Color grading is one of the biggest issues in modern cinema. Not primarily for changing the way older movies look, but it's one of the reasons most modern movies look like shit.
The problem with scanning 35 mm release prints is that there is a degree of variance between them. Especially on big movies there were so many copies of them that studios used different labs and their processes and chemistry slightly affected the outcomes. If we went to 1999 and watched 5 different prints of The Matrix in different theaters, there would be some differences between them. This is one of the reasons lots of DP's and directors like DCP, because it guarantees that the movie looks the same around the world as long as the movie theater has their projector and screen settings done right.
>“The future world is cold, dark and riddled with lightning, so we left the lighting a bit bluer and made it dark as hell. Also, the future reality is very grimy because there's no reason to clean it — only the pods need to be sterile. Because humans haven’t actually manufactured anything for a hundred years, anything that had been manufactured is now old and rusty.
>“We didn't necessarily want the Matrix world to resemble our present world,” adds Pope. "We didn't want any cheery blue skies. In Australia, the sky is a brilliant blue virtually all the time, but we wanted bald, white skies. All of our TransLight backings [for the stage work] were altered to have white skies, and on actual exterior shots in which we see a lot of sky, we digitally enhanced the skies to make them white. Additionally, since we wanted the Matrix reality to be unappealing, we asked ourselves, 'What is the most unappealing color?' I think we all agreed on green, so for those scenes, we sometimes used green filters, and I'd add a little bit of green in the color timing."
The bottom one actually looks more like the original release of the movie. The pink sky release is literally just one out of many releases of this film and it was done by literal whos. The bottom one was done by trying to stay faithful to the original release.
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film5/blu-ray_reviews_72/mirror_blu-ray.htm
The people doing color grading live in smog cities. They haven’t seen what nature looks like. They have degraded cones and rods. Who knows what equipment they use.
Because it's a film made for adults and not children who cannot consent to sex and who are the private property of their parents and who love pretty colors because they don't have free will.
They're not actually entirely burnt, since you can bring the details back. This quick example looks like shit because it's from a compressed .jpg with very little data to work with, but you could do a way better job with the actual video file.
I agree that the highlights in it are way too fricking high. Criterion fricked it up.
>ok, now do that for every frame
You could do the actual work in a few minutes in DaVinci Resolve. Slightly bringing down the highlights is just a few clicks >dont alter the audio portion, and make sure it animates smoothy.
Why would color grading affect those anyway
The pink sky version version was originally released by IVC in Japan in 2014. The same master was later released in Europe by the British Curzon Artificial Eye in 2016.
The bottom one actually looks more like the original release of the movie. The pink sky release is literally just one out of many releases of this film and it was done by literal whos. The bottom one was done by trying to stay faithful to the original release.
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film5/blu-ray_reviews_72/mirror_blu-ray.htm
It's the Curzon Artificial Eye version. Brits PINKED it
11 months ago
Anonymous
It was PINKED by Japs. IVC released the pink sky version a few years before Curzon Artificial Eye.
I thought Artifical Eye was first?
Not according to DVDbeaver or blu-ray.com
11 months ago
Anonymous
DVDbeaver seems to think the pinking comes from an independent source:
>This looks like the same source as the newest Artificial Eye (The Andrei Tarkovsky Collection boxset that never really got released.) Perhaps this is some form of restoration that took place 2011 or before. I'm just guessing. The aspect ratio is about 1.44:1. The 1080P shows more grain and in certain scenes there is depth and detail not seen on SD. Also the colors may be the most noticeable video difference. Brighter, tighter and more layers. Black and white sequences have solid contrast. This new Blu-ray can look softer, but I don't think it is softness - it actually looks more thick and film-like in-motion, to me. I liked the way this looks - superior to the DVDs, but I can't say it will be the definitive.
I think my confusion was the fact there's two Artificial Eye versions - the 2011 version and the 2016 Collector's Edition. Seems like only the second one has been pinked
Newest remaster was done by/with Argento. The DP (who insists he’s the real director of the film) hates that remaster, although that’s more out of principle because he wasn’t consulted, I don’t think he ever saw it.
I saw that remaster projected and I don’t call the blood being particularly pink, but may just be my memory. The blood mostly looked like shit but that’s just typical for European movie blood of the era.
