[Released] HALLOWEEN: Evil Waits (2013 regrade with new prologue and original mono audio)

[pipefan413]

HALLOWEEN: EVIL WAITS

a pipefan413 preservation

This is mostly Halloween as we know it, but with a few tweaks:

1. The original mono audio has been reinstated (in lossless 16-bit PCM) and the TV audio has been level boosted by approximately 5dB so that it is no longer significantly quieter than the rest of the film.

2. I have added a new prologue consisting of a re-edited presentation of one of the scenes shot for the 1980 TV cut. As well as cutting some shots and rearranging others, I regraded the colour to somewhat more closely approximate the DP-approved "35th Anniversary Edition", since that was my source for the rest of the footage.

3. 10 frames have been trimmed from the start of the opening titles so that the timing of the main theme kicking in after the new prologue is more satisfying (you can almost count the theme in with a bar of 5/4 at the right tempo).

4. The whole thing has been re-encoded down ever so slightly to a video bitrate of around 35Mbps so that it'll fit onto a 25GB Blu-ray disc with a little room left for a menu and potentially a bonus video or two if you like. The direct rip of the unedited film was 36.2Mbps and slightly too big at 25.5GB, but this release is around 22.9GB. I have attempted to ensure that it's disc-compatible, but I don't reckon I want it on disc myself so burn at your own discretion (you might want to inspect the file closely before authoring).


I did this after re-watching Croweyes1121's Halloween: Revised Extended Edition, which adds the 1980 TV scenes to spoRv's THX-esque regraded release (Fundamental Collection #006). Whilst I love that release as an alternative way to watch the film, I find the TV scenes to be distractingly mismatched with everything else, and they mess with the flow of the edit significantly. However, one scene between Loomis and young Michael in Smith's Grove stood out to me in a good way. I do not feel that it sits well where it was placed for the extended TV cut, but I thought it might work as a brief prologue to the original theatrical cut. That's exactly what I've done with this edit.

NOTE: The regrade of the TV footage is by no means "accurate" in any way, since it uses no direct reference and was not intended to reproduce an existing version of this footage. It's definitely heavy on the blue. This is primarily because I'm new to colour grading but wanted this out by Halloween, so I just did a very simple curve adjustment to cut the red channel fairly heavily and the green channel slightly, as opposed to learning and implementing a more sophisticated technique. It does nonetheless look better to me overall than it did on the special features of the 35th Anniversary Blu-ray Disc, or in Croweyes1121's regrade (which was targeted toward the THX colours to match Fundamental Collection #006) and if I do get better at this stuff and manage to get my hands on a better source e.g. the bonus disc from the 2014 US Complete Collection, I might take another run at this. For now, it does what I want it to do and I figure it might be of interest to somebody out there. Here's a quick example of what it looked like in the source I had vs how it looks in my first release: http://www.framecompare.com/screenshotco...n/J0EMMNNU

In terms of availability, it's currently on the 'Spleen and will be made available elsewhere if anybody feels like inviting me to another suitable tracker that's still taking on new members.

Enjoy!

[iguanaclerk]

This looks cool, and I think probably the best way to integrate the tv material into the film. I'm definitely grabbing it from the spleen. I think the original cut of the film is obliviously the most effective, but I've always thought that doing something like this prologue and then appending a heavily cut version of Halloween II (mostly the Laurie and Michael hospital scenes) would be an interesting watch.

(By the way, you mention in your post that the bluray's colors match a 35mm print you saw better than the THX dvd and spoRv's regrade based on it. That is correct. The bluray is intended to be faithful to the original material, while the DVD was an experiment by Cundey to digitally regrade the material to make it look more like fall, which they couldn't do originally on such a low budget)

[PDB]

Agreed, I going to give it a download also. Congrats on finishing the project pipefan

[pipefan413]

Thanks guys, I appreciate it.

If anybody's remotely interested, I figured I'd add a quick bit about the colour grading of the TV footage, including a preview so you can see what I managed to achieve in a hurry...

I have the official 35th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray Disc steelbook as released here in the UK, but the TV scenes on that are interlaced 1080i which made them pretty useless to me. Deinterlacing is a pretty horrible thing to my eyes and I had to render this footage beside theatrical stuff which was obviously at 1080p. Being in the UK, I don't realistically have access to the better source, which is the US "Complete Collection" limited edition box set from Anchor Bay / Starz and Scream Factory containing all the films in the series up to Rob Zombie's Halloween II as well as a bonus disc which includes the extended version of the original Halloween (consisting of the theatrical footage intercut with the TV scenes) in 1080p.

Because I can't get my hands on the US bonus disc, the only 1080p source for the TV scenes that's available to me at the moment is Croweyes1121 "Revised Extended Edition" which - unfortunately for me - looks like it's been regraded to approximate the revisionist (though admittedly quite pleasing at times) 1999 THX colour grade, since it used spoRv's Fundamental Collection release as its source for the theatrical scenes. As such, everything was rather orange; Loomis was already pretty orange in the source to begin with, so in the Croweyes1121 version he looks like he's just come from the tanning salon. The only way I could deal with this fast was to adjust the curves to cut red and a little green such that the white balance of the walls etc. is now skewed somewhat inappropriately toward blue in some shots, though not in others because the colour balance is all over the place from shot to shot and I didn't really have the time to be sitting going over each individual shot and adjusting curves and trying to match each scene to the same kind of palette by eye. Ideally, I'd like to figure out a way to keep the walls balanced while fixing the skin tones (moving them closer to the fairly desaturated magenta seen in the 35th Anniversary Edition and further from the saturated orange seen in all the TV sources I've seen).

