[versions] DRACULA (1958) a.k.a. HORROR OF DRACULA

[The Aluminum Falcon]

Yay! Glad to hear. Good to know that the Amazon rip is indeed pretty good. I have to say that Encode 3 (the latest German BD) looks a lot worse in motion because the noise reduction results in weird grain fields.

[pipefan413]

Yay! Glad to hear. Good to know that the Amazon rip is indeed pretty good. I have to say that Encode 3 (the latest German BD) looks a lot worse in motion because the noise reduction results in weird grain fields.

Yup. It's quite noticeable, especially when you see what it looked like before.

[pipefan413]

SUMMARY OF HD RELEASES TO DATE

Revisiting the comparisons for a number of reasons, one of which I'll get to at the end of this (long) post. What follows is a summary of sorts to serve as a quick reference for the differences between the versions.

My start point is 24 frames before the start of the Universal logo on the 2007 UK master, i.e. 24 frames of black, then the Universal logo. All frame numbers are based on that and are counted from 0 rather than 1 (because that's how digital systems usually count and it keeps it simple for scripting and so on).

2002 US MASTER (Warner Bros., IP scan)

These are all based on a scan of a newly-struck interpositive Warner made from the negative materials for the 2002 DVD releases. They actually feature too much detail in places compared to actual theatrical prints, but conversely are rather soft and bland overall. There's also the signature magenta bias of most early DVD masters that were created on and for CRT screens.

1. 2016 DE Studio Hamburg Blu-ray Disc is 25 fps
   
2. 2019 DE Studio Hamburg Blu-ray Disc is 24/1.001 fps ("23.976 fps" if you're rounding up)
   
3. US Amazon Prime Video stream is 24/1.001 fps
   

These all have different downsides. The 2016 transfer being PAL (25 fps and composed of separate, interlaced fields) is obviously a pain, but when you consider that this is easily remedied and compare it against the 2019 release from the same distributor, the old PAL version has less DNR so becomes rather more appealing than one might think on initial inspection. It's not a very high bitrate encode though, with the H.264 stream weighing in at only 11.3 GiB. The US Prime Video encodes are actually surprisingly solid, though obviously being streaming copies, they aren't going to be as high bitrate as even the fairly low bitrate German disc. For an idea of how the different encodes of the old master compare, see this post.

2007 UK MASTER (British Film Institute, OCN scan)

These are all based on a restoration done by the BFI for a 2007 UK theatrical re-release, which was created from a scan of original negative materials provided by Warner Bros. in the US. They are the only releases without the additional footage from the Japanese cut that feature the original UK title of Dracula in the opening title sequence, as well as the Universal logos at the start and end of the film that are absent from US prints and the US IP-based master, but are otherwise the same editorially as the US theatrical cut (in other words, they do not follow the BBFC's censorship).

Unfortunately, this being an otherwise excellent scan is somewhat marred by the fact that the colour grading is often aggressively wrong and the cropping may also be incorrect as well. The attempt to recreate the UK title sequence isn't great either, which I'll address separately in a moment.

1. 2013 GB Lionsgate Blu-ray Disc is 24 fps and has 5 missing frames (72172-72174, 97512, 110693)
   
2. 2017 DE Anolis Blu-ray Disc is 24 fps and has 3 missing frames (72172-72174)
   
3. 2018 US Warner Blu-ray Disc is 24 fps and has 3 missing frames (72172-72174)
   

The GB and DE releases are more or less the same except that the DE one is missing 2 fewer frames and has an extra 24 frames of black at the start. The 3 remaining frames that are missing in all versions of the 2007 BFI master have been lost due to either Warner or the BFI inaccurately recreating a dissolve from the negative elements, for some reason (could be deliberate re-timing for better sync or something like that, but probably just a mistake).

The 2018 Warner Archive version is unique in that it features Warner's attempt to "fix" the rather dodgy BFI colour grading, but they messed this up quite badly in some ways. Often things are balanced when they actually shouldn't have been, and many things have changed colour that shouldn't have (e.g. green walls are turned blue when they were actually correctly graded as green in the BFI version). Warner also messed up the levels (confusion over limited vs full RGB range) which means that both the highlights and shadows are badly clipped, reducing detail at both ends of the dynamic range. As a minor point, the Warner version also removes a static credits panel from the end, which contains logos for the BFI, UK Film Council ("Lottery Funded"), and Midnight Transfer on the UK and German releases. When I took a brief look at the audio for all the releases a while back, I concluded that the Warner Archive release appeared to have the best sonic profile as well, but I would like to do a more in-depth analysis, which I'll try to do soon. So many things I want to do, so little time...

RESTORING THE LOST UK TITLE SEQUENCE

One of the frustrations of the way this film has been released over the years is that it was never released - since 1958 - with the original UK title sequence intact. The film is owned by Warner these days as far as I can see; they hold the negatives in their archives in the US, and apparently they had no idea where the original element for the original UK title (Dracula) was. So for years, we've been getting the film - even in the UK - with the US title, Horror of Dracula, at the start. (The decision to retitle it almost certainly had to do with audiences in the US already being familiar with Bela Lugosi as Dracula because of Universal's black and white adaptation at the start of the 30s.) Warner only located the original title element after being urged to do so by the British Film Institute when they were creating a new restoration for a theatrical re-release in 2007.

It appears, however, that the Dracula title sequence has been recreated by the BFI by reconstituting the existing US title sequence that Warner had already put together for their DVD transfer in 2002. There are a few different signs of this.

