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Ben X

Film and TV Demasters

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A place to whine about classic media getting fucked with.

 

We've already discussed The Simpsons (with a mention of the initial, waxy Predator blu-ray), The X-Files and The Wire (I did end up getting the latter on DVD before it disappears).

 

Now Seinfeld is on Amazon Prime UK, I've noticed they've re-framed that to 16:9 too.

 

http://i.imgur.com/IB6G5RM.png

 

I've found a couple of sites that quote Wikipedia as saying:

 

Quote

There are two high-definition versions of Seinfeld. The first is that of the network television (unsyndicated) versions in the original aspect ratio of 4:3 that were downscaled for the DVD releases.[96] Syndicated broadcast stations and the cable network TBS have begun airing the syndicated version of Seinfeld in HD. Unlike the version used for the DVD, Sony Pictures cropped out the top and bottom parts of the frame, while restoring previously cropped images on the sides, from the 35 mm film source, to use the entire 16:9 frame. The TBS airings were edited to reduce running time (presumably for more advertising space), cutting out certain lines, even rearranging the stand-up scenes position in the episodes as well as showing the credits during the last scene as opposed to after the end of the episode.[97] Amazon.com lists season one of Seinfeld in Blu-ray, though no release date has been announced.[98]" 

 

Though that bit about TBS re-cutting seems, appropriately, to have since been edited out. Ah well, at least I have the DVDs for that series too.

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Not quite but almost the same thing is my complaint here about OJ: Made In America cropping archival footage to 16:9, which is the most aggravating thing a film I otherwise love has done in a while.

 

And if you really wanna go down a rabbit hole you should follow home media review sites that will compare and contrast various home releases of old movies, trying to figure out who improperly framed or egregiously color corrected what. My friend Gabe Powers does blu-ray reviews and this review of Phantom of the Paradise is a good indicator of how far down the hole he's often willing to go.

 

I don't have a great home video set-up (pretty small TV, no surround sound of any kind) nor a great set of eyes and ears to appreciate all the subtle differences, but I did spend 110 bucks on a Halloween blu ray box set in part because it was the only way to get the original mono soundtrack on the original Halloween. So, I am invested in this sort of thing to an extent.

 

EDIT: Apparently people going back and futzing around with the colors of their old movies is such a widespread problem that even ardent film preservationists like Martin Scorsese are guilty. Check out this review of the new Goodfellas blu-ray for an example. Scroll down to the caps of Samuel L. Jackson to really see the difference: his pants used to be blue, they made them green!

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2 hours ago, Ben X said:

A place to whine about classic media getting fucked with.

 

I resisted getting a lot of anime on Blu-ray for many years because there was a period of time between the spread of digital masters in the late 1990s and the popularization of high-def standards in the mid-2000s where the vast majority of anime were animated at a maximum resolution of 480p, meaning that any high-def releases were going to be upscaled from low-def sources. It took a long time for Western distributors, especially FUNimation, to do more than pile on DVNR to get rid of "texture" in the fills, add edge enhancement to make the lines "cleaner," and crop the edges of the frame to "fix" gate weave. Even today, it's usually more comforting when word gets out that an upscaled master from the original Japanese studio is being used, rather than an in-house upscale done stateside. That's why the Serial Experiments Lain and Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya Blu-rays look amazing, while Dragon Ball ZLucky Star, and Claymore look terrible (although it's not an ironclad rule, considering that the FLCL remaster was done by GAINAX and is worse than anything FUNimation has done short of the infamous Samurai Champloo upscale). It feels ridiculous that we're a decade into widely available high-def media and it's still a crapshoot if you're going to pick up a Blu-ray where everyone looks like wax dolls with no definition.

 

Not to drop a TV Tropes link here, but their "Digital Destruction" article is a good chronicle of some mistakes that have been made.

