[versions] Dances with Wolves (1990)

[Chewtobacca]

Dances with Wolves seems to have two main color-timings: a neutral look that is on the cool side in certain shots and prairie-grass that is somewhat reddish, and a golden look that's quite distinctive.  The theatrical cut tends to come with the latter, and the extended edition, the former, although there are some releases that buck the trend. such as the UK BD of the TC.  LD ID8322OR has the golden look, with the occasional shot that does its own thing.








Neither look seems obviously wrong when watching the film.  The golden look has its charm though.

[spoRv]

I prefer LD color timing... white on BD is toward magenta.

So, is there any BD (or other HD versions) with LD timing?

[LucasGodzilla]

I wonder if perhaps the LD is based on an interpositive or internegative since perhaps it's sort of inherent that the main reason why the blu-ray has a different color grade since it's likely based off of the original camera negatives to reconstruct the theatrical cut and piece together the extended cut. The golden timing does look quite nice and does help push the colonial time period aesthetic judging from the LD screencaps alone.

[Chewtobacca]

^ Yeah, I was wondering the same thing.  Perhaps the negative was rescanned in order to create an HD master that would serve as the basis for the extended edition, but the original grading was not reproduced, leaving a more or less neutral look. If so, the fact that the BDs of the theatrical cut share the neutral look might be explained by postulating that the studios simply conformed the HD master to the theatrical cut and encoded it.

I prefer LD color timing... white on BD is toward magenta.

Agreed.  It's shots like this that make the LD look authentic.



I'm not aware of an HD version with the golden look.  It does indeed suit the film/period.

EDIT: The 1080i HDTV cap from 2006 was the extended edition.

[spoRv]

EDIT:  The 1080i HDTV cap from 2006 was the extended edition.

And has it the LD color grading?

[Bigrob]

Is the LD AR slightly opened up as well?

[Chewtobacca]

And has it the LD color grading?

I don't know, because I don't have it any more, but if my speculations (above) about the extended edition are right, it won't have the LD grading.

The LD perhaps gains on the top and bottom but loses on the sides.

[spoRv]

According to caps-a-holic screenshots, combining BD TC and EC it's possible to gain a whopping 8pixel slice of vertical image!

But in its SD comparison, the Korean DVD has a different color grading, while the other DVDs have the same found on BD - http://sd.caps-a-holic.com/vergleich.php...eichID=407 - it seems different from the LD, though!

[Chewtobacca]

Yeah, the Korean DVD's included in the DVD Beaver comparison as well. It's the same as the other early TC DVDs, which do look a bit different from the LD, but I'd say that they are broadly similar. All the other DVDs on caps-a-holic are the EE, apart from one, which obviously shares the same master as the EE (like the UK BD).

EDIT:
@spoRv
So do you think that syncing the LD video to the UK BD by duplicating frames where the former lacks them would be of use when it comes to color matching?  Alternatively, if you don't care about syncing to an existing BD, we could conform the UK BD to the LD.  The subtitles would obviously have to be dealt with to stop them interfering with an automatic color-matching approach.

[spoRv]

When I use an LD (or other sources) as reference for color matching, I just repeat frame(s) before or after missing frame(s); unless they are completely different (and 99.99% of the times they are not), the color matching will be perfect!

So, in the case the reference has more frames (until now IIRC it happened twice, with just one frame more), I just delete the frame in the reference, instead of duplicating one frame in the HD source; this to preserve the HD audio tracks - as they ofter are lossy, I prefer to cut one audio "frame" from the reference, that usually is PCM (or WAV capture of analog tracks).