Universal Re-Mastering Frankenstein Sequels in 4K

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by jeatleboe, Jul 15, 2015.

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  1. jeatleboe

    jeatleboe Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    NY
    For fans of the old Universal Monsters (like me), word has just come out that Universal is working on 4k transfers of SON OF FRANKENSTEIN, THE GHOST OF FRANKENSTEIN, FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN, HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, and HOUSE OF DRACULA (which features The Monster).

    No guarantee yet that these will be Blu-rays, but here's hoping!
     
  2. Remington Steele

    Remington Steele Forum Resident

    Location:
    Saint George, Utah
    "It's alive!"....in hi def!
     
  3. Myke

    Myke Trying Not To Spook The Horse

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  4. Holy Diver

    Holy Diver Senior Member

    Location:
    USA
    I love all those old movies. Great news!
     
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  5. jeatleboe

    jeatleboe Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    NY
    I wouldn't have noticed the Frankenstein news if it had been part of a Marx Brothers thread - but thanks.
    Anyway.. I hope you're correct that these will all be Blu-rays, but other than the title of the HTF thread itself mentioning the term "blu-rays", the actual message from Universal I don't believe mentions blu (unless I missed something). I want blu-rays of these films very much, but sometimes a title can be restored to 4K and be a regular DVD. That has happened before.
     
  6. BlueGangsta

    BlueGangsta Forum Resident

    Location:
    Australia
    They did a fantastic job with the original and Bride of Frankenstein. I look forward to this! :)
     
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  7. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
  8. BlueGangsta

    BlueGangsta Forum Resident

    Location:
    Australia
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  9. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    They have been, but I can think of another couple of thousand more-obscure movies and TV shows they own that are still languishing on the shelf.
     
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  10. BlueGangsta

    BlueGangsta Forum Resident

    Location:
    Australia
    You name them, and with Universal's recent profit, they can spent $5,000,000 restoring each of them.
     
  11. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Oh, they've got the list already. The problem is, 90% of their home video executives are under 30 and only know movies made after 1985. And they've also laid off dozens of home video execs and video mastering people who actually knew and understood their library and its historical significance.

    All of the Universal B- horror movies from 1930 to the late 1950s would be high on that list, as well as all of James Whale's movies, their 1930s and 1940s mysteries (like the Inner Sanctum pictures), all of the Deanna Durbin musicals... there's a lot of stuff that just kinda sits there. The major Frankenstein and Dracula movies do get released, but a lot of the other stuff gets short shrift. Take a look at this list and consider that less than 1/3 of these films have ever been released on home video:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Pictures_films

    And this doesn't even scratch the surface of all their comedies, their shorts, their cartoons, and their TV shows. A boxed set of just Steven Spielberg's TV episodes would be fantastic.

    As to the mastering: in truth, I don't think there's actually 4K of resolution in these old B&W finegrains (especially from that era), but just getting pin-registered scans of everything they've got in the vaults is a step in the right direction. And when they spend time and money getting rid of all the scratches and dirt from those master positives, they can look sparkling clean, as we saw with the Blu-ray releases of the early Frankenstein and Dracula movies. The costs are far less than you might think -- I would say for a 90-minute B&W film, they'd be looking at $100K tops. $200K if you added a new digital film negative placed in archival storage, even with all the sound restoration work, per title.
     
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  12. Myke

    Myke Trying Not To Spook The Horse

    Any announcement that includes The Marx Brothers, the "second tier" of Universal Horror, and a Brando film, came across as a dream list for me !
    I'm not only genuinely excited, but proud that my patience for all of these since VHS, is now being rewarded.
    .
     
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  13. bobbyhol

    bobbyhol Forum Resident

    These are being done for Universal's Repertory dept, since like all studios they are slowly converting their libraries to DCP for theatrical use.
     
  14. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    The chances of even one of these films being released to theaters is about .001%. Making a DCP out of a digital master takes no longer than runtime these days, maybe 3 hours tops. Nothing to it. The two biggest reasons the studios want their library digitized is 1) all the film elements are falling apart, and 2) they're looking at the download/streaming market of the near future. DCPs are very, very low on that list for 99% of the films on their shelves.
     