>I saw that remaster projected and I don’t call the blood being particularly pink
Sorry anon I mean IN that remaster it was clearly (quite realistic) red. >Saw the newest remaster in the cinema a few years ago, blood was red.
All the previous versions I'd seen (DVD, Blu-ray, whatever) it was distinctly pink. And the common theory is that horror films got around censorship by intentionally making blood bright pink so it was less realistic. Pretty sure this still happens in some countries and other media: the Mortal Kombat games for example.
If it was just a dodgy special effect that didn't turn out great, fair enough. But this is where the "preservationist" side of my brain argues with the "original intent" side of my brain. I wouldn't want to go see a new remaster of a 1970s film with noise removal, but I also wouldn't want the visual effects UPDATED with BRAND-NEW CGI.
If you go a typical art cinema showing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in 2023, are the titles in Italian? Is everything piss-yellow?
This was a film screening in 2017. Wikipedia says the Italian version doesn't use the Synapse restoration.
Pretty sure it was this:
https://wearecult.rocks/suspiria-like-youve-never-experienced-restored-in-4k
>The new 4K scan was painstakingly restored by TLE Films in Germany with that crucially distinct colour palette reinstated in accordance with Argento’s original Technicolor Dye Transfer specification, using period film materials as reference.
>I saw that remaster projected and I don’t call the blood being particularly pink
Sorry anon I mean IN that remaster it was clearly (quite realistic) red. >Saw the newest remaster in the cinema a few years ago, blood was red.
All the previous versions I'd seen (DVD, Blu-ray, whatever) it was distinctly pink. And the common theory is that horror films got around censorship by intentionally making blood bright pink so it was less realistic. Pretty sure this still happens in some countries and other media: the Mortal Kombat games for example.
If it was just a dodgy special effect that didn't turn out great, fair enough. But this is where the "preservationist" side of my brain argues with the "original intent" side of my brain. I wouldn't want to go see a new remaster of a 1970s film with noise removal, but I also wouldn't want the visual effects UPDATED with BRAND-NEW CGI.
If you go a typical art cinema showing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in 2023, are the titles in Italian? Is everything piss-yellow?
i saw it recently in the cinema with Argento attending and i remember the blood having a really distinct color, leaning into a pinkish color but i'm not 100% sure
I think the restorations they're involved in are usually perfectly good, but it gets weird when they involve the director (which they always do of they're alive and willing) and the director makes a bunch of changes (see: Thief's blue tint). And a lot of the time they just license restorations from other companies, and sometimes those are shit but it's what's available.
I remember an anecdote from some interview with Criterion's head restorationist about Le Cercle Rouge, and how they didn't have a good reference print for their HD remaster so they basically made an estimation based on shitty degraded prints, descriptions of the film from reviews at the time, and the director's other films. Then in the 4k era, Studio Canal did a 4k restoration of the film using a much better preserved print that was found in an archive in the meantime, and the color grading ended up being much warmer than the old criterion version. When the 4k version was released it got shit on in some reviews for being revisionist and deviating from the "original" version, even though the "original" version was a less informed remaster from just a decade ago that didn't represent the film's original look at all.
I think this happens a lot, people make comparisons between a new release and the original, but the supposed original is just some DVD master they happen to be used to, but might be even shittier for all anyone knows.
See also: the splodgy sky regrading they did on Schrader's insistence for Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters
I stuck the earlier DVD as a raw mux on Soulseek, current username there is Rrobynne Mk. II
There's always some gay who remembers exactly how the film looked when they saw it in the theater in 1972, with certainty that the film was in perfect condition.
Sometimes the Criterion one looks better for shots that work better high contrast, but blowing out the exposure on shots of the sky removes some of the dreamlike qualities of the original grading imho
if top is the original: "NOOOO THE SECOND ONE IS TOO WASHED OUT THEY RUINED IT"
if bottom is the original: "NOOOOO THEY ADDED A BLUE FILTER THEY RUINED IT"
How is there still not a centralised website that simply lists the stats for the different releases of a film? E.g. BD20 or BD50 used, audio track format, subs included, scan source, presence of noise removal, whether one release is obviously compressed more than another (obvious cases, like when there's macroblocking present), differences in cuts, screencaps a la caps-a-holic included alongside? Why have I still got to hunt across multiple forums and ancient, non-exhaustive sites like DVDBeaver that don't really give me a qualitative assessment like reviewing the (also incomplete) caps-a-holic in 2023? Still needing to double dip just to compare at this late stage is a world of hassle that wouldn't need to happen if a more centralised community for assessing releases existed.
