A Few Words About A few words about...™ Mary Poppins -- in Blu-ray (2 Viewers)

[FoxyMulder]

I'm the first person to complain about the teal & orange fad in movies made today, and the revisionist timing of some live action features to make them look more "modern," but when it comes to the alleged recoloring of Disney animation, I have to wonder against what reference they're being compared? An old DVD or VHS? Memories of a theatrical screening from 60 to 70 years ago?

All i can say is that i would take the word of bigshot aka Stephen Worth as he is what i would call an animation expert, his post earlier in the thread and indeed in other threads say that Disney are putting out their animated classics with alterations including colours, this is due to how they "restore" them, i haven't been that happy with Disney animated releases, they get high praise but something isn't right with them, it's not just that they lack any film texture, the colours and tone seem off on a lot of their releases, the Diamond editions get treated better than the "second tier" titles, i was appalled by The Aristocats release.

I used to think Disney just overdid the DNR but Stephen knows his stuff and has enlightened me in this very thread, i still wonder though if the second tier titles like The Aristocats have just been given the cheaper DNR option, still this thread is about Mary Poppins which is mostly live action, although i am fascinated to read posts from experts on this subject matter.

 

[Robert Harris]

Just curious if Mr. Harris had any opinion on the issue with the line quality on the restored animation sequence - if the alterations as reported were so this would be a noticeable loss for art fans who greatly appreciate seeing the nine old men's unaltered handiwork.

Not my business. Thank God I'm a soldier.

 

[bigshot]

bigshot, I respect your credentials and passion. I also find myself feeling sorry for you that your passion prevents you from enjoying what is a MARVELOUS presentation by Disney!

It's OK. I'm used to it with Disney. And I have plenty of enjoyment from the spectacular Looney Tunes releases, the recent eye popping Olive Betty Boop blus and the fantastic hidef prints on the George Pal Puppetoon disk. (Not to mention the stacks and stacks of fantastic live action films I've been screening lately!)

 

[bigshot]

Oh! And I have two Harryhausen films on their way to me right now! It's a very good time for fans of animation on blu-ray.

 

[bigshot]

I have no intentions of dialing the colors on my LED to match my personal preference. I want to view it as the colors are encoded on the disc and more importantly, how the film was shown in theaters.

That's fine as long as they are one and the same. Unfortunately, not all transfers are accurate. That's why God gave us color controls. I have a half dozen different color adjustments programmed into my projector. Two are specific to particular blu-rays, Bambi and now Mary Poppins.

 

[bryan4999]

Just got back from watching it on Reed's 120" screen, and I think my jaw was on the floor for the entire two-and-a-quarter hours marveling at (among so many other things) the color. Here was a film with people who looked like a group of real people, with varying and always realistic flesh tones. If anyone had gotten up to touch that dial, I would have been forced to utter something impolite.

And oh yes, that orchestra. My god. I have never appreciated it like this before. That alone brings Mary Poppins into the company of the great roadshow films. And there is so much more...

I got to revisit my 14th year on earth tonight.

The remark about the orchestra brings me to my one complaint - I had hoped against hope for an orchestral music only track, which they had on the laserdisc with the purple cover. Unfortunately, due to the limitations od laserdisc, it was in mono. Think of how glorious this could have been for those us interested in orchestration.

As to the color, I am no expert, but I have to agree with Rob_Ray: I had the oddest feeling that I was ten years old again seeing this at the theater. I have never had that reaction to seeing this movie on home video before.

 

[bigshot]

Any time over the past whatever numbers of years that I've thought back to my first times seeing MARY POPPINS, I see in my mind's eye: the color blue! This movie is full of blue, from much of the advertising to the main and end titles to many of the scenes, and... you name it. Blues and greens, with all manner of other color highlights.

Me too. But the blues aren't the problem. The problem is the cool flesh tones that look really pink, and the tinge to the neutral colors in the Banks's house. One of the things about 50s and 60s color design is the use of absolutely neutral pearl grays. (Think of My Fair Lady and you'll know what I'm talking about.) Here, the grays all have blue tinges.

This really isn't a problem though, because it's easily fixed by adjusting the settings on your TV or projector. It's an overall color shift, not specific color problems like with Alice in Wonderland. There's no way to fix it when they go in and punch in a completely different shade of blue here and a different orange there. That isn't the case in most live action movies. It's an anomaly peculiar to animation... and Disney blu-rays in particular.

 

[bigshot]

One other question. The 5:1 sound had a very busy rear channel. Bits of the orchestra kept getting split off to the rears. Was that the way it was on original release? Is there an original 2 channel stereo mix option I missed?

