[Help] The Keep (Michael Mann, 1983) – 35mm Scan

[H A S S A N]

Is there 2 versions of this?
I was blessed to be given a Grindhouse version earlier so is the final version complete?

[LucasGodzilla]

Is there 2 versions of this?
I was blessed to be given a Grindhouse version earlier so is the final version complete?

It's still in the works. In fact, recently thanks to @TomArrow, I was able to improve the scan's colors a little bit, so the reds aren't as pushed, so some shots don't look as magenta as before. Furtherly, I think I've done a re-do of the grade and was able to come up with a seemingly working reel-to-reel color grade approach. So now the movie seems to look more consistent with a photochemical steel blue color scheme, though nowhere Cameron-esque (if anyone's expecting that from my description) and still is weirdly inconsistent shot-to-shot...

But hey, at least Reel 3 doesn't vaguely look piss-tinted anymore.

As for clean-up though, I've lost steam and haven't been able to do anything the past some months due to IRL stuff consuming all of my spare time. That being said, I hope to render out a new version of the movie someday in the future and run it through Phoenix to do an auto-clean-up and sharpen pass. It'll probably still be a while though since I want to see if I can do some further color grade tests when I get a chance since I don't want to re-render this movie over and over again.

[HippieDalek]

As for clean-up though, I've lost steam and haven't been able to do anything the past some months due to IRL stuff consuming all of my spare time.

I know how that feels, it's a huge task! There's no hurry to get it done though, most of us are just happy in the knowledge that the film has been preserved and is being looked after. Just remember that even in it's unrestored form fans now have access to this film in better quality than they ever had before, and it's all thanks to you!

Keep up the amazing work, but don't drive yourself crazy over it

[pipefan413]

But hey, at least Reel 3 doesn't vaguely look piss-tinted anymore.

Is piss-tinting what happens when cinematographers get bored of bleach bypass and want to try something even more creative?

[LucasGodzilla]

But hey, at least Reel 3 doesn't vaguely look piss-tinted anymore.

Is piss-tinting what happens when cinematographers get bored of bleach bypass and want to try something even more creative?

I think it's either a result of a reel discoloring / yellowing over time or some photochemical error when the print was struck.

I remember that in the past, someone described this similar issue with a 70mm screening of The Abyss so I doubt the yellow veil is intended color timing.

[zoidberg]

Without a screening of the print for reference it's just guessing really, I don't think the LUT is 100% accurate

[LucasGodzilla]

Without a screening of the print for reference it's just guessing really, I don't think the LUT is 100% accurate

Yeah, that is true. It's why I tried doing that sort of universal grade for the Open-Matte Grindhouse release but it led to it looking really strange in some places, and I think I made it look too green and used an old scan RGB channel adjustment process which has been superseded.

For the record btw, no LUTs are involved. What I ended up doing this time (out of using the new scan color adjustment) is essentially doing a reel-by-reel white balance using little spots (that are cropped out on the open-matte) on the side of the reel that have consistently stayed the same color throughout. I just made an averaged out value from them per reel, set that as the white-point, and then adjusted the gain to a certain number so that the brightness stays consistent throughout the whole scan. With these grade changes done, I skimmed through it all, and, again, suddenly the movie feels like it has a somewhat consistent color tone. I also checked it against the few bits of white text I have in the movies and they all seemed okay.

I do plan on doing some more testing with some RAW DNG files for Big Trouble In Little China sometime in the future to be sure this process works since I have yet to test how it looks with the colors from a different movie.

Although I dearly wish I could see how the movie looked when it was projected back in the day when it came fresh from a lab, let alone a print of the movie projected in general, that opportunity won't likely come for me for a while. So until that day comes (or the day another print shows up that can be scanned for cheap), this is the best we got to determine the intended color timing.

[nullcasa]

I have been looking for a way to do this for a decade, I'd love to get in on this! Happy to contribute.I'd private message but my account is too new

[LucasGodzilla]

Happy New Year Everyone!

Introducing a newer rendering of The Keep (encoded in H265) with a new color grade and an auto-clean pass with... mixed effect.

Okay here's the brunt of it, the render has some issues that need addressing, which is why I labeled this as version 1.5 rather than 2.0 since I hope to do a follow-up render sometime in the future to fix things.

So, what exactly went wrong? Well, a couple of relatively minor issues. Occasionally—for some god forsaken reason—Resolve apparently didn't render out certain frames right, causing occasionally weird frames like this or ones that are outright replaced with an error.

Furtherly, the auto-cleaner made some mistakes every now and then, creating strange and noticeable artifacting every now and then.

Now, why am I releasing it like this? Well, two reasons.

The first reason was the rendering and encoding this to H265 took an entire week to do, and if I were to re-render the project to fix the glitches from the preceding half of this post, it would've also taken another week to do and I would've missed this holiday deadline.

Second reason is because I wanted to be able to have extra eyes in catching these auto-cleaning mistakes so I can fix these in a second release that I hope I can put out as soon as I can. So please, do send me / post screenshots or something of times such errors are found to make things easier for me to fix.

So for those of you donors who are interested in checking it out, send me a PM.

[Kynch]

Thanks a lot for the update, Lucas! Is there any way to reduce the likely hood of errors in rendering? Any logs that could help pinpoint the root cause?

I will probably wait until v2.0 since I have never seen the film and hope to discover it in the best of conditions. Take your time!