In any case, here's an idea of what it looked like in the Croweyes1121 source vs how it looks in my first release: http://www.framecompare.com/screenshotco...n/J0EMMNNU

[pipefan413]

Decided to split each individual shot so I could regrade one shot at a time. Actually ended up re-linking some of them with shared nodes since they have the same lighting etc. but they had to be grouped quite specifically and some done on their own.

This is very much a work in progress in terms of the shot by shot regrade; it's not different enough to merit a reupload until I've spent more time tweaking and am sure it's a significant improvement over what's already been released (which was a shared adjustment for the whole scene). However, here's a rough idea of what it currently looks like. There's still quite a lot of green but you can see how much red I'm fighting off. I'm not using LUTs or anything yet, this is just very simple adjustments using curves and not a lot else.

There are things I'm not happy with, such as the fact that Loomis' skin tone is completely different in the shot of him walking down the corridor (it's very pink in both versions, but he's a lot closer to orange once he enters the room); I'm not yet sure how to fix that. I could be wrong, but I think it actually might be that he's wearing heavy makeup in the room for some reason, unless I'm reading too much into it. Some of it is easier to see up close e.g. in the shot of Michael, the light coming in the window and the highlight on the square panel on the wall are both very much pink but in my corrected version of the same shot the left wall is noticeably green... and so on and so forth.





If you've done this kind of thing before, any feedback would be valuable as I work out how the heck all of this works. For now, I reckon it's getting slightly better as I tune it but it's not yet massively different from my initial release.

[pipefan413]

OK so I managed to get hold of the source I wanted, being the bonus disc from the US exclusive, limited edition 15-disc version of the Complete Collection Blu-ray box set. And I'm rather alarmed to find that it seems Croweyes1121 didn't regrade it at all... I think the colours are identical between this source and Revised Extended Version. In other words, my supposition that Croweyes1121 had regraded the TV footage to approximately match the Fundamental Collection footage appears to be incorrect.

This is a bit of a disappointment because I was hoping that locating this source would make regrading to match the 35th Anniversary colours  a bit easier, when in fact it looks like it's exactly the same. It would be a rather large pain in the arse to replace all the frames in the project I already have with the source ones, because of all the reordering etc. I already did previously, and the only reason to do so would be to remove one re-encode from the generational chain (I was using Revised Extended Version which was re-encoded from the source I now have, whereas I can now re-encode directly from that source). I'm not sure if I might as well just keep things under the existing project file for simplicity and continue to work on the shot by shot regrading but the perfectionist in me wants to replace everything...

EDIT: Yeah, scratch that, I've just noticed that the Croweyes1121 footage is also ever so slightly cropped in (and this source is already cropped tighter than the standard definition 480i footage on the 35th Anniversary disc). I'm going to replace every frame in the project with this source from scratch and then split up the shots and regrade shot by shot again from there. Deary me. I'm glad I got the initial release out when I did, because this is going to take much longer than I realised!

The whole reason I'd been trying to get this 1080p source in the first place was that I'd assumed it would be graded identically or at least more similarly to the 480i source I already had, and that the reason Revised Extended Version was warmer was that it had been regraded by Croweyes1121 to look more like the 1999 THX colours (or rather, Fundamental Collection #006, which in turn aims to match the THX colours). Since that isn't the case, I'm now wondering if I can instead use the 480i source as a colour reference to regrade the 1080p source from instead. Of course, I have absolutely no idea how to do that. Is this what LUTs are for? Any help would be much appreciated here...

Here's a comparison between the 480i source, the 1080p source, and the Revised Extended Version to show the differences in both framing and colour grading: http://www.framecompare.com/image-compar...n/J0M1FNNU. As you can see, the colour is most suitable in the 480i source but it's squished presumably due to inaccurate framing of the source for 480, whereas the colours in the other two are worse; the 1080p source has more image on the sides, but Revised has been intentionally reframed for consistency with the theatrical footage.

[eldiablosuizo]

Very interested in this. I just recently purchased the Limited Edition myself and am absolutely craving an extended edition that attempts to upscale the deleted TV footage. Certainly not a request, just a comment of support!

[pipefan413]

Very interested in this. I just recently purchased the Limited Edition myself and am absolutely craving an extended edition that attempts to upscale the deleted TV footage. Certainly not a request, just a comment of support!

That isn't exactly what I did here: I was very "green", as it were, so I just took already deinterlaced 1080p TV footage, colour graded it, re-edited the shots how I wanted them, and plonked them at the start of the film without touching anything else. Audio-wise, I would definitely do something more sophisticated now too, as I have an actual LaserDisc copy of the original mono myself now (for the TV audio I'd go back to the source clip and check whether it's mono or stereo at source, and match it better to the rest of the audio in terms of levels etc. as well). I'm rather obsessed with reducing generational degradation, so things like re-encoding video that's already been re-encoded once or more, and editing already edited audio, are things I'd avoid if I revisited this. And it is very likely that I might.

Nonetheless, thanks!

[franzkfk]

Hi, I would love to help fund the project.

[pipefan413]

Well, god damn it. Being non-American, I missed this in Halloween '21. Another release, another regrade: https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?a=1&x=560...0&i=5&go=1

This looks less desatured than the 2013 "35th Anniversary Edition" previously put out by Starz/Shout separately in the US and in the US Complete Collection (which is different from the "35th Anniversary Edition" transfer released elsewhere, e.g. the UK). It also has less of a yellow/green inclination, with a bit more reddish/pinkish hues, which makes skin tones look more natural (though possibly a bit less like a theatrical print).

There's a geometry change too. Either this one is stretched out horizontally, the previous one was stretched out vertically, or some combination of the two. I suppose somebody made a booboo when doing the anamorphic lens correction.

And of course it's not out here, so I would have to import it. *shakes fist at the sky*