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  15. They need to do John Hughes movies properly. Weird Science looks like crud. They also need to get the OG music licenses for 16 Candles if they haven't already done so. They own so many great films and botched their initial hi-def releases. I know they're supposedly making amends now but I hope they re-do as many of their hi-def releases as possible. They own so many great films.
     
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  16. bobbyhol

    bobbyhol Forum Resident

    If this were true reps and film societies could book DCP versions of just about anything the studios have released on blu-ray. However, if a studio has no 35mm print or properly mastered DCP available for a title that IS available on blu-ray, they will license you to run the blu-ray or DVD if required.
    Every month the studio 'classics' departments send out updates of catalog titles that have been mastered in DCP and are available for theatrical bookings. Most of them seem to come up with 2-4 titles per month.
     
  17. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    For small repertory theaters, I don't think there's any realistic difference between showing the 2K DCP and showing a Blu-ray of a 50-60-70-year-old movie, if the mastering is good enough. There's only about a 10% difference between 2K and HD Blu-ray, though the JPEG2000 compression is much less on the DCP.

    It makes you wonder how much longer Quentin Tarantino can keep on with his New Beverly Cinema, which only shows 35mm prints (and steadfastly refuses to show DCPs).

    That's very true. People forget that we were doing HD mastering all the way back in 2000, 2001, 2002, and believe me, nobody knew anything back then. Blu-ray didn't come out until 2006, and they already had thousands of titles stockpiled. There were even experimental HD film transfers going on in the mid-to-late-1990s, and those were haaaaarible. Thankfully, a lot of that early stuff got thrown out and redone, but quite a few mid-2000s transfers should be redone today. The technology has come a long way even in just 10 years.

    Mastering to 4K is kind of a mask on what really goes on, but the truth is that they can make the initial film scans with much higher quality today than the HD scans of 10-15 years ago. It's not so much the 4K that makes the quality better -- it's better processing, plus a pin-registered transport, and lower noise in general. And I think the color-correction mastering software is better today as well.
     
  18. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    I agree...let's have some stuff we don't have in superior visual quality!
     
  19. Noel Bullard

    Noel Bullard New Member

    Universal studios need to release the 30 film legacy collections on region 2 that was very pointless just releasing 1 legacy collection on region 2 maybe they are talking about a Frankenstein complete legacy collection on region 2
     
  20. GuildX700

    GuildX700 Forum Resident

    Location:
    USA
  21. captainsolo

    captainsolo Forum Resident

    Location:
    Murfreesboro, TN
    At least they're finally starting to get up off their rear and do some work with their catalog. There have been some HDTV airings of the monster sequels, of which FMTWM and Son looked very nice.
    Absolutely floored for Son which for me is the only truly great Uni horror title left un-restored aside from Old Dark House, Man Who Laughs and Phantom. They're supposed to work on both famous Chaney classics, but really need to put work into poor Old Dark House. The film was barely saved, and Kino's pathetic DVD is struck off a noisy 16mm reduction. It's really nice that they've announced work on the 40's cycles which are classics of their kind and inspired much love by children over the years. Come on: we need The Mummy's Hand in HD!!!:D

    But my big gripe with Uni is still their absolute lack of care over their Hitchcock stable. Yes some BDs were finally spruced up, but many if not all are still based around old work. Several are so bad they should not be released. Family Plot is probably the worst major studio disc release ever. The DVD is better. NOT kidding. Frenzy and others aren't up to snuff...but the worst has got to be the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much. It could have been restored after Rear Window, but was skipped for no reason other than Uni not wanting to pay. This is a VistaVision classic starring Jimmy Stewart written by John Michael Hayes from the Master's career peak...and they have just left it to rot. The 2005 DVD was some kind of terrible effort to re-digitize the deteriorating element and it was just plain terrible. The BD is basically a tweaked version of this. Thus we are left with the old 2001 DVD of a dirty print which was probably dated back to the old analog only pan n scan LD. They have been neglecting these films since then...only to half-ass them on each new format. It pisses me off to no end. Sure Psycho, Rear Window and Vertigo will get new editions with varying transfers but at times it's as if they pretend the others don't exist.
     
