- Joined
- Feb 8, 1999
- Messages
- 18,312
- Real Name
- Robert Harris
You're certainly welcome to disagree, but what I'm describing is not about the L&H "mythos". It's a matter of reality. These were shot on film, and L&H's images and the essences of their gags were captured and preserved by film grain. Take away the grain and you're taking away the essential record of their performances which is on the grain.
It's the same as transferring analogue sound, which is a sign wave, with lots of high and low range information, to the digital realm, which is a square wave, which only preserves the middle range, and then using an overly aggressive cleaning tool to get rid of the tape hiss. Yes, you can hear the voices and instruments without any impediment, and it may sound "better" to an untrained ear, but there's very little information left. What remains is a pale shadow of the original performance, so that many people hearing Maria Callas for the first time on CD might think her voice isn't all that impressive, because so much of what made that voice great is missing.
You talk as if there is only a choice between dupey, contrasy images and the overly clean ones, denuded of grain and reality, that are on this set. But it would have been easy, if perhaps a bit more time consuming, to use a cleaning program carefully, and preserve the grain while leaving the images even more crystalline and easy to see, as the grain would still be there, for taking out the grain softens the image considerably. That's the point Mr. Harris and others are trying to make.
I’ll try to post some representative samples, albeit compressed of a 1927 film, in 4k scan from OCN, scan of original print frames, 2k scan of 35mm dupe neg from print - all with zero processing or cleanup, which means that (within reasonable proximity per a .jpeg) they should show high frequency information, lost on these discs.