Re: How The West Was Won, Errol Flynn, Warner Westerns - 26/08/08
HOW THE WEST WAS digitized
The "special screening" that ended last weekend's excellent "The Reel
Thing-XX" put on for AMIA by Grover Crisp and Michael Friend was a
digital presentation of Warner Home Video's digital restoration of
HOW THE WEST WAS WON from original negatives. Each panel of the
Cinerama negative was scanned at 2K, ultimately yielding a 6K image.
A Sony 4K digital projector was used for the presentation.
The last session in the "Reel Thing" program was a presentation by
Bill Baggelaar of MPI, who supervised the restoration. They had two
main goals: minimizing the blend lines as much as possible and
correcting geometric problems caused by the nature of the three lens
Cinerama camera. When focused from infinity to about 25 ft. the
three 27mm lenses produce a fairly accurate representation of the 146
degree field-of-view. However, the left and right cameras are
designed to toe-in when focused closer and this leads to some strange
results, such as different vanishing points for each panel, that are
not that obvious when projected onto the deeply curved screen, but
become quite so when shown side-by-side on a flat screen. Since most
of the shots in the travelogues were fairly wide, this wasn't as much
of a problem as it became with the dramatic films where the directors
wanted to use medium and even close shots. Photochemical technology
made correcting this for non three panel presentation impossible.
Though I'm not aware of any efforts to do a combined version of any
of the travelogues (16mm IB prints were extracted from the center
panel of SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD (1957); I don't know if this was
done for the entire film or selected sequences), according to editor
Harold F. Kress in personal conversation, Technicolor did make a 35mm
reduction with all three panels printed side-by-side with a 2x
squeeze for editing and viewing. They later made a combined
interpositive, which I'm assuming was on 65mm because both Ultra
Panavision and spherical 65mm format internegatives were made, at
least on HTWWW; I have no further information on these elements, such
as their actual formatting, aspect ratio, etc. The 35mm anamorphic
internegative that became the source of the general release 35mm and
16mm prints made by MGM Labs and all subsequent 35mm, 16mm, and video
elements are from this source. All of these would have had the
perspective flaws noted above.
MPI used digital technology to get a better geometric match between
the center and side panels, resulting in the kind of fish-eye effect
that would have been achieved if the film had been shot on a
single105mm strand of film with a 27mm lens. While all the
horizontal information was captured, this created a problem with the
top and bottom of the frame. As it happened, Cinerama films were
composed with extra headroom to allow for theaters whose prosceniums
were lacking in height. Since the amount of perspective varied
depending on the point of focus of the shot, resulting in variations
in framelines, MPI decided to letterbox the image to a ratio that
covered all situations, resulting in the 2.89:1 AR announced in
initial publicity, the ultimate "letterbox".
How does this look? On the 42 ft. screen of the Academy's Pickford
Center Linwood Dunn Theater, it was no problem, but on a 42 inch
monitor? Fortunately, the Blu-Ray disc will also have the film
rendered in MPI's version of David Strohmaier and Greg
Kimble's "Smilebox"®, which simulates the way the film would look
from the ideal seat in a Cinerama theater. This format is quite
effective on 4:3 screens and it will be interesting to learn how many
fans prefer watching the film this way.
The 2.89:1 ratio also contributes to the controversy over "how wide
is too wide", which has been going on since the aborted Wide Film
Revolution of 1930. It's the widest format used for mainstream
motion picture presentation to date, wider than Ultra-Panavision
(2.75:1), small format anamorphic (@2.66:1 depending on how the
aperture is cut, and the recommended projection aperture for three
panel Cinerama (2:59:1). Because HTWWW was photographed primarily
with wide angle lenses, it actually does not look all that awkward,
on a large screen. Fair evaluation of compositions is compromised
because of the necessity of keeping the subjects within a given panel
in original photography rather than composing for the entire frame.
However, with apparent declining interest in seriously working in
aspect ratios wider than 16:9, this issue may be moot.
Because of my familiarity with the film, I was subconsciously seeing
the panel splits, but they've done such a good job of pulling the
images together that I doubt they'll be visible on smaller video
displays. They are really only noticeable when there is horizontal
movement from panel-to-panel, especially when the moving object is
closer to the camera than where it was focused. They are also
noticeable in shots where they couldn't totally correct for the
geometry across the split. One interesting instance is one of the
few lateral tracking shots in the film, the camera traveling along
side a Pony Express rider. This shot looks rather strange in
Cinerama and really awkward in old combines. Here it looks better
but really emphasizes the fisheye lens effect.
The only negative is the reproduction of the Ultra Panavision
material. This has always been a problem since, for the original
version, it had to be double duped through Kodak's 5253 Intermediate
stock. Introduced in 1956 and supposedly improved over the next
twenty years, it was still not deemed good enough to allow labs to
stop release printing from the original cut camera negative until the
introduction of 5249 CRI stock in 1968. Use of the large format 65mm
negative helped, but even in original IB Cinerama prints, the image
quality change was quite noticeable and was worse in the combined
elements, which added an additional two generations to the material.
For cost reasons, MPI did not scan from the 65mm originals, which
still exist, but reduced to those scenes to 35mm VistaVision for
scanning. The quality of the results varies. Ironically, the
material taken from THE ALAMO and RAINTREE COUNTY, and here
reproduced from the three panel dupe negative, looks better.
The original seven channel dub has been rechanneled to 5.1, with an
enhanced low end and inconsistent placement of dialogue and effects
entirely in the center channel or with their onscreen sources. It
includes the overture, en'tracte, and walk out music.
Though I'm not a video person, I know this is going to be very
controversial when released in August, especially the non-"Smilebox"®
version, and I leave that to others.
--
Rick Mitchell
Film Editor/Film Historian/Film Director
Above is a post from the Yahoo fans_of_showmanship group.
Thanks,
Roland
.
