A question about scans (1 Viewer)

[John Morgan]

I keep reading in reviews about scans and have a question.
When any vendor does a quality scan of a negative or fine grain or whatever, is that scan supposed to replicate the source material as is, rather than doing any "fixing" during the scan" And all fixes, color timing, repairs are now done in the digital world?
When I say "replicate the source material as is," I don't mean there isn't any cleaning or repairing splices, etc., prior to scanning.

 

[Ernest]

It is hard to provide an answer because you have run many items together without asking a question. In a perfect world all film transfers to Blu-ray would be as identical to what was shown in the theater as possible. Grain is a natural part of film adding texture. To little grain the picture will look like a cartoon. To much grain becomes distracting takes away from the quality of the transfer. In many cases older films have to be restored because the negative prints are damaged, scratched, faded, whatever. Restoring films is very expensive especially when you consider many older titles don't sell very well. Twilight replicated 3000 copies of the Egyptian, a very good period piece, a year ago and you can still buy a copy.

 

[David Wilkins]

I find your question too unfocused and non-specific, as well. The potential range for the general topic is huge. Try to use a specific example for your inquiry.

 

[John Morgan]

Well, I will try again. I guess I don't know enough to even ask a question that makes sense, so let me put it into a couple of questions.
1. Once a film element is cleaned, repaired, etc., is it scanned as is and any restoration, color fixing, etc. done solely in the digital world from those scans?
2. The botch of THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. Do we know or can guess if the intial scan was okay and Universal then failed to do any or little work on those scans for a quality master?

 

[Alan Tully]

Yep, fixing damage, despoting ect. all done in HD using the computer. If we take colour films, if they scan an interpositive (a dupe made from the original negatives) then that contains all the colour grading (timing), so it should be quite easy to keep the original look of the film, & I think you get some very nice results doing that. Scanning the original negative & you're starting from scratch again, & there's the danger! The colourist should try to get back to the original look, & not grade the film as if it were a new movie (you know what I'm talking about, teal/orange look, 40% of the colour wound out, a nice cyan wash over the sad scenes), which is why you need someone in charge of the project who knows what films should look like. Looking forward to seeing what they've done with The Great Escape (where they've scanned the original negs).
I think we're moving to the idea of people who restore film never seeing a piece of film, it's all scanned somewhere else (somewhere nice & cheap) & they just deal with images on a computer.