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One of the nice things about living where I do is there are two arthouse movie theaters that regularly screen 35mm prints. Seeing film prints has become an increasingly meaningful experience for me in a world where art is increasingly subject to post-release "fixing".

 

The Chicago Film Society blog had a really interesting blog entry on film prints as artifacts of history (using the truly bizarre looking 35mm film print of a shot-on-Betamax horror film "Boardinghouse" that screened at the Music Box as a case subject) that I really enjoyed.

 

Quote

Given the substantial cultural cache of Frank Zappa, Jacques Tati, and Michael Snow, it’s easy to imagine how and why these video-film objects made it onto the big screen. It’s harder to figure out what exactly is going on with Boardinghouse, widely credited as the first horror film to be shot on video and subsequently released on 35mm in 1983. Boardinghouse‘s provenance is weird enough. Written, directed by, and starring Johnima and Kalassu Wintergate, the core members of new age collective and rock band Lightstorm, Boardinghouse is caught between being a vehicle for Johnima and Kalassu’s band, a genre deconstruction that doesn’t scrimp on exploitable qualities like sex and violence, semi-sincere advocacy for meditation and new age spirituality, and particularly garish video art. Like the cycle of DIY shot-on-video trash horror that proliferated in its wake during the video rental heyday of the ’80s and ’90s, Boardinghouse is a particularly crude labor of love, taking advantage of its makers’ familiarity with and access to video production tools, balancing strange and ineffable in-jokes and personal aesthetic proclivities with market-dictated genre elements.

Boardinghouse would also appear just before the home video exploitation market really blossomed, necessitating 35mm theatrical distribution from Coast Films. Boardinghouse may be as weird and wooly as a Kuchar production or early John Waters, but its narrative beats are mostly secondhand horror clichés. It’s a film designed to straddle the twin imperatives of being a personal film and an only marginally disreputable commercial prospect. Were Boardinghouse made a couple of years later, its migration from the realm of the televisual to the photochemical would be unimaginable. Because it arrived at the perfect moment, Boardinghouse managed to mark an interesting crossing of streams–a physical object that saw the passing of one market (the independent exploitation circuit of drive-ins and grindhouse theaters) and the birth of another (the straight-to-video genre revolution).

 

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I don't have anything substantial to add to this thread, but the Atlantic City bluray made everything really fucking blue and it's awful. I know there's plenty of other movies that are recolored  pushing the blue and teal, but I really like Atlantic City so this bothered me. At least I have the DVD. Also this is not really on topic with this thread, but anyone who likes Star Wars should definitely be watching the Harmy Despecialized editions of the original trilogy if you aren't already. 

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12 minutes ago, TheLastBaron said:

I don't have anything substantial to add to this thread, but the Atlantic City bluray made everything really fucking blue and it's awful. I know there's plenty of other movies that are recolored  pushing the blue and teal, but I really like Atlantic City so this bothered me. At least I have the DVD. Also this is not really on topic with this thread, but anyone who likes Star Wars should definitely be watching the Harmy Despecialized editions of the original trilogy if you aren't already. 

This is maybe not a conversation to have on a public forum but I could not for the life of me figure out how to download the Despecialized editions. But I figure Disney knows there's a lot of money to be made from a proper release of the original Star Wars films, and will do it eventually. Right? RIGHT!??!

 

 

2 minutes ago, Cordeos said:

GROSS. SO GROSS.

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11 minutes ago, Patrick R said:

I figure Disney knows there's a lot of money to be made from a proper release of the original Star Wars films, and will do it eventually. Right? RIGHT!??!

 

It makes so much sense, and yet... and yet...

 

Actually, I wouldn't put it past Disney to hold off on releasing a "classic" edition of the original trilogy because they don't want to confuse customers about what the "real/true/right/correct" Star Wars is.

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Releasing unadulterated Star Wars seems like the sort of thing Disney would keep pocketed as a thing to do ~eventually~ but not, I imagine, until after the current theatrical trilogy is over. At least.