Just to make specifically you upset.
I’ve seen it on film and it looked like the top IIRC.
Was it an original print from the 70s or a modern print pressed from the digital remaster?
Original. Slight reddish fading, better condition than most 70s prints I’ve seen.
out of these two, which is supposed to be better?
I like the first one.
Color grading is one of the biggest issues in modern cinema. Not primarily for changing the way older movies look, but it's one of the reasons most modern movies look like shit.
colors: corrected
It's called blueray for a reason.
To be fair I think Aragorn on the right looks slightly better, the greens are popping a bit more
to be fair it does like better if lotr takes place inside the matrix
>the matrix
>DVD (2004)
SOVL, DON'T CARE
enough with the reddit meme crap
>Filename
Go back
the 35mm scan is nice but too dark/heavy contrasted, but its better than the other newer versions
Wait wtf! I remember her having a magnum 44 desert eagle in this scene. Instead she shoots him with some fricking bb gun. How lame.
it was always a beretta
I also thought it was a big gun but I guess it was just the perspective and being a kid.
The scenes within Matrix having a green tint is kino though
i'lll take the 1999 dvd/vhs release thank you
The problem with scanning 35 mm release prints is that there is a degree of variance between them. Especially on big movies there were so many copies of them that studios used different labs and their processes and chemistry slightly affected the outcomes. If we went to 1999 and watched 5 different prints of The Matrix in different theaters, there would be some differences between them. This is one of the reasons lots of DP's and directors like DCP, because it guarantees that the movie looks the same around the world as long as the movie theater has their projector and screen settings done right.
>the green tint was just the film getting bogged during its DVD release
My life is a lie
>“The future world is cold, dark and riddled with lightning, so we left the lighting a bit bluer and made it dark as hell. Also, the future reality is very grimy because there's no reason to clean it — only the pods need to be sterile. Because humans haven’t actually manufactured anything for a hundred years, anything that had been manufactured is now old and rusty.
>“We didn't necessarily want the Matrix world to resemble our present world,” adds Pope. "We didn't want any cheery blue skies. In Australia, the sky is a brilliant blue virtually all the time, but we wanted bald, white skies. All of our TransLight backings [for the stage work] were altered to have white skies, and on actual exterior shots in which we see a lot of sky, we digitally enhanced the skies to make them white. Additionally, since we wanted the Matrix reality to be unappealing, we asked ourselves, 'What is the most unappealing color?' I think we all agreed on green, so for those scenes, we sometimes used green filters, and I'd add a little bit of green in the color timing."
left looks like a tv show
right looks like a movie set in a fantastic world
Bottom is the only one where right actually looks better. The water is too pink on the left.
right looks better, whats your point
DVD vs BluRay grading.
I prefer the BluRay on al but the first landscape shot.
There is no particularly strong difference except for the piss snow, that just looks jarring and cannot be attributed to any weather/light condition.
you are colour-blind.
the green of the plant life on the Aragon shot is completed crushed
>Left
>Right
>Left
>Right
are better
The bottom one actually looks more like the original release of the movie. The pink sky release is literally just one out of many releases of this film and it was done by literal whos. The bottom one was done by trying to stay faithful to the original release.
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film5/blu-ray_reviews_72/mirror_blu-ray.htm
>home release
>original release
That’s not how it works.
Original release.
i dun get it
Looks the most natural. My favorite.
Too much contrast, too little saturation.
The cinematographer prefers this one by the way, as he superwised the remaster.
Too artificial.
Actually the original release was 73 film copies in Soviet cinemas in 1975. The original film prints are what remasters should be aiming for
Oh you took this photo in Moscow in the 1970s? this is just the Kino 2000 DVD version
it's the 2005 russian Lizard version
Criterion
Incel troony version
Isnt this the way the movie was intended to look?
Says who? The older DVDs weren't pink.
The people doing color grading live in smog cities. They haven’t seen what nature looks like. They have degraded cones and rods. Who knows what equipment they use.