 

[FoxyMulder]

The problem i would have with altering colours on a projector is that you shouldn't have to do that, when you calibrate your display it's done to the ISF standard, by altering the colours to change them for a specific disc it will be messing with the calibration and those standards.

 

[Cinescott]

That's fine as long as they are one and the same. Unfortunately, not all transfers are accurate. That's why God gave us color controls. I have a half dozen different color adjustments programmed into my projector. Two are specific to particular blu-rays, Bambi and now Mary Poppins.

Yeah, but my point is since I never saw this film theatrically, I am trying to figure out what the correct colors are. Maybe it is this "cool" palette for lack of a better word, but something tells me not. I am honestly not trying to find fault in what many perceive to be a perfect, faithful facsimile of projected film from 50 years ago. Even if I had seen it, I wouldn't trust my memory. It's a shame that virtually none of the principal filmmakers are around anymore to offer an opinion. I just find it hard to believe that many of the neutral colors would look so "ashen," or that there would be so few vibrant colors. It is true that whatever seems "off" to me seems to be consistent throughout, so it could be handled with an adjustment.

I am trying in my own mind to convince myself that this disc indeed represents (as close as possible) what theatergoers would have seen in 1964. If it is, good. If not, it's still good and the positives definitely outweigh the negatives.

 

[Stephen_J_H]

By the way, the xerox process used on 101 Dalmatians was exactly the same as on Mary Poppins. The quality of the xerox line should be the same. My copy is on the way from Amazon. I'll take a look at it and post after I get a chance to look at it.

I really hate to say this, but your argument falls apart on this line. Xerox is only going to duplicate what is drawn, and as I previously indicated, the drawing style in 101 Dalmatians is completely different from Mary Poppins, to the point that the sketchbook quality of 101 Dalmatians extends into Xeroxed lines on the backgrounds. The line quality overall is cleaner in Mary Poppins, as evidenced by the frame grab and print scan posted on this thread. Also, as indicated in this thread: http://www.hometheaterforum.com/topic/327969-mary-poppins-a-look-back/, no grain management tools were used by Reliance MediaWorks when restoring the animated sequence. Let's all reserve judgment until we've had a chance to watch it.

 

[Stephen_J_H]

I should be receiving my copy in the next day or two, but I want to point out... Disney does not use DNR. They matte the characters out of the scene and clean them up by repainting them frame by frame. Then they re-composite the characters back into the scene with a cleaned up still frame of the background. This is entirely different than DNR and causes totally different sorts of artifacts. Instead of grain smoothing and blurring in fast motion, like you might expect with DNR, you should be looking to color accuracy, messed up optical effects (like ripple glass) and line degradation. It is much harder to matte a xerox line than it is an ink line, because xerox doesn't have a hard, clean edge. I think the problem here is that their restoration process compromises the lines, so they are forced to beef them up to black and shave off all the "hairiness" of the xerox to be able to composite them cleanly.

They are the only studio that uses this process. And the films they rework this way have completely reworked color palettes, missing optical effects, glow effects underneath the character instead of on top of it, mistakes in painting areas on the character, degraded lines and a complete lack of film grain. Based on previous films, I don't hesitate to call this process a "massacre". I'll see what they did to the animated sequences in Mary Poppins when my disk arrives.

Disney's live action films are generally very good on blu-ray. I saw a hidef copy of 20,000 Leagues from Europe and it looked fantastic.

Except that Disney didn't restore the animated sequence; Reliance MediaWorks did. The method of "restoration" to which you refer hasn't been used by Disney since the early 2000s, back when Scott MacQueen was in charge of restoration and did Sleeping Beauty. If you want to know how Disney now restores animated films for Blu-ray, take a look at the special features on Sleeping Beauty. No rotoscoping involved.

 

[bigshot]

The xerox process was new for 101 Dalmatians, but it really wasn't any different until they developed new toners for Great Mouse Detective. Key drawings were always the original animator's ruffs with just a little bit of erasing here and there. Assistants' in-betweens were fully cleaned up. It's very easy to tell who animated a scene by still framing on the keys, especially with Frank Thomas who animated in a flurry of sweeping lines. The keys stood out because of their looseness, and since they were the drawings that were favored in the action, this added an extra spark and liveliness to the animation.

Frank Thomas animated a lot of the animated sequences in Mary Poppins. I defy you to find a bit of his line left in the blu-ray. You can't even tell which are the keys and which are the assistant's in-betweens by the line quality. All of the lines have been made thick and coarse.

