A Few Words About While we wait for A few words about...™ The Rodgers & Hammerstein Collection -- in Blu-ray (2 Viewers)

[Noel Aguirre]

What about that blooming white sky? Oh wait that's clouds!

No That's Fox's Hello Dolly - where the sky is never blue and only white.

 

[haineshisway]

No That's Fox's Hello Dolly - where the sky is never blue and only white.

Not this again. How many screen grabs showing a blue sky do you need to not make this kind of statement? Oh, never mind.

 

[John Maher_289910]

HELLO, DOLLY! on Blu-ray, looks exactly as it did during its roadshow presentation in theaters. I saw it 9 times, back then, and a couple more times (AFI showings), since. There is nothing wrong with that Blu-ray.

 

[rsmithjr]

HELLO, DOLLY! on Blu-ray, looks exactly as it did during its roadshow presentation in theaters. I saw it 9 times, back then, and a couple more times (AFI showings), since. There is nothing wrong with that Blu-ray.

Bingo! Back to the River Hills Cinerama in Des Moines, IA in 1968! Close to South Pacific in quality.

 

[Gary16]

This is a long article from Widescreen Review by Alen Koebel that may be of interest here (note the final section that's in bold):
How Digital Color Grading Is Ruining Movies
Alen Koebel
“Make it Pop!”

If you are old enough to remember when
desktop publishing programs and laser
printers first appeared, you might also
remember what started happening to documents
at that time. Where once they used a
few highly readable fonts, they suddenly
started to look more like ransom notes.
Things got downright ugly.
Something like that is happening today
in the movie world. The old analog, filmbased
paradigm for making movies has
almost completely disappeared, replaced
with digital image capture, digital processing,
and digital projection. None of that is
inherently bad; in fact, similar to desktop
publishing’s affect on the printing world, it
expands creative possibilities and lets more
people make movies.
Unfortunately, it also makes it easier—
much easier—to make bad design choices
and to take things to extremes. Where once
a scene might have a few carefully crafted,
mechanically based special effects, the
image frame can now be filled from edge to
edge with computer-generated objects, all
of them moving at high speed in different
directions. Where once set design, costuming,
and lighting would be used to create a
particular color palette in a scene, today the
set can be lighted and dressed in neutral
shades and the final colors chosen later in
a computer during digital color grading,
with few restrictions about what colors can
be used.
But to paraphrase Jeff Goldblum’s character
in Jurassic Park, just because we can
do something doesn’t mean we should.
Specifically, in the context of this article,
just because we can color grade a movie
any way we want doesn’t necessarily mean
it’s a good idea. If it isn’t done to serve the
story or done with an artist's eye, the result
can get ugly, just like those multi-font documents.
Despite its provocative title, this article is
not a rant against digital color grading.
Movies do need to be color graded, for
many reasons. And since they aren't for the
most part about absolute reality (even when
they are set in the real world), they need not
use “normal” colors. (Documentaries, particularly
those about nature are obvious
exceptions.) Rather, the concern here is the
unoriginal way the process is often being
used today.
Doing It Digitally
Digital color grading is only one of the
steps in a larger process known as digital
postproduction, which got its start with liveaction
features in 1999’s Pleasantville. Just a year later
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
became one of the first live-action, featurelength
movies to be entirely post-processed
digitally. The use of this technology only
increased after that. Today, you would be
hard pressed to find a movie playing in a
theatre that has not been digitally postprocessed.
Movies shot on film first need to be digitized
before they can be digitally
processed. This creates what is called a
“digital intermediate,” so named because
the final, edited movie was in the past usually
written back to film for final projection.
Today, digital projectors make that unnecessary.
Of course, if you capture the
images digitally in the first place, the digitization
step is also unnecessary.
After digitization (if required) the next
steps in the digital postproduction workflow,
in a general sense, are editing and color
grading. The raw “footage” (a word originating
from the historical use of linear feet of
film) must be examined, selected, cut, and
re-ordered to tell the intended story. Color
grading is then used to alter the properties
of the images comprising the individual
scenes. Despite its name, color grading
can change not only the colors in an image
but also its tonal characteristics—the contrast
between dark and light parts of the
image and how shades between them are
rendered.
There are many reasons for color grading.
You might, for instance, need to match
shots taken in different lighting situations
that are supposed to be part of the same
scene. Without color grading it would be
obvious the shots were not taken at the
same time, which would undermine the
scene’s continuity. A further reason might
be to compensate for the characteristics of
a particular camera film stock. Yet another
reason might be to turn scenes shot in daylight
into night scenes, something that was
once quite common.
Artistically, color grading can be used to
impart or amplify an emotion or a feeling in
a scene. It can be used to focus attention
on a particular object in a scene or conversely
make that object less noticeable.
Color grading can also be used to achieve
a certain stylized “look” to part of a movie or
indeed to an entire movie. This last reason
is the one we’ll look at more closely in this
article.

Moderator Warning: Provide a link and do not post an entire article. Thank you.

 

[Mark Booth]

One forum where I was a moderator had very strict rules about reproducing an entire (or nearly entire) copyrighted article from another source. Quoting snippets of an article usually falls under fair use laws. But quoting the entire thing is a completely different matter.