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19 hours ago, Patrick R said:

This is maybe not a conversation to have on a public forum but I could not for the life of me figure out how to download the Despecialized editions.

 

Getting it from fan edit sites is insanely difficult, but cough if one were to look for it on torrent sites, they would probably have some luck. (And of course they should make sure they own the movies first, for ethical reasons.)

Edited by Ben X
Oxford comma

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I don't think Lucasfilm or Disney have ever gone after anyone over the despecialized editions, I know for sure they've never gone after Harmy, so they either don't care or don't want to acknowledge that there's a market for the theatrical versions.  I got them from the private tracker they were officially uploaded (which is one that focuses on fan edits and restorations rather than piracy), but I'm sure you can find it on any big public tracker.

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I mentioned this on an Idle Thumbs episode a few weeks back, but I got ahold of the Silver Screen edition of Star Wars, which is different to the Despecialized ones as it's actually a new scan of an original theatrical 35mm print, rather than a cleaned-up version of an official release. It looks awesome and is really worth tracking down. Like any of these things, it's kind of sketchy and I felt weird getting it; this is the only thing I've pirated in many, many years, and it involved paying for a Usenet account for one day so I could actually get access to it. It was a pain in the ass. Glad I did, though.

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No tv or movie come to mind BUT

 

The remastered version of Late Night, Maudlin Street by morrissey is cut down from 7:42 to 6:55. It's one of favourite morrissey songs, namely because the end of the song is this hauntingly long fade out. 

 

The remaster cuts the song off before morrisey even finishes singing I hope you singing now.

 

fucking criminal.

 
Old:

 

Remastered:

 
Its like my favoirite minute of music and doesn't even exist anymore 

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That reminds me of the Bruce Springsteen song Shut Out the Light which is about a Vietnam vet coming home and dealing with those issues and trying to fit back into his previous life.  It's already a pretty fucking harrowing song if you listen to the released version, but it originally had two more verses that were cut, one about him and the heroin addiction he picked up (reminiscent of Sam Stone by John Prine) and one at the end of the song where the the protagonist kills himself.

 

The original:

 

The version released:

 

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The one movie I've always wanted to see in its unadulterated form is The Exorcist III. Put all your preconceptions about 'threequels' aside - and forget about The Exorcist II - this is a really interesting and unique horror film that deserves to be seen if you have any interest in the genre. It was written and directed by William Peter Blatty, who wrote the novel which the original movie was based on.

 

It's a strange and haunting film, partly inspired by the Zodiac murders, which at first glance has almost nothing to do with 'The Exorcist'. For the most part it's highly restrained, dreamlike, and incredibly atmospheric. The stark differences in tone and plot didn't do the film any favours: after they did some test screenings, the studio were like 'why is there no exorcism in this movie called 'The Exorcist'?' and made them go back and put an exorcism in it.

 

I've always wanted to see the Director's Cut, which apparently restores it to something resembling Blatty's original intentions; apparently there's a new Bluray out that gets somewhere close, but annoyingly, it's not available in the EU region. :(

 

But for the most part I don't care too much about digging out special/uncut versions. I still enjoy going to see old movies projected in 35mm, not so much for the opportunity to see extra scenes or effects in their original format, but because it still retains a certain depth and luminosity of colour - an aura? - that I don't feel can be entirely replicated through digital projection.

 

Sometimes this becomes manifest as a kind of raw scuzziness - I saw a print of Hardware by Richard Stanley last year which had exactly that effect, for example. But I once went to a screening of The Taking of Pelham 123 where the print was so bad the celluloid kept slipping out of the gate, so you could suddenly see the black bars that divide the frames at the top of the screen, or it would fly off the reel entirely. It was quite annoying but somehow also appropriate for a movie about a runaway train.