I love Dakota Fanning bros
which one is supposed to look "bad"?
Because it's a film made for adults and not children who cannot consent to sex and who are the private property of their parents and who love pretty colors because they don't have free will.
What's with the burnt highlights in the Criterion disk? It's like they used a very fricked up cinema print for the restoration.
They're not actually entirely burnt, since you can bring the details back. This quick example looks like shit because it's from a compressed .jpg with very little data to work with, but you could do a way better job with the actual video file.
I agree that the highlights in it are way too fricking high. Criterion fricked it up.
Five minutes in Lightroom. It wasn't that hard.
ok, now do that for every frame, dont alter the audio portion, and make sure it animates smoothy.
>dont alter the audio portion
I'm going to split-tone the audio strip into orange and teal, and there's nothing you can do about it.
>ok, now do that for every frame
You could do the actual work in a few minutes in DaVinci Resolve. Slightly bringing down the highlights is just a few clicks
>dont alter the audio portion, and make sure it animates smoothy.
Why would color grading affect those anyway
It'd need to be shot-by-shot realistically tbf
It's film, so reel by reel would be less revisionist.
That would be the best way if you had access to the negative scans.
Reminder that Criterion is butchering every release they put out
So which <10GB torrent should I download?
My local library only has it in vhs/dvd.
Which colors do you want?
Not the pink if it's not faithful.
The other two look close to each other for me.
If you don't want pink, then your only HD option is the Criterion release, which came out in 2021.
Thanks
this isn't the criterion version, right?
It is. The Criterion release used that same master.
but they went crazy with the contrast and desaturation for no reason
At least the contrast is fricked up in Mosfilm's YouTube upload as well. Look at the sky in the shot with the woman on the fence.
So which is the pink sky version? It's not Ruscico
The pink sky version version was originally released by IVC in Japan in 2014. The same master was later released in Europe by the British Curzon Artificial Eye in 2016.
I thought Artifical Eye was first?
See here
It's the Curzon Artificial Eye version. Brits PINKED it
It was PINKED by Japs. IVC released the pink sky version a few years before Curzon Artificial Eye.
Not according to DVDbeaver or blu-ray.com
DVDbeaver seems to think the pinking comes from an independent source:
>This looks like the same source as the newest Artificial Eye (The Andrei Tarkovsky Collection boxset that never really got released.) Perhaps this is some form of restoration that took place 2011 or before. I'm just guessing. The aspect ratio is about 1.44:1. The 1080P shows more grain and in certain scenes there is depth and detail not seen on SD. Also the colors may be the most noticeable video difference. Brighter, tighter and more layers. Black and white sequences have solid contrast. This new Blu-ray can look softer, but I don't think it is softness - it actually looks more thick and film-like in-motion, to me. I liked the way this looks - superior to the DVDs, but I can't say it will be the definitive.
I think my confusion was the fact there's two Artificial Eye versions - the 2011 version and the 2016 Collector's Edition. Seems like only the second one has been pinked
looks like the Mosfilm 2k version which is from a scan of the original negative. Criterion used it to make their moronic version
The new Mosfilm version and the Criterion version are the exact same. Here's Mosfilm's official YouTube upload:
?t=358
Was the blood in Suspiria originally pink?
Saw the newest remaster in the cinema a few years ago, blood was red. I always thought the pink blood was a censorship thing?
Can't help but feel they took some creative licence and 'fixed' it for modern audiences.
Newest remaster was done by/with Argento. The DP (who insists he’s the real director of the film) hates that remaster, although that’s more out of principle because he wasn’t consulted, I don’t think he ever saw it.
I saw that remaster projected and I don’t call the blood being particularly pink, but may just be my memory. The blood mostly looked like shit but that’s just typical for European movie blood of the era.
>I saw that remaster projected and I don’t call the blood being particularly pink
Sorry anon I mean IN that remaster it was clearly (quite realistic) red.
>Saw the newest remaster in the cinema a few years ago, blood was red.
All the previous versions I'd seen (DVD, Blu-ray, whatever) it was distinctly pink. And the common theory is that horror films got around censorship by intentionally making blood bright pink so it was less realistic. Pretty sure this still happens in some countries and other media: the Mortal Kombat games for example.
