. But I would imagine there's supposed to be some color in it, as even the UHD has it glow in bright cyan. Here's a comparison of the shot in different releases (with the 1080p remastered version taking the place of the UHD, though the UHD is less bright):
http://www.framecompare.com/image-compar...n/DWLDPNNX

So I couldn't say which is most correct, but my hunch told me to leave my correction where it is there. Either way we'll have to wait for a scan of a print to happen to see all the little idiosyncrasies.

[deleted user]

I was thinking about applying this same LUT without any further changes to the Batman Returns UHD and see what comes out of it. Would anyone like the idea of such an attempt/project?

[LucasGodzilla]

I was thinking about applying this same LUT without any further changes to the Batman Returns UHD and see what comes out of it. Would anyone like the idea of such an attempt/project?

I mean, I did something similar to Hellraiser 2 back when I regraded the first film just to see what would happen. Admittedly, I am curious to see screenshots of what that regrade would look like but it's certainly up to you whether or not you'd want to release that sort of experiment though.

[deleted user]

Ah yes I remember that was your plan.

Well, let's see, I took a small encode of the UHD and applied it to that (the compression shouldn't affect colors too much I think) and this is what I got:



What do you guys think?

[captainsolo]

Returns has the particular issue of the cold blues going into teal land. That's its main problems as otherwise it doesn't suffer from the issues of 89. So while the above shots do show some improvement I think you'd have to start from scratch to combat that particular issue.