 

On the other hand, last year I went to see Magnolia (in 35mm) and The Master (in 70mm) and both of them looked absolutely stunning. I'm glad to support an independent repertory cinema that makes a point of screening films in this way. I do wonder if it's partly a sentimental thing, since I know that digital projection has its advantages too - especially for smaller independent filmmakers, for whom it's always going to be more economical to shoot and distribute digitally. But the experience of celluloid is valuable and worth preserving. And the tendency for cinemas to replace trained projectionists is, of course, lamentable.

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I don't have a great technical grasp of this sort of thing, but seeing film prints of movies shot on film is always illuminating for me. I think one should see films in the format they're intended, when possible. It drove me absolutely bonkers that JJ Abrams made such a big deal about shooting Force Awakens on film, this is on film, on celluloid, just like the original trilogy, film film film...and then that movie did not screen on 35mm prints ANYWHERE, as far as I can tell.

 

I saw Inherent Vice (shot on 35mm) in a regular theater digitally and I saw it at an art theater on 35mm and it looked way better as the latter. Then I later saw it again as a 70mm blow-up as part of a 70mm festival, and while it looked good I still think the 35mm looked better.

 

On the other hand, my local art theater (The Music Box) knows that seeing film prints has become very cool among cinephiles, and has taken to promoting 35mm screenings of movies that were originally shot digitally! I saw them show Mad Max: Fury Road in 35mm and it didn't look any better. They also did a midnight screening of Magic Mike XXL, which is one of the most digital-ass digital movies around. That 35mm prints of films such as this float around is interesting, but I can't anyone really benefitting from seeing them this way.

 

On the flipside, I've seen interviews where Michael Mann complained that all the aesthetic and textures of his video films were ruined in 35mm prints and that that is a lot of the reason why people thought Public Enemies looked so ugly.

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On 2/2/2017 at 4:13 PM, Patrick R said:

EDIT: Apparently people going back and futzing around with the colors of their old movies is such a widespread problem that even ardent film preservationists like Martin Scorsese are guilty. Check out this review of the new Goodfellas blu-ray for an example. Scroll down to the caps of Samuel L. Jackson to really see the difference: his pants used to be blue, they made them green!

 

I think you have this backwards; they're green in the older release, and blue in the latest one. Not that this actually matters at all! I only mention it because, based on how the colors changed (more subtly) in all the rest of the example shots, it made me wonder if there's some way in which his pants were actually always blue, and just got washed out in such a way that they appeared green? The change seems way too extreme for that to be completely true, so maybe it is just an odd arbitrary choice.

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Yeah, got it mixed up. From the review:

 

"Unlike so many cases of revisionist colour timing, this one isn’t the same super-modern orange and teal, which is a relief all of its own. Instead, the image has been slightly desaturated and cooled. Browns and tans, including skin tones, are more homogenized, occasionally making previously warm sequences appear almost sepia. The 2007 release had a sickly green/yellow quality that faded the more searing reds (bar/restaurant interiors, in particular). The rescan has adjusted those reds, to appear more vivid and cleared out the pea soupiness. An unfortunate side-effect is that very littler green survived the cut at all (just check out Samuel L. Jackson’s once green, now magically green blue)."

 

My friend wrote that review and has a tendency to go back and double check things with previous DVD and even VHS releases, so while you can't be 100% sure without checking the original film print, I believe him when he says the pants used to be green.

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1 hour ago, Patrick R said:

"The 2007 release had a sickly green/yellow quality that faded the more searing reds (bar/restaurant interiors, in particular)."

 

Ugh, the tendency of color timing in the first decade of the twenty-first century to make everything the yellowed green of terminal monitors is genuinely frustrating for anyone with a shred of curiosity about the creator's original intent. There are so so many problems with the 2.0 release of Ghost in the Shell, the decision to replace the hand-drawn opening with already-obsolete CGI foremost among them, but redoing the warm amber tones of the original cut to match the greenish tone of the sequel movie (and the prevailing attitudes in the industry) in order to reinforce the sense of a "franchise" of GitS media is really unforgivable.

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