The clearest place you can see what is happening is to look at the Fox's tail and then compare it to the feathers in Cruella's fur coat that I posted. Look at the way the points are blocking up into big black blobs. Check out in the film how when a line gets thinner, it starts popping on and off like in the interior line on the horse's nose. This is because the xerox got faint and their selection tool wasn't able to grab onto it any more. Xerox would reproduce gray scales more or less intact. This new version has a threshold where either a line is there or it isn't any more.

It really isn't a subtle thing if you are used to the look of 60s xerox line animation.

 

[Stephen_J_H]

Here's what I'll go ahead and say - actually, I'll let Mr. Harris say it, because he knows this film very well and he knows what dye transfer prints look like when projected with carbon arc, which this film was: "Color, densities, shadow detail (even a bit limited in dupes), and the goddess of grain, are all precisely where they should be, in director Robert Stevenson's 1964 classic."

I agree with him straight down the line. If everyone thinks they know better, more power to them. I don't adjust my settings to some personal like because when the color is right my personal taste doesn't enter into it. It would be like taking Woody Allen's latest yellow-infused film and adjusting my settings because that doesn't appeal to me at all. And that would be wrong, IMO, so I don't do it.

Or colorizing Manhattan.

 

[bigshot]

Except that Disney didn't restore the animated sequence; Reliance MediaWorks did. The method of "restoration" to which you refer hasn't been used by Disney since the early 2000s, back when Scott MacQueen was in charge of restoration and did Sleeping Beauty. If you want to know how Disney now restores animated films for Blu-ray, take a look at the special features on Sleeping Beauty. No rotoscoping involved.

That isn't true. There were artifacts of the rotoscoping process on both Alice and Peter Pan. I knew someone who was a digital colorist on Alice. He was given a scene of the Mad Hatter with no BG to clean up.

They use the rotoscoping process on scenes with flat backgrounds. In Bambi they had to do it differently because of all the multiplane shots. You can't piece together backgrounds when the backgrounds are moving in three dimensions.

In Mary Poppins, it looked like they were using several different techniques- roto, painting frame by frame and DNR, probably because of the difficulty of working around the composited live action with motion blurs.

 

[bryan4999]

One other question. The 5:1 sound had a very busy rear channel. Bits of the orchestra kept getting split off to the rears. Was that the way it was on original release? Is there an original 2 channel stereo mix option I missed?

Yes, there is a 2.0 track. It is the third choice when you bring up the set-up - audio menu.

 

[bigshot]

The problem i would have with altering colours on a projector is that you shouldn't have to do that, when you calibrate your display it's done to the ISF standard, by altering the colours to change them for a specific disc it will be messing with the calibration and those standards.

In theory, you're right. But in practice, not all blu-rays are created equal. It's the same with audio. In theory, you should be able to calibrate your speakers to a flat frequency response, and it should just work. But in practice, engineers are fallible and it's nice to have those tone controls to be able to fix things.

 

[bryan4999]

Yeah, but my point is since I never saw this film theatrically, I am trying to figure out what the correct colors are. Maybe it is this "cool" palette for lack of a better word, but something tells me not. I am honestly not trying to find fault in what many perceive to be a perfect, faithful facsimile of projected film from 50 years ago. Even if I had seen it, I wouldn't trust my memory. It's a shame that virtually none of the principal filmmakers are around anymore to offer an opinion. I just find it hard to believe that many of the neutral colors would look so "ashen," or that there would be so few vibrant colors. It is true that whatever seems "off" to me seems to be consistent throughout, so it could be handled with an adjustment.

I am trying in my own mind to convince myself that this disc indeed represents (as close as possible) what theatergoers would have seen in 1964. If it is, good. If not, it's still good and the positives definitely outweigh the negatives.

Here's just an observation I've had from experience. In 1990 I saw "The Sound of Music" in 70mm at The Plitt Century in Century City in their 'showcase" auditorium (where I also saw the restored My Fair lady a few years later). In fact, I saw SOM a bunch of times. It was golden and warm looking. After a few weeks, it moved to a second auditorium and suddenly it looked blue and cold. Obviously, it was a different type of projector lamp. So I can honestly say I have seen that movie both ways. Which is right and what the filmmakers intended?

 

[Patrick McCart]

I'm not entirely buying the idea that the Reliance Mediaworks remasters utilize cutouts and rotoscoping. Their processing seems to not need that extra step considering the quality of work from lesser film elements, let alone 35mm sequential exposure negatives. Especially when that trademark rock-steadiness is fully apparent in their live-action remasters/restorations without utilizing cutouts. It just seems like a lot of extra work for already advanced processing.

 

[moviebuff75]

For once, I am just going to sit back and enjoy. I've been through enough grief trying to get the word out about the alterations with "The Wizard of Oz" and trying to get WB to fix the errors. I think I deserve a break from all of the stress!