Further, I believe you need to be a subscriber to Widescreen Review in order to read that article. As a photographer, I'm very sensitive about copyright issues. I encourage the moderators to edit the above post and replace it with a link (if a suitable link can be found).

Mark

 

[bluelaughaminute]

HELLO, DOLLY! on Blu-ray, looks exactly as it did during its roadshow presentation in theaters. I saw it 9 times, back then, and a couple more times (AFI showings), since. There is nothing wrong with that Blu-ray.

I'm only 51 but sometimes I've forgotten what I was doing 24 hours ago.
Yet some people , like Tim Lucas for example , can tell whether a current product looks the same as it did when they visited the cinema 45 years ago - amazing .

 

[Tom Logan]

I wondered why the recent orange-teal grading mania didn't come up more often in all our discussion of the botched coloring on The King and I. It seems the obvious explanation.

Personally, I'm pleased with The King and I's grading, because I've always felt that Rodgers and Hammerstein musical classics should look exactly like those overedited overwrought Michael Bay epilepsy triggers.

 

[Joe Lugoff]

I'm only 51 but sometimes I've forgotten what I was doing 24 hours ago.
Yet some people , like Tim Lucas for example , can tell whether a current product looks the same as it did when they visited the cinema 45 years ago - amazing .

And then there's the guy who remembers the look of the movie vividly, but his memory's a little hazy about the year.

 

[usrunnr]

How are they going to address the 30fps issue on Blu-ray? Remove six frames per second or interlace at 1080i60?

Please forgive an ignorant question on a side issue: Should I have my Blu-Ray Player set to "Auto" or 1080i? I just don't understand this. Thank you.

 

[David Weicker]

Please forgive an ignorant question on a side issue: Should I have my Blu-Ray Player set to "Auto" or 1080i? I just don't understand this. Thank you.

Normally 'Auto' is fine. Your player decides, based on whatever disc you are playing whether to use 1080p, 1080i, 720p, 480p, or 480i.

However, with some discs that are coded at 1080i (especially BBC discs), the header information doesn't always tell your player that it is 'i' instead of 'p'. And when you play these discs at 'Auto', you will see a judder (or skipping). If you manually change your player to the "1080i" setting, that goes away. Your player should know the difference, but on some discs, it gets confused.

 

[DeeF]

I have a 720p version of The King and I, which I got 3 years ago. I'm posting a photo, which I haven't done before, so if it doesn't work, don't get crazy on me.

This version seems to be superior, in every way except resolution, to the newest bluray. Something went wrong with the recent transfer.

 

[John Maher_289910]

I'm only 51 but sometimes I've forgotten what I was doing 24 hours ago.
Yet some people , like Tim Lucas for example , can tell whether a current product looks the same as it did when they visited the cinema 45 years ago - amazing .

Well, I saw it so many times in its Todd-AO presentation, that it doesn't take much to remember it. I do, however, have complete venue recall for where I saw a movie. Back when there were neighborhood and first-run theaters, and I was seeing lots and lots of movies. We had 6 movie theaters that I could walk to, alone.

 

[DeeF]

I'm trying to find captures from my transfer which match the captures made earlier in this thread.

Here's one of Anna, singing "Hello, Young Lovers" in the gray dress. It's the same dress she wears throughout the opening of the film, although she has removed her hat and jacket. The dress is linen (not shiny like her later satin dress) and the color is cool gray, which means gray with more blue in it than yellow. It isn't cyan or turquoise, and it wasn't meant to look anything but gray.

 

[Reed Grele]

I'm only 51 but sometimes I've forgotten what I was doing 24 hours ago.
Yet some people , like Tim Lucas for example , can tell whether a current product looks the same as it did when they visited the cinema 45 years ago - amazing .

I'm 58. But I can recall the theater, the time of day (it was a Saturday matinee) and even where I was sitting when I first saw Goldfinger with my best friend in the summer of 1965. It left that big of an impression on me!

Now... What was it that I had for dinner last evening???

 

[DeeF]

Here's Anna before "Getting to Know You" in the gray-and-white pinstripe dress with the black bowtie. The dress resolved very well in this older transfer.

 

[DeeF]

Trying to get this shot from my 720p version. This is the exterior scene. The dress is gray, not turquoise.

 

[usrunnr]

Normally 'Auto' is fine. Your player decides, based on whatever disc you are playing whether to use 1080p, 1080i, 720p, 480p, or 480i.

However, with some discs that are coded at 1080i (especially BBC discs), the header information doesn't always tell your player that it is 'i' instead of 'p'. And when you play these discs at 'Auto', you will see a judder (or skipping). If you manually change your player to the "1080i" setting, that goes away. Your player should know the difference, but on some discs, it gets confused.

Thank you very much. I appreciate the information.

 

[Will Krupp]

I'm 58. But I can recall the theater, the time of day (it was a Saturday matinee) and even where I was sitting when I first saw Goldfinger with my best friend in the summer of 1965. It left that big of an impression on me!

Now... What was it that I had for dinner last evening???

For me...it was SUPERMAN THE MOVIE in 1978 as it was the first movie I was allowed to got see with just friends and without parental supervision (to this day I still get chills during the opening credits) so I get exactly what you mean, Reed.

 

[haineshisway]

Trying to get this shot from my 720p version. This is the exterior scene. The dress is gray, not turquoise.

And those ORANGE skin tones? I think not.