The "restored" Wizard of Oz.

I watched the "restored" Wizard of Oz the other night. Wow. So bright and crisp and clear. It was like being right there on the set with Dorothy. There's only one problem with that... I don't WANT to be right there on the set with Dorothy. I want to be in OZ.

I can't help but think that directors, cinematographers et. al. knew the film stock, knew the screen material, knew the projection lamp, etc. and filmed in such a way as to get exactly the look they wanted in the theatres of the day. And then when they restore a film, they don't take that into account when they're doing their "bright/crisp/clear" thing. Oz was certainly bright and crisp and clear... but somehow, looking like a stage play instead of a movie, it was no longer magical.

We're not in Kansas anymore.

 

This is an interesting observation with regard to the new technology's capabilities to perfectly align the 3 Technicolor strips, providing an image that arguably has more clarity than when the film was first released. Personally, I enjoy the added clarity, but I can certainly see the point of view that these new versions of classic films are not 100% true to the original viewing experience.

 

Are we actually having this discussion?

Don't we want the best quality for our media? Or is lesser quality for the purposes of nostalgia actually desired by some?

 

Well they didn't get the color balances right. Everything else about the current resto, if that's what you're referring to, is superior and in my opinion makes for a better and more magical viewing experience than it ever has on video. Well, except too much processing of the sound, but the sound is a sterling job compared to what many vintage films end up with. As for getting the alignment corrected, I'm 100% in favor and glad they did that - I doubt the original first run prints were out of register much, as that probably tended to creep in with aging of the elements and sloppier reprints. In that sense we're probably closer to 1939 if not better off. All the same, I take your point about the IB Technicolor, silver screens and arc lamps. It's entirely possible that it did have more magic on good movie screens of 1939, and film in general. We can't reproduce the exact original look of course. I do wish the color balance was more authentic but otherwise I'm grateful for the current resto and do feel it retains as much magic as it can on video today.

 

Wow. Would've loved to see that.

 

Sublime!

Hm I guess I'd been assuming that the appearance of contemporary trailers on video was largely a factor of the quality of trailer prints (if what I was seeing was in fact original at all) and transfers... I'd kinda tuned that out. But yes I'd heard that color grading was different in the early Technicolor days. Usually it's chalked up to wanting to subdue the "gaudy" colors, but seems to me its from the folks at Technicolor having a particular, and to us perhaps odd, aesthetic.

Do you know how much effect the screens and projectors of the time would have altered a color film's appearance and in what way(s)? I assume they were optimized to give black and white a particular look. Perhaps the early Technicolor look is in part a result of them feeling obliged to "compensate"?

 

My goodness! You were living in a bit of an Oz yourself! Did you get to say "hi" to Fred Astaire at all? And when's the book coming? Signed if you would

Thanks for the insight

Edit: I do recall that the Fremont in San Luis was still using the original arc light projectors until 1990 - just in time for screening the resto of Fantasia... with the new modern projector instead! They messed up everything else that night too, but anyway... The new projector is much dimmer, softer and whiter ("cooler") than I seem to recall the old one being. The original screens of course had been replaced in the 1950's and by the time I saw the place it's been small milky screen time, so I don't know what screenings used to look like in the '40's. Just a curiosity of mine

 

All I can do is drool at the thought of seeing The Wiz(ard Of Oz) projected from the TV print.

I have a Snow White re-issue trailer from the early 70's, and while it does look pretty good (and I'm almost positive that it's a Tech trailer), I just don't remember it being THAT vivid. Perhaps it was because reissue trailers were usually a print of a print of a print?

I just picked up a trailer to one of my favorite Disney movies of all time--1965's "Those Calloways" with Brian Keith, Vera Miles, and Brandon DeWilde.

"TC" just came out on DVD within the last 2 years or so. For a minor Disney movie, they did a VERY decent job on the transfer. A lot of the film takes place in Vermont with the appropriate leave color, and it shows.

Flash up to this week: I just traded for an original 35MM trailer for "TC". Most (all?) Disney trailers up until the mid 1970's were printed IB Tech. I've been searching for this trailer for awhile, and I finally rc'vd it, and spliced it into one of my trailer reels. When the film finally hit my projector, the colors just absolutely jumped out at me.

