Check out more screen captures here: True Stories Blu-ray - John Goodman It seems that it's mostly this scene that is very teal-tinted for some reason.
No it is everywhere. It is just more noticeable as green when there are elements in the shot that are supposed to be white.
This x (the biggest number ever) I stopped buying catalog blu-rays almost altogether because they're routinely unwatchable. Between DNR waxification and the teal blight, it's beyond unfortunate--it's inexplicable and pathological the way studios uniformly treat the medium.
Any word if it will be the Director's Cut version or not? I'm happy it's at least getting a high-definition release and they're not waiting through four more Avatar films before doing this.
I think it's for real this time, check out the list of credits for Skip Kimball on IMDB, it's a long list that includes Alita, Avatar etc...
Isn't it a shame how they have to mess with movies? It really aggravates me when I notice the change or read about.
Skip Kimball is a first-glass gentlemen and does superb work -- he's done several Cameron films (including Avatar), as well as superb TV series like Stranger Things. The director specifically told Lowry Digital that he detested film grain and felt it was an aberration, so they did what they could to give the director what he asked for. This is a creative choice, so in that respect it's not a mistake. Note that there are at least 20 different kinds of processing out there, so what you call "DNR" is not exactly right. I'd buy "grain reduction." Still, it's a complicated subject because there's so much that goes into it, and there's often a lot of careful thought and precise adjustment that goes with it. My preference is to remove no more than half the grain, so that image is still recognizable as being from film, but you have to go in and make sure that the grain stays consistent scene-to-scene and shot-to-shot. Note that many modern TV productions routinely add back synthetic grain as part of the process, so now we've come full circle: we have film productions that remove all the grain, and we have digital productions that are adding in artificial grain. Crazy, huh?
Grain reduction, that's what I meant. To be fair, I haven't watched my 4K T2 disc yet, so I don't know if it will bother me personally, but I do remember reading that a lot of people didn't like it. I did go ahead and get the Endo-Arm Collector's Edition, so I got that at the very least. It is very cool!
Call me crazy: when I remaster an old movie, one of the first things I do is determine what's supposed to be white, and I make it as completely neutral and pure as I can. Same thing with black. And then we work on fleshtones and everything else. It's not that hard. I am not generally a fan of "orange & teal" (and the originators of that look actually say it's "flesh tone and teal"), but I'll give certain scenes that zap if they lend themselves to it and the filmmakers ask for it. But a guy walking through a department store? Naw. I try to make it look like real life, but maybe with a little dramatic edge. Of course, there's always the exception when the director or cinematographer says, "oh, I never wanted the whites white and the blacks black... I want this deliberately tinted a different way." And it's their film -- we have to give them what they want. For all we know, it's a night scene and they want everything dark and a little bit on the blue side. And that's OK. I'll avoid teal per se, just because I lean towards a more neutral picture, but it's very subjective. There's always the issue of having to use good taste in any kind of remastering job, and that goes for still photos, for music, for spoken word, for movies, and for TV. If you get an idiot at the controls who cranks everything to "11," the results are going to suffer. An old sound associate of mine used to say, "taste +1," meaning "crank it up until you see the effects of the processing, then back off a little bit." And I've applied that idea to color for many years.
Just imagine if in the 80's CD's with a DDD SPARS code got tape hiss added. I dislike when I see a movie with its grain removed and but I dislike it more when I see a digitally shot movie with fake grain added, it's like having the worst of both worlds.
How would you know? I even know of sitcoms where they're adding synthetic grain, and it's just a thing. It doesn't detract from the show at all, and you won't be aware of it unless you're looking for it. BTW, in Pro Tools there are tape saturation plug-ins that not only introduce various kinds of hiss, but also create certain kinds of distortion, harmonics, and that kind of "compressed" thing that happens when you overload analog tape a little bit. And there's a whole lotta them out there.
The problem with added fake grain is that I do look for it or I should better say that knowing that 99% of today's shows are shot digitally it's like fake grain jumps out of the screen for me. Regarding Pro-Tools plug-ins I have no idea how they sound or the albums they've been used as I don't listen to contemporary music at all, the most recent Rock-Pop album I got was Van Halen's A Different Kind Of Truth and with all the dinamic range compression used on it I doubt the plug-ins used on it, if any, are noticiable. It's one of the worst sounding albums I've ever heard.
I still say you don't know when synthetic grain is added. BTW, I have tons and tons of real grain available in my VFX library and can and will use them if the client wants it. Is it a crime? Is it a fraud? Does it matter? Note also that many compression schemes (including DirecTV's MP4 and VP9 on other systems) tend to omit the grain in favor of the image, so sometimes the grain kind of goes away just because of how it's "seen" as data. BTW, the last thing I saw where I said, "hey, they went nuts with the fake grain" was the 2014 HBO made-for-TV production The Normal Heart. And at the end of the show, the Kodak logo came up and I was shocked to realize it had been completely shot on 35mm negative. I've been so used to digital shows, this looked like excessive over-the-top grain... but it was 100% real.