If it was just a dodgy special effect that didn't turn out great, fair enough. But this is where the "preservationist" side of my brain argues with the "original intent" side of my brain. I wouldn't want to go see a new remaster of a 1970s film with noise removal, but I also wouldn't want the visual effects UPDATED with BRAND-NEW CGI.
If you go a typical art cinema showing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in 2023, are the titles in Italian? Is everything piss-yellow?
caps-a-holic.com/c_list.php?c=2036
feel free to compare yourself
Seems like they just upped the saturation so the pink looks red again. Pink is pretty much just desaturated red anyway
This was a film screening in 2017. Wikipedia says the Italian version doesn't use the Synapse restoration.
Pretty sure it was this:
https://wearecult.rocks/suspiria-like-youve-never-experienced-restored-in-4k
>The new 4K scan was painstakingly restored by TLE Films in Germany with that crucially distinct colour palette reinstated in accordance with Argento’s original Technicolor Dye Transfer specification, using period film materials as reference.
Fair enough.
i saw it recently in the cinema with Argento attending and i remember the blood having a really distinct color, leaning into a pinkish color but i'm not 100% sure
Many Criterion releases actually look like shit. They're supposed the most prestigious DVD/Bluray house, can't they hire some actual professionals???
I think the restorations they're involved in are usually perfectly good, but it gets weird when they involve the director (which they always do of they're alive and willing) and the director makes a bunch of changes (see: Thief's blue tint). And a lot of the time they just license restorations from other companies, and sometimes those are shit but it's what's available.
I remember an anecdote from some interview with Criterion's head restorationist about Le Cercle Rouge, and how they didn't have a good reference print for their HD remaster so they basically made an estimation based on shitty degraded prints, descriptions of the film from reviews at the time, and the director's other films. Then in the 4k era, Studio Canal did a 4k restoration of the film using a much better preserved print that was found in an archive in the meantime, and the color grading ended up being much warmer than the old criterion version. When the 4k version was released it got shit on in some reviews for being revisionist and deviating from the "original" version, even though the "original" version was a less informed remaster from just a decade ago that didn't represent the film's original look at all.
I think this happens a lot, people make comparisons between a new release and the original, but the supposed original is just some DVD master they happen to be used to, but might be even shittier for all anyone knows.
See also: the splodgy sky regrading they did on Schrader's insistence for Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters
I stuck the earlier DVD as a raw mux on Soulseek, current username there is Rrobynne Mk. II
Also the official subs for Mishima are trash
There's always some gay who remembers exactly how the film looked when they saw it in the theater in 1972, with certainty that the film was in perfect condition.
Americans live in the same latitudes as eurospics and don't know the comfy summer nights of Northern Europe.
Sometimes the Criterion one looks better for shots that work better high contrast, but blowing out the exposure on shots of the sky removes some of the dreamlike qualities of the original grading imho
>but blowing out the exposure on shots of the sky
It's not, even on a highly compressed JPG there is info there.
global warming
>Cuckterion
Both look like shit in different ways. Arrow looks flat, and the Criterion has way too much contrast. Here's the Arrow version with more contrast.
if top is the original: "NOOOO THE SECOND ONE IS TOO WASHED OUT THEY RUINED IT"
if bottom is the original: "NOOOOO THEY ADDED A BLUE FILTER THEY RUINED IT"
How is there still not a centralised website that simply lists the stats for the different releases of a film? E.g. BD20 or BD50 used, audio track format, subs included, scan source, presence of noise removal, whether one release is obviously compressed more than another (obvious cases, like when there's macroblocking present), differences in cuts, screencaps a la caps-a-holic included alongside? Why have I still got to hunt across multiple forums and ancient, non-exhaustive sites like DVDBeaver that don't really give me a qualitative assessment like reviewing the (also incomplete) caps-a-holic in 2023? Still needing to double dip just to compare at this late stage is a world of hassle that wouldn't need to happen if a more centralised community for assessing releases existed.
It would be useful, but my problem is then you get into more subjective factors.
I've never seen The Exorcist. Which cut do I watch? Even if it's the highest quality in the best conditions.
what movie?
Boku no Pico
Mirror, don't watch it though, people who say they get it are pretending
next they take all David Hamilton movies and fix all blurry parts