Since I only have about a 15 ft throw on my DeVry (projector), I've fitted it with a 500 watt bulb for now. When an IB Tech trailer runs through, you can see that the look of the film get a tad darker. Not unwatchable, but just a deeper black that doesn't come across on a regular Eastman or Fuji printed piece of film.



I'm guessing that, like anything else, IB Tech fell out of favor because it was more expensive to produce, but this is only speculation on my part....I'm sure others have an actual reason.

 

I do understand the original intent of the thread, however, and I see it mostly in television shows that have been upgraded. On a lower budget, monitoring on older monitors, certain things they got away with on old TV shows, I never noticed for years. Now, these shows, shot on film, can be transferred in HD, then converted to DVD (I don't have HD yet) and you begin to see camera shadows, boom shadows, obvious "studio lighting". It hasn't ruined watching old shows for me, but for that brief moment, you are taken out of the story as you see a camera shadow move across a wall. I think I first really took note of this effect when I watched the first season of MASH on DVD. MASH had always seemed kind of gritty to me, like it was always shot on location. On DVD, I noticed the standard studio lighting on shot done inside the tents, and it just made it seem more like a production shot on a soundstage somewhere. Not bad, I didn't dislike it, it's still MASH after all. I do think that it is a result of the new, better resolution transfers though.

 

<cough>Vinyl</cough>

 

Is this not just like the remastered CD versus the original debate? If they take a movie that looked a certain way when released and then 'fix' it with modern technology, isn't that the same as maximizing and noise reducing an old audio recording?

 

Could be, but not necessarily. Let's say an album was recorded in the 60's, then cut on LP. This LP cut could have lots of distortion not present on the original tape due to the cutter head and amps of the day, then the engineer could limit the amount of bass and dynamics to make it easier to cut and play back on the electronics of the day. If Steve were to cut this today, or make a CD, it would have much greater dynamics, bass and clearer highs, much less distortin and noise. It would be, in some ways, significantly different from the original LP everyone knew. However, I don't think many people would complain. I figure, with film restorations, one could simply be revealing what the original source contains, and then walk that fine line up to the point where they are starting to HYPE the original to make something that is significantly different. I'm not saying the Oz disc is one or the other, but it still has to do with how much restraint the person doing the restoration has.

 

I assumed it was the newer DVD release that came in a big box set a year or two ago. It may be the very same transfer that the HD broadcast is from. I don't know for sure.

http://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Oz-Thr...5-8613709?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1172952969&sr=1-3

 

It sure would be nice to see some sort of a demo disc for home video, showing off the characteristics of various projection formats. Sure, it wouldn't be as correct as actually viewing in a theatre adapted for it...but so few of us live in L.A.

I think HD-DVD or Blu-Ray should be enough to give a home viewer an idea of the differences in 3-strip Tech or 2-strip Cinecolour, or a restored print from original negatives compared to a two-generation dupe. Heck, why not show off the differences in sound systems to approximate for the home viewer the difference between Dolby and dts, or Disney's original 6-channel Fantasia experience versus THX; and compare Todd-AO with Vistavision and Cinerama while you're at it...maybe even a tour of IMAX, OmniMax and Showscan, just for the geeky fun of it. Surely studios could allow :45-second clips of examples in the interest of education?

I'd buy it...!

 

I would too.

 

Would you be interested in some extensive babble about it? If so, while I'm a-waitin' on my pizza in the oven here goes. IB Technicolor was an exclusive, patented process. Only Technicolor labs had the legal and technical ability to make an IB dye-transfer print and they never licensed the process or equipment. They also ran a lab in the UK and China iirc which also had the facilities to produce an IB Tech print. Making IB Tech is quite different from the chemical color processes ala Eastmancolor, which any lab could adopt (and did - Metrocolor, DeLuxe, so on).

As the decades rolled on, Technicolor evolved into a big multi-interest corporation and didn't seem to compete meaningfully against other (all Eastmancolor based) labs, some of which were in-house affiliates of the big studios. It was something of a "by request" alternative by the early 1970's. By that time, they had been running the original, one-of-a-kind IB Tech equipment to the point that the labs needed major investment to rebuild the unique gear, and as you might be guessing, the bean counters said "uh why don't we just buy cheaper conventional new stuff and do it like everybody else, it's cheaper short term." So they gave up their exclusive technology and went Eastmancolor like everybody else in 1974. The UK lab went Eastman in 1978. The China lab still used it for some time but I don't know the situation at present. Anyway it was a short-term "cost-effective solution" that proved permanent, perhaps due to lack of vision and/or ambition. Since they still held exclusive rights to the process, no one else could do it either. At least that's the tale I've heard.

