The Simpsons Movie - BD Color Correction

[SCS_Shoug]

The Simpsons Movie has always been a weird-looking movie to me because of its strange yellow/green tint that I, and many others, assumed was just an intentional choice to make the movie appear more cinematic. However, with hindsight and knowledge of other home releases with similar tints, I've come to realize that the original home video master was actually just botched. It's a movie from early in the era of digital cinema, only 2 years after DCI was standardized, meaning it was almost certainly completed in DCI-P3, so what seems to have happened is they simply forgot to adjust the white point when bringing it into the realm of Rec.709, leading to the pervasive green tint. Thankfully, because of reference material like the theatrical trailers and a few 35mm scans, it's pretty easy to come to the conclusion that the movie was meant to have a much more neutral tone than the warmer yellow-green tones of its home releases. Thankfully, aside from the base white point error, the movie is graded pretty consistently so doing a white point conversion and white balance to neutralize the whole movie without affecting other intentional tones in things like the night scenes was quite easy.

Sourced from the Blu-ray, and other than colors was left untouched before encoding, so I unfortunately couldn't reduce the BD's sharpening artifacts.



Screencap comparisons:
https://slow.pics/c/z7xXvZN6

[dvdmike]

The BD is terrible this is a good idea

[SCS_Shoug]

The BD is terrible this is a good idea

I wish I could've reduced the BD's other problems like the sharpening but that's out of the scope of my skillset. I did also fix up the framing cause it's pretty wonky on the BD, has a tiny sliver of black on the left side and isn't perfectly vertically centered either. Didn't crop anything remotely substantial out, maybe just a single line in one direction and that's it.

[FreaQ]

Does it have the tint on D+?

[SCS_Shoug]

Does it have the tint on D+?

Yes, as it's just the same master as the old Blu-ray.

[Sambarker04]

It sucks that this is what we got. Though, to be fair, the film would look even better if we got a 35mm preservation of the movie (though there was a telecine bootleg already existing) or even better, if someone actually still had the old DCP and KDM that we could use. I think the sharpening was just a norm for DVD transfers of late-2000s films, but I didn't expect the same thing to happen on Blu-ray.

Also, since the second movie is on its way, and given that Disney has been doing 4K remasters of films to tie in with their sequels or remakes, I do wonder what the upcoming possible 4K remaster of this film would be like? Hopefully, the colours would be close to this preservation and there wouldn't be any sharpening.