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  22. So what's the deal with 4K mastering anyway? Worth triple dipping for blu rays with 4K scans or just wait for actual 4K discs (if that happens)? Personally I'm prone to 4K blu rays that will hopefully upscale nicely on the 4k machines because I think that may be a much more cost effective route. And because it seems like this 4K remastering is giving titles a better blu ray than previous editions (i.e. Ghostbusters, Goodfellas, and (hopefully) Spartacus.)

    EDIT: There was a conspiracy theory in regards to the initial HD masterings back in the early aughts. Specifically for Hong Kong cinema. It was said that they made HD masters but put out inferior DVD releases so that a few years later they could re-release DVDs from "new" HD transfers. And honestly I've seen nothing to contest that bogus practice. Of course shortly thereafter blu rays were released and instead using the HD masters used in the second wave of DVDs they just upscaled. Jeez. What's so hard about doing it right?
     
    Last edited: Jul 20, 2015
  23. Captain Wiggette

    Captain Wiggette Forum Resident

    Location:
    Seattle
    It does actually take a lot of effort, and the scanners have gotten a lot better, hard drives much cheaper, etc etc. And there's a lot more knowledge, bigger displays that people are looking at, etc. In the early days, even with good equipment and care, if they're looking at and mastering on small BVM crt monitors, there's just only so much you're really going to see.

    Then of course there is the problem of too many tools, too much 'more-gooder' mentality of digital noise reduction that wipes out lots of detail (though those tools have gotten much better too), of amping up the colors or trying to make everything look like the awful teal/orange of today's movies (UGH).

    These were all problems even during the DVD days. Good tools are expensive, good people are expensive, and good people's time on good tools are triply expensive. And do you have a good source to begin with anyway? And then how much more are you going to spend fixing damage, problems, etc?

    So while it can be cheaper now and there are more and better tools now, it still takes a lot of effort, and there will always be more and more improvements and more demands, 8k, etc etc. It's a never-ending continuous improvement process.
     
  24. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    I believe it's more about the transfer date than the K per se. A transfer done 10 years ago is limited to the technology available back then. Nowadays, we have wider-range color corrections software, pin-registered scanners, faster hard drives, and a lot of other things that make the process more streamlined and also capable of much better quality. Even if you did it all in HD today, it would look better than it did 10 years ago. The 4K or 2K alone isn't what makes it better, and as I've often said, I'm not convinced there's actually 4K worth of details in a lot of 35mm films made prior to about 1980.

    Cheap movies traditionally get very cheap-and-dirty transfers. I won't mention the name of the studio, but I once did a package of about 10 kung-fu movies (all to HD) from lackluster elements, and we knocked them out very fast as per the deal. The client was anxious to get their entire library transferred to digital so they could then position their studio for sale, which did happen about six months later. I don't know what happened in the specific case you cite, but I believe it's extremely rare that anybody would take a standard-def master and try to uprez it for Blu-ray. One reason why is that it costs no more to do mastering work in HD today than it does to do SD work. It's all the same now. 4K does take more than twice as long and requires four times as much storage.
     
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  25. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Those are all gone. Nobody masters to CRT anymore that I've seen in all of LA. It's all OLED or plasma, and in some cases, high-end LCD panels.

    I'm not a guy who leans on NR very much, but on the rare occasions where I do use NR, I'll generally target only part of the image. For example if the sky -- and only the sky -- is noisy, I'll pull a key off the sky and do some temporal NR on that by itself. There are zero artifacts doing this. The only way you'd notice this is if I showed you a before and after comparison. Same thing with enhancement: if I crispen something up in a scene, it's typically only a character's eyes and nothing else. So the tools are much more like a scalpel. There are also levels above which I just won't go. I won't go to "11," but I might go to "6."

    A lot in mastering boils down to "do no harm, and use good taste." A pal of mine in the sound mixing business sometimes talks about "taste +1," where if you slam something with processing, back off a notch below what you think is right so that there won't be any danger of overdoing it. The whole point is to be subtle and not grind things in the ground.

    Universal typically does very good work, and I was floored with the first batch of Frankenstein and Dracula Blu-rays. In particular, I thought the sound clean-up work was remarkable. The accompanying documentary showed how with the optical hiss stripped away, now you could hear the actors clomping around on plywood sets when it was supposed to be a "stone floor" in certain scenes, which I think is hilarious. You figure, it's always been there, so let's see and hear it, warts and all.
     
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