The process of course differed in all stages of filming. Mind ya, I'm really simplifying here, trying to explain without writing a chapter worth... For a negative, IB Tech uses three strips of black and white film, as you may know, one for each of the three primary colors; a matrix is made from those which can print the dyes onto film prints (ergo, dye-transfer). Eastmancolor uses a single color negative which is usually used to make a series of prints and negs used to strike prints one at a time, a chemical development based printing. I suppose for simplicity's sake you might think of Eastmancolor as a conventional "darkroom" photolab process and IB Tech as a printing press, or as like duplicating cassettes (Eastman) instead of pressing vinyl (IB).

You may be guessing by now that Eastmancolor was more flexible and cheaper per print up to a limit, while IB Tech would be far more costly for individual or small runs but cheaper to crank out huge numbers of the same prints. Ironically of course, since Technicolor gave up IB printing, many films have gone on to print far more copies per title, which would have made it the smarter process, but hey that's the movie biz eh?

Besides a different visual result, IB Tech has superior color stability - the 3-strip negatives are B&W so they don't ever suffer any color shifting or fade, and the prints aren't chemical colors, they are color dyes which hold stable a heck of a lot longer.

It gets extra confusing over the years because the technologies mixed, but there's definitely a good side to the mingling. Methods were quickly developed so one could make an IB Tech print from a single color negative or make Eastmancolor prints from 3-strip negatives. Those 3-strip cameras were bulky and costly, so shooting with single color negatives became the norm by the early 1950's. Technicolor adapted by using the single color negative to make 3-strips from. Unlike IB Tech printing, making a 3-strip negatives (called seperations) from color film was not a patented Technicolor process so anyone could do so. As you might guess, many 1950's color negatives are severely faded to unusable, but if such a film was IB Tech printed at Technicolor, you could not only have an unfaded print (if an IB Tech print was saved in good condition), you could also have an unfaded backup of the color negative (if the 3-strip negatives they had to make were correctly saved). Sometimes making 3-strips was done to backup color films, and we're lucky where that was done correctly and the 3-strips saved. It's still a wise idea to make "safety separations" for backing up color film.

It's my understanding that some puttering with IB Tech process has been done in more recent times and some new IB Tech prints have been produced (one of the Gone With The Wind reprints iirc?), but I don't know if anyone's seriously backed development let alone implemented a competitive use of the process. The patents may be expired. Anyway it's getting a bit late, what with "digital projection" being developed and marketed as The Way of The Future, with or without a real need for it.

I'm glad to hear. It's a beautiful looking film.

Perfect timing - now the pizza's done in the oven!

 

They re-did the restoration - the 2000 DVD has been usurped by a 2006 release. This features the sharpest image I've seen yet - I gather this is thanks to a new alignment process that uses a new technique of mapping the pixels between the 3 strips such that the images overlay practically perfectly across the whole image. Gone are any colour fringes or blurring from misalignment - the results are stunning

The colour balance looks fine to me too.......

I presume the HD broadcast was from this new restoration.

 

FYI:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technicolor

"In 1997, Technicolor reintroduced the dye transfer process to general film production. It was also used on the restorations of films such as The Wizard of Oz, Rear Window, Funny Girl, and Apocalypse Now Redux. An article on the restoration of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (original version, 1977) claimed that a rare dye-transfer print of the movie, made for director George Lucas at the British Technicolor lab during its initial run, had been used as a color reference for the restoration. The article claimed that conventional color prints of the movie had all degraded over the years to the extent that no two had the same color balance. However, because of the variation in color balance per print, dye-transfer prints are used in the professional restoration world as only a rough guideline.

Reintroduction of the dye transfer process

After its reintroduction in 1997, the dye transfer process was (somewhat unexpectedly) used in several big-budget, modern Hollywood productions. These included Bulworth, Pearl Harbor, and Toy Story. The distinct "look" this process achieves, often sought after by film makers looking to re-create the period of time at which Technicolor was at its most prominent, is difficult to obtain through conventional, high-speed printing methods and is one explanation for the enduring demand and credibility of the process."