A Few Words About While we wait for A few words about...™ Raiders of the Lost Ark -- in Blu-ray (1 Viewer)

[Douglas Monce]

Well,that's not the same colour timing as the Blu-ray is it?
The BBC ran an HD copy of Raiders a few weeks back which didn't look any different from previous releases (although I wasn't looking all that hard - the colour timing issue hadn't arisen at that point). I'd assume Paramount would supply them with the current HD source unless they did their own transfer. Leading to the question how many HD masters could there be floating around out there and who ensures they're all to spec?

As the new HD masters were done specifically for the blu-ray, I doubt they would be available anywhere, other than theaters, until after the blu-ray has been out for a few weeks, or months.
Doug

 

[Douglas Monce]

What a thread! One person says, "Too orange!!!" while a reviewer for another site says, "Too blue in certain scenes" while another poster who has a very bad habit of making statements that sound like fact and that he has inside information, having that statement proved incorrect (that only Raiders received a 4K scan) and then doing the usual disappearing act while screen caps are posted that no one has any idea of their accuracy. I will simply say what I always say: "I'll have the disc come Tuesday and AFTER I've watched it without my nose pressed up against the screen, THEN I'll be able to post thoughts.

I too will have it on Tuesday, but first I'm going to be seeing it in the theater that night. One of our local theaters, called the Cine Capri,that sports 4k projection and a 75 foot screen, (which is larger than most digital "Imax" screens) made a deal with Paramount to show the film for a week before the blu-ray release. Should be a blast to see it on a huge screen again! It will also be interesting to see how the 4k looks.
Doug

 

[Douglas Monce]

Add my name to the string of folks agreeing with Mark! I saw Raiders in the theater at least a dozen times and it did NOT look as over-saturated and blue as the DVD screen grabs. I also feel the Blu-ray color palette is MUCH more realistic.
Take this shot, for example:
The shadows tell us that the sun is behind the characters (relative to the camera) and over their right shoulders. With the sun in that position the camera is partially shooting into the sun. The sky in the background should NOT be as blue as it is in the DVD shot. In addition, it's an archaeological dig so there should rightfully be dust in the air. That would further cause a white-out of the sky due to the sun reflecting off of dust particles.
The Indy I remember from the theaters (and from Laserdisc) most definitely had more of a golden hue to it. Did Spielberg and company take it too far toward the yellow during the "restoration"? Maybe. But the Blu-ray shots are a LOT closer to what I remember vs. the DVD.
Mark

The blu-ray (assuming these are somewhat accurate) also has far more shadow detail than the DVD. It looks much more film like and not crushed like the DVD.
Doug

 

[Paul_Scott]

The blu-ray (assuming these are somewhat accurate) also has far more shadow detail than the DVD. It looks much more film like and not crushed like the DVD.
Doug

And the Blu-ray has far less shadow detail than the interim HD transfer (made after the 2003 one originally used for the DVDs).
In fact the newly imposed yellow haze and crushed blacks on the Bd, make the image look flatter and less dynamic than this other HD transfer- a transfer which to my eyes, fully jibes with my memories of how this looked theatrically. And yes, I've also owned the WS laserdisc. Though I got rid of it well before the 2003 DVD showed up, the visual differences between them never struck me as false, and self consciously manipulated, as some of these BD caps have.
I'm willing to concede that the DVD may not be fully accurate- but the Bd caps I'm seeing go way out in another direction. I never saw a teal Paramount logo back in '81, and the jungle scenes that I remember were not tinted yellow or sepia. And no one in the film looked like an Oompa Loompa or Jersey Shore refugee.

 

[Douglas Monce]

And the Blu-ray has far less shadow detail than the interim HD transfer (made after the 2003 one originally used for the DVDs).
In fact the newly imposed yellow haze and crushed blacks on the Bd, make the image look flatter and less dynamic than this other HD transfer- a transfer which to my eyes, fully jibes with my memories of how this looked theatrically. And yes, I've also owned the WS laserdisc. Though I got rid of it well before the 2003 DVD showed up, the visual differences between them never struck me as false, and self consciously manipulated, as some of these BD caps have.
I'm willing to concede that the DVD may not be fully accurate- but the Bd caps I'm seeing go way out in another direction. I never saw a teal Paramount logo back in '81, and the jungle scenes that I remember were not tinted yellow or sepia. And no one in the film looked like an Oompa Loompa or Jersey Shore refugee.

Sorry I have to completely disagree with you. The blacks are not crushed on the blu-ray images, they ARE crushed on the DVD images. This was probably done on the DVD, because if the natural tonal range were used, the DVD with its lack of detail, would look VERY flat and bland. This doesn't mean