• The colour of the UK title is drastically different from the bold red of all the other text surrounding it; it's very dark, really approaching a burgundy rather than primary red. That suggests that it's been dropped in from a separate source with different - possibly more faded - colours.
  
• There are some marks on the BFI's UK title sequence that exactly match marks on the US one; little flecks of dirt/dust/damage that are identical, frame-for-frame, in both. It is entirely possible these are all on the negative, of course, but I reckon that the negatives wouldn't have had the titles on them at all, and they'd need to be recreated from a contemporary source like an assembly/IP print or something like that.
  
• One of the things that I do respect about the BFI restoration (despite all its problems) is that this title sequence actually has more correct colours than Warner's own US restorations do. Both the early 90s LaserDiscs (US and JP) from Warner, which are clearly scanned from a print, have all the stonework looking very decidedly red and coppery, which Warner has completely neutralised in the 2002 DVD restoration despite all the text being a bold red (the stonework now being a cool grey instead, which is wrong). But the problem here is that you can tell that the BFI wasn't working from a source that had the stone in the red colour; there are a bunch of dodgy chroma artefacts all over the BFI's version of the title sequence that appear to be the result of them trying desperately to regrade the red colour back into all the stone, but they're evidently working on top of Warner's grading, because it's destroyed all the balance of the other colours. The sky, quite blue in Warner's grade, is noticeably red-tinted in the BFI sequence. The text is no longer quite as garish a bold red colour as it is in the Warner title sequence, having been turned somewhat darker toward brown (though not as badly as the "Dracula" title text has been). When the blood drips onto the crypt at the end of the sequence, you can see a whole bunch of unpleasant red haloing around the blood, a horrid pinkish haze that extends beyond where it's evidently supposed to be; they've turned some of the greyish part of the stone pinkish in the upper mids/highlights.
  
• While the majority of the BFI restoration is opened up to reveal more image on the top and bottom (being frame as 1.66:1) compared to the Warner restoration, the sides have been chopped off in the title sequence instead, resulting in the desired 1.66:1 ratio by subtraction rather than addition of picture information. (This is questionable for another reason as well: I actually think it's more likely that the right theatrical ratio for this was probably 1.75:1 anyway.)
  

Given all of the above, I believe that what's happened is as follows, roughly.

Since the BFI restoration in 2007 was being constructed from scans of the original negative materials, and those negative materials would not have had the fully composed titles on the background image, they (or Warner) opted to save time/effort/money (eeny, meeny, miney...) by just taking the exact same version of the title sequence that Warner had already created in 2002 for the DVD, which had the US title - Horror of Dracula - and the incorrect, blue sky and grey stone colour grading. Upon seeing one or more reference prints (either the Warner IP and/or a 16 mm print they found in the BFI archives), the BFI quite correctly noticed that the colour grading of the title sequence was actually wrong, and the stone was meant to look red instead of grey, so they made an attempt to fix it. Unfortunately, this knocked the colours off on the whole sequence, darkening the picture somewhat (so the sky is nowhere near as bright as it was, and the text is somewhat less saturated) and causing chroma bleed in the red channel, which now leaks into some bits of the highlights where it wasn't supposed to.

To restore the Dracula title, they found a 16 mm print in the BFI archive bearing that title to confirm how it looked on the print (all the way to the edge of the print including edge codes and all that presumably), took a screen capture of one of the frames from it, and sent it to Warner in the US. Warner then searched for and, allegedly, found the original element bearing the UK title. This presumably just being the text and not the background, the BFI composited it into a loop of the background (possibly from the very start of the sequence before the text appears) and recreated the dissolve on either side so that it fit into the sequence, adding a tracker to the middle of the text so that it matched the gate weave of the background. I'm not sure if they only had a plate / single frame of the text or if it was a series of frames of the same thing, but if the former, then they've done something over the top of it to vary it from frame to frame so it doesn't look so obviously duplicated, which works fairly well. But as mentioned above, the colour isn't quite matched: the title looks a lot less saturated/bright than the surrounding text, which is fairly weird when you see it in context.

I don't have any illusions about being able to do a better job than the BFI but I think I am going to at least try to see if I can learn something here, even if the results aren't ideal. If I can get it looking even a wee bit better than it does in the BFI restoration, I'll be happy as Larry.

As the primary source, I'll most likely use the 2016 25 fps German Blu-ray, being potentially the highest quality encode of the old master (imperfect though it is). This will need to be fairly aggressively regraded while trying to keep the text in check, so I'm probably going to have to use power windows for this, which is a first for me. Combining power windows with the qualifier, though, it should be possible, it'll just be incredibly laborious (and not overly straightforward for someone who's never tried this sort of thing before). I'll loop some frames from the start to use as background for the title, which I'll have to isolate from the BFI restoration, and composite that on top after colour correcting it separately to restore more of a bold red to better match the rest of the text in the sequence.

[pipefan413]

Quick runthrough of re-grading the US title sequence in preparation for attempting to composite the UK title into it. Needs a lot of work, you can see for example that blowing it out as much as this has clipped some of the bright edges of text. But blowing it out like this doesn't just match the print better, it also helps mask some of the horrible amount of video noise from the low-bitrate source, which is mostly in the sky and becomes basically invisible after compressing the crap out of the highlights.

Inside the crypt is a lot closer to start with so that's only been fairly subtly changed here; it's mostly just a bit of green plus taming the blown-out red highlights causing that pinkish haze around the blood. That was partly helped by expanding the highlights, got a little bit more control that way.

EDIT: By the way, if you're wondering why I'm grading the external scene so warm, here's the LaserDisc (from a print scan)...

Anyway, here goes: