[Released] "Heat" theatrical cut regraded

[izzybell]

the Japanese Blu-Ray TBEH doesn't sound that much better than the US Blu-Ray mixes, it also doesn't have the missing lines at all.

[EvilJames]

As @alleycat mentionned in the Shoutbox, the Prince Charles in London will show Heat on 35mm film 5 times from now to mid-december. Londonian members, it's a can't-miss. It's your only chance to actually experience the real Heat. Go and report back to tell me how close I made it here. My 35mm experience was in 2015, so it's not as fresh a memory as it used to be.

Many other very cool 35 and 70mm events there:  https://princecharlescinema.com/seasons-events/3570mm/

I’m probably too much of a newbie to get the link to this, but having seen a 35mm screening at the Prince Charles last Monday, I can definitely confirm the more vivid colour palette as shown in the screengrabs above was present and correct there too. I watched the film hundreds of times on VHS and DVD as a teenager so have the cooler, more neutral and desaturated look baked into my brain - the 35mm (my first viewing in well over a decade) was like seeing a totally different film. Golden skin stones, green and teal fluorescents, saturated primaries… I can’t imagine watching the film any other way now. Why Mann would make the choices he’s made since simply baffles me.

[WKWGL]

I never realized Heat was this colorful on release. This version looks gorgeous.

[knucks]

Wow, very nice!

[dvdmike]

And still managed to be a terrible remix

What's wrong with the Blu-ray mix?

Filtered and normalised to death

[BobbyMishima]

And here comes the theatrical cut. For more information, see here: https://fanrestore.com/thread-6390.html



... with a trailer I recreated for the occasion, or at least a look-alike with some liberties I had to take:



Video: 2009 Warner Blu-ray plus one shot taken from the UHD and another upscaled from the DVD by @alleycat, the whole thing regraded to emulate the look of an original 35mm film print from 1995.
Audio: English PCM 2.0 (Laserdisc), English Dolby 5.1 (Laserdisc), English Dolby 5.1 (DVD), French Dolby 5.1 (DVD), German Dolby 5.1 (DVD), Italian Dolby 5.1 (DVD), Italian dts 5.1 (DVD) from @alleycat's project.
Subtitles: French (rearranged), English. I don't deal with proofreading OCR in other languages, so those interested in them will have to do their thing on their own.








Available on demand to regular members, meaning no newbies who need to get involved before asking for stuff.

I just sent you a private message

[Virtualcrane]

I've heard some people say that archival prints of Heat look like the UHD. Is there any credence to that?

[LucasGodzilla]

I've heard some people say that archival prints of Heat look like the UHD. Is there any credence to that?

I've heard that the UHD is closer by coincidence (since, by comparison, you have an old magenta master which is even further from the mark), but from what I understand, original prints were generally more vivid with its teals and yellows.

If anything, some of the "changes" made to the newer master compared to the older one actually bring it closer to the original photochemical timing. A lot of the daytime scenes were originally very warm in appearance and I remember posting scans of an archival print (that I studied and scanned myself) demonstrating this around the time the remastered Blu-ray came out. The old Blu-ray largely kept those originally warm-looking scenes cool and muted (it looks that way for most of the runtime), while some of those scenes were kept warm on the latest master which brought it more in-line with the original photochemical timing.

Even by Michael Mann's own account, unlike Thief, the UHD is its own digital grade rather than a recreation of its original theatrical look.

When it came to remastering the film for the Blu-ray, were there specific sequences you focused on?

Yeah, the whole film! When you go into Blu-ray, and you go to 4K, you're in a different color space. Meaning that what was magenta doesn't translate exactly. There's no logarithm you could use to make "magenta" still stay magenta, with that exact color. So you have to imagine everything, from contrast, to how black blacks are, to what the color palette is. The ambition here was: If I was shooting the film two or three years ago, what would it look like? That was really it. So we went into every shot.

Your style in your more recent films has evolved from when you made Heat. Did that affect how you looked at this film?

Let me put this rather precisely. When you see an emotion on a human's face, how much of the face do you see? What constitutes fear? What constitutes apprehension? What constitutes suspicion?

Yes, I evolved, but also, audience perception evolves, and media evolves, year to year. If I shot this film two or three years ago, this particular film would be less chromatic. And the sense of tension would become more pronounced with greater contrast and kind of a more blue-black palette, than the film as I wanted it to be when I shot it in '94-'95.

Are there any moments in particular that bring up what you're talking about, that as you're working with the 4K, any sequence in the film that you think is seen anew on this definitive edition?

The one that comes to mind is when Hanna is chasing Neil McCauley at the end of the film past the airport. All that is a lot darker. Primary reds are stripped out. The reflections in the metal—everything is substantially darker, if I showed you the before and after. They're big steps, they're not subtleties.

[Beber]

The thing is the "remaster", as they call it, and I'm pretty sure there never was a new scan ever since the DVD era, has a few scenes that look closer to the original grading than the DVD and the 2009 Blu-ray as is. Closer but still in a dull way nonetheless. But once you tweak the saturation on the 2009 Blu-ray, you pretty much recover the original grading on the whole movie. And that doesn’t work with the "remaster" since they intervened scene by scene in between. It’s one of the reasons I based my project on the 2009 Blu-ray. To me, the "remaster" is nothing more than a scene by scene regrade of the same old master that they zoomed in, cut the Warner opening logo out and encoded better from 2009 VC1 standards to 2017 AVC standards, and the subsequent HEVC standards for the UHD. Nobody will ever convince me a new scan was made when 2 shots still present the same flaw ever since the DVD, maybe even the VHS/LD era, flaws that are not on the original prints. And they know about those 2 shots since they tweaked them with the grading to minimise their flaws. You don’t do that when you scan the original elements. Let’s say the IP was damaged in the late 90s after the original release. Then use another source element to scan those 2 shots, the ONeg for instance. Or the other way around: the ONeg is damaged? Then replace those 2 shots with a new scan of the IP. When you read the blu-ray.com review of the 2017 Fox "remastered" Blu-ray, they even mention the source of said remaster is unknown as the press packet doesn’t mention it. Hmm... that’s suspicious. Usually they make a point that the ONeg was used so we know we'll get the best definition possible, but in this case, nothing. Their marketing "value" they were willing to communicate about was Mann’s involvement to supervise the thing so that the usual herd of sheeps will try and silence those who complain when seeing the result.