A few words about...™ The Wizard of Oz -- in Blu-ray - Page 11

WB steps up to the plate more times than not, when they make a mistake. They did a fix of one of the Matrix Blu-rays, for ONE frame that was messed up. Even did an exchange for the title.

For the collectors price of this title, which i dont own because of that reason, they should make sure it is done right...100%

The Matrix Revolutions issue was an encoding error that was a relatively inexpensive fix - re-encode the file.

This Oz issue is something that likely occurred during the Lowry clean-up or the HD master, which is 5-6 steps back in the process, and would be prohibitively expensive to correct.

As for whether it "should have been caught" - those expecatitions are rather unrealistic. People very familiar with the film, such as Mr. Harris, didn't notice it. And at which phase should it have been caught? Ideally at the Lowry clean-up or HD master stage. If caught on the final disc QC an issue like this would likely be approved. After all, it's not a deal killer, extremely few people would notice, and street dates and millions of dollars would be lost if one had to go back to the HD master to fix it.

It's the principle of diminishing returns.

Sorry, getting my titles mixed up. I think you know what I mean, though - an issue such as this would be from the early stages, during the digital scanning to 8k or other prep work, etc. It's not a fix that would be a matter of flipping a switch or recompressing the digital file.

I agree with your comments. I know that they do. They have had awesome customer service in the past. That's why I brought this up...they may not even know about it. I wish they would also fix the deleted/altered Garland line, but that's wishful thinking.
Edited by eric scott richard - 11/7/09 at 4:46pm

In the future they should definitely pass a test copy or two of upcoming titles to the folks here. Any mistakes not caught by them would definitely be caught by the eagle-eyes on this site. I've often wondered why the studios don't do that, with all the problematic discs (BR and DVD) that there have been in the past several years.

Security reasons. The legal problems with such a program would be a nightmare.

Yep, I agree.  Piracy a huge problem now for the studios.

But what about all the review copies that are sent out to HTF members? Those can be pirated too, no?

Review copies are final versions of the disc build, after the QC stages, and are far too close to the street date to make any significant changes to unless a *MAJOR* issue is found, and then that's a loss of a ton of money to do that.

Hi all,
          I'm new here...Just finished watching my "Sing-along" version of The Wizard of Oz, and before you ask, I didn't (sing along, that is). Disc of the year so far. I can see only one blu-ray rendered film with the potential to beat it - if it ever comes to blu-ray: The Quiet Man!

I forgot to check before I sent the disc back to netflix, but isn't there a deleted scene with Buddy Ebson that was included on a previous version?

I didn't notice if it was included on the blu.

Edited by TonyD - 11/12/09 at 7:36pm

The "footage" you are talking about is the song "If I Only Had A Heart" sung by Ebsen before his untimely departure from the film. It is accompanied by costume test/portrait sitting stills. It's on the Blu-Ray.

Sorry- the point I was trying to make (which I guess I didn't make clearly) was not that review copies would be suitable for QC testing (I know they aren't), but that review copies can be pirated, too.

I got my UK copy today. I wasn't really interested in the entire gift set and the MGM doc, so this was an easy buy. Yes, the cover doesn't look as good as the US version, but that's a small detraction. The 'Sing-A-Long' banner isn't as big as the pictures suggest, so it's not too bad.
Now the movie, I think everything has been said about it, and I agree with those statements. It looks absolutely beautiful.

Are the extras all in NTSC, non-region format?

Marvin, Warner releases are always open region with SD content in NTSC.

I was watching TBS tonight, and I guess they are using the new transfer because I saw it as well- very minor to be sure, but still visible to me.

They are using the new transfer, because the wires were gone. It is minor, but there was never a problem there. I'm an Oz fanatic so I've seen the film hundreds of times. Of course it would pop out to me right away. Shame.

Eric,

I was curious regarding the Wizard of Oz frame problem that you have mentioned in this thread (and also over on the forum at IMDB) that occurs at 32:29.  I single-stepped through the frames and came to the following conclusion:

1. Everything is normal up through frame 46750 (32:29.865).
2. Frame 46751 (32:29.906) is where the glitch occurs.  The right-hand side of the frame looks correct, but the left-hand side of the frame is a duplicate of the following frame (46752).
3. Frame 46752 (32:29.948) is correct.  It's left-hand side is the same as frame 46751.

I don't believe this is a "mistake" in the compositing or restoration process.  I believe this was done intentionally to cover up irreparable film damage to the left-hand side of frame 46751.  The original film from where the scans were made is 70 years old, and this color process they used consisted of 3 separate negatives.  Severe damage to just one of the negatives in this frame would render it unusable.  Since other DVDs and transfers don't have this problem, I can only assume they were originally made from standard definition intermediate sources, or were made before the damage to this frame occurred.

In short, I don't think you've uncovered a mistake, but simply an artifact of the restoration.

Interesting, Joe. But if the frame was damaged, couldn't they have just used the materials stored in the computer from 2005 and fixed it from there?

Typically they would use information from the frame before and or after to repair a torn image. Unless there was too much movement in those frames to provide enough information to fill in the missing details.

Doug

Maybe, but there may have been problems with that approach.  The scans of the original footage done for the Blu-Ray were 4K resolution, I believe.  If the scans done in 2005 weren't suitable for HD, then you would have part of the frame dipping to some lower resolution.  This might have looked strange, possibly stranger than the skipped 1/2 frame.

Another possibility is that they couldn't properly match the colors to the new scans.  The new scans are being done on different equipment, with a different production process.  Maybe the inserted 1/2 frame would have been off-color and more noticeable.

Or possibly those original scans from 2005 weren't done from the original film at all, but from some intermediate master.  In the interests of purity, maybe they wanted to do everything possible to remain true to the original film and decided on the repeated frame approach, even though the intermediate master exists.

I find it more than coincidence that this damaged frame occurs in this scene.  This scene is a composited scene, with the special effect of Glinda's bubble floating away, and with the live action of the Munchkins.  The source films would have been run through transfer machines multiple times with mattes and transparencies to produce the final master, so it's no coincidence that the frames in this part of the film might have been more likely to suffer damage.

I wonder if the 24fps of the blu ray makes this more apparent? I wonder how the new dvd looks. This means that if a frame is damaged that the damage would have occured after the scanning for the 2005 edition. They used the original negatives then as well.

Yes, it's possible that 24p makes the artifact more apparent.  On DVD, 24 fps film is played back at 30 fps using the 3:2 pulldown technique, which involves repeating certain fields of each frame.  Thus, the information we're talking about here that's missing in the Blu-Ray frame may not be as noticeable on DVD since some of the frame information is repeated already.

And yes, it's possible this frame was damaged between 2005 and 2009.  Even just a slight tear halfway across the frame would probably render it unusable.  It would be difficult to get the frame into the scanner, and even if you did the scan would show a large defect that wouldn't be fixable digitally.

^
Umm post 269 back in October......immediately followed by discussion of this anomaly

Yes, I read the entire thread.  The point is that when the issue was first brought up and discussed, the discussion focused on this anomaly being a mistake in the transfer that needed to be fixed.

My new assertion is that this anomaly itself IS a fix.  It's not a mistake in the transfer, it's an intentional repair of film damage.  Do I have proof of that?  No.  I just consider it the most likely scenario.

Here's another theory: There is a lot of instability in that composite on the previous dvd. The background, in particular, wavers horizontally. Perhaps WB employed a stabilization technique whereby the frames were prevented from shaking, resulting in the Munchkins "jumping" when the image did shift.

I just got the Emerald Edition (3-disc set).  I must say I am surprised that there hasn't been more discussion about the horrendous quality of the TV-movie "The Dreamer of Oz." Only one post (#148) has mentioned it. Sure, I realize the movie itself is the most important thing and it looks spectacular. The John Ritter TV movie is merely a "here you go" tossed-in supplement and nobody appears to care much about it, but really, how could a 1990 TV movie look this bad? It is worse than VHS and actually has videotape drop-outs in the picture! According to IMDB the telefilm was shot on 35mm film, and no I would not expect them to retransfer it for this release, but surely the original telecine transfer from 1990 looked better than this. I'm not kidding when I say the version on the blu-ray had to have been VHS video-taped off an on-air broadcast!

Check out the first 2 seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation from 1987 and 88. Looks horrible and not much better than VHS.  Yes a lot of telecine work from the late 80s and early 90's is pretty bad. Add to that the Dreamer of Oz was probably edited on video (480i), so there is likely no edited film to go back to and re-transfer. The whole film would likely have to be re-scanned and re-edited from scratch. Probably not something Warner was going to spend money on.

Doug