And bless you for it. That's one reason why I put more faith into your restorations than I do in some others.
That's a whole 'nuther kettle of fish. A 4K scan from the original camera negative looks inherently different than a vintage theatrical print -- even if the colors are 100% accurate. Doesn't mean that colorists shouldn't strive for accuracy, but it does mean that you're still comparing apples to oranges. Or maybe a more accurate analogy would be one variety of apple to another. The Exorcist in 4K on UHD will look different than the film did in the Seventies even if the color timing is perfect.
No. They were not.
A scan of the original camera negative, 2K or 4K, will show up what indeed was in the negative. Answer prints, colour grading, etc. would have been applied at a later stage in the photochemical process.
And yet there are 4K discs like Alien, Flash Gordon, The Shining and Blow Out that manage to look very much like pristine film prints. I'm sure they don't look exactly the way release prints did, but they just look "right" for films of the era. So does pretty much everything released by the Waner Archive.
That's my whole point -- release prints don't necessarily show up everything that was on the negative, regardless of differences in color timing. The levels of detail, the grain, and even the densities change with generational loss. Even assuming that there was consistency in the timing that means every print exactly matched the intentions of the filmmaker, and assuming that the color grade on a given UHD or Blu-ray exactly matches that, the digital version based on a scan from the OCN will still look different than the film did originally. And that's even taking the vagaries of memory out of the equation, too. What The Exorcist looked like in any given theatre in 1973 isn't really an exact benchmark for how the UHD should look. Too many variables have been removed from the equation.
I agree 100% with you. In the photochemical era, there was an answer print, or an approved I.P., etc. from which prints were struck, etc. Ideally, the digital restoration from the OCN should be as close as possible to that photochemical master. But while you can have a digital master, and struck DVD, Blu-rays, VOD, DCP, etc. any derived digital version from that and should look identical in terms of look, there wasn't that consistency with the prints during the photochemical era. There were good and bad prints, and all of them, with a film with a succesful run such as "THE EXORCIST", probably played for weeks, if not months, causing lots of tear and wear, damages, etc. to the print itself. While a DCP at a movie theater remains the same, it doesn't deteriorate, and the variables come from the projection system and the bulb of the projector.
FWIW, you also don't *have* to watch them on very "digital" looking "displays reaching many hundreds or thousands of nits" either. Some of us go w/ FP setups that probably do come closer to what good film projection would/should look like, but that's a choice you have to make (and pay for and accommodate) yourself of course -- and some (maybe even most?) may simply/actually not care/want the original film projection kinda look (aside from increased resolution/detail) anyway...
_Man_
I’m not referencing extreme HDR. Look at Aurens, MFL, Godfather 2008, Vertigo et al, and you’ll see the reference print At 98%.
Exactly and there are many stills etc from that era to use as reference and that look nothing like those new screen caps. I fear HDR is tweaking many films to look modern and may look fine to many especially younger viewers but actually are a disservice to film preservation. Same for changing a mono film to a 7.1 Atmos experience. Like why doesn’t The Exorcist for example default to the mono?
Keep in mind that Exorcist had a bona fide 70mm mix.
