Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by Bob Casner on February 10, 2000 at 19:16:30:

Last night in Hollywood I attended a seminar at the Lloyd Rigler Theater in the Egyptian Theater complex. The capper of the evening was the showing of two reels showing what the REVIVED Technicolor Dye Transfer process can do. This is ALL new, folks; new matrix films, new blanks (the receptor of the dyes which becomes the release print you see, which MUCH finer grain than the earlier generation), new ("gigantic") transfer machines with great precision (registration AT LEAST to .0002"), and new dyes.
The clips shown:
Something old restored - "Rear Window"
Something new - "The Thin Red Line"
This last was REALLY something special - it looked like, for want of a better descriptor, professionally shot Kodachrome tranparencies, only widescreen and in motion. NO visible grain, detailed highlights, details in neutral shadows that would not be visible in an ordinary print. Stunning color saturation when called for, also SUBTLETIES of color shadings and tone scale. I was thinking, "WAIT! I want to see the WHOLE MOVIE this way!"
And I want to see ALL movies this way. Frankly, I had pretty much given up on going to movie theaters because the prints I see are usually so bad - fuzzy, too contrasty, and too grainy. Yes, I'm picky - I used to do still photo color printing and I KNOW what a good color print is supposed to look like. I even made a couple of mediocre still Dye Transfer color prints. I often find the image on a well mastered laserdisc/DVD to be BETTER than that in a movie theater, size aside.
The problem is finding out what films have been printed by this process, and where to find the available prints (not all prints of a given movie that has used the process will be Technicolor Dye Transfer prints). At some point, they may post this information on their web site (www.technicolor.com) - maybe we can hasten that day by contacting them? Out right now: "Rear Window" (all of the prints, I believe), "Toy Story 2", and "Any Given Sunday" (only SOME of the prints in theaters for the last two), and I'd sure like to know which theaters in Los Angeles are running them. Apparently one way to know you are seeing a Technicolor Dye Transfer print: the reel "changeover marks" (they appear in the upper right corner of the screen) are GREEN instead of white.