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Sorry you're disappointed, but this is an incredible achievement with gobs of detail not previously visible

Posted by Jazz Inmate (A) on September 26, 2008 at 09:38:18

In Reply to: I've rented part one... posted by eppis1 on September 26, 2008 at 00:42:23:

There are plenty of dark scenes, rich dark colors and inky blacks. But the daylight scenes are not supposed to appear dark. There is no "color correction", according to Robert A. Harris, the motion picture archivist who was involved in the project. Here are his full comments:

"The comments offered below are meant to place a bit of reality to the various posts on other sites proffering everything from color is wrong to concepts such as "for the restoration, those guys made a print and cleaned it."

For the cleaning of photographic emulsions, we generally find that an extra fine or 0000 steel wool works best.

There are a great many functions applied during the restoration, all based upon our selection of specific shots or frames from one element over another, that led to the final look and feel of the films on 35mm as well as Blu. I won't even get into SD, as our abilities there to replicate an image are so far removed from those of BD, that I prefer not to go there.

We began with between 150 to 155 minutes of slightly faded, heavily damaged and dirty OCN and from there scanned samples of every available dupe or preservation element we felt viable, inclusive of an original CRI produced in 1972 for UK and foreign.

In a number of cases we were saddled with dupe shots (some damaged as early as 1972), field enlargements, etc. that were up to fifth generation. A great deal of effort went into adapting and massaging these to make them work within the context of the film as a unit.

The general ethic we use in any restoration is to virtually disassemble the film, and then rebuild it using the best (the meaning of which changes on occasion) shots or frames available after side-by-side comparisons with their counterparts as well as original reference.

All decisions toward the creation of the final product were made with only film in mind. The idea that we made certain decisions, color corrections or whatever toward a potential SD or even HD release as I've seen posted elsewhere are laughable.

Referencing the CRI, we found that although it would ordinarily have been written off without inspection, that it had been produced slightly underexposed, ie. darker, which was beneficial in that some reels had less fade than they might, and allowed us to harvest certain shots from the unit.

I'll bring up one other anomaly here, that being the concept of "reference." We used the final Technicolor reference print of GF 1, which has survived under the aegis of the Academy Film Archive, as well as several dye transfer prints of GF 2 (courtesy of AMPAS, UCLA and Harvard Film Archive) as color and density reference, further supported by aid from Mr. Willis and Mr. Daviau.

We had found in the past and confirmed once again that Technicolor reference is not perfect, and the reason appears to be economic. Final density and color changes originally made their way into the printing process and final printing matrices. One gets to a place, whether attempting to maneuver a point's difference one way or the other, that the lab is going to cease the creation of six thousand feet of matrix for a small change.

Those anomalies become apparent through multiple examinations of the print, and some final tweaks which never made it into the "final" set of printing matrices are included in our 4k data files as well as all digital derivatives."
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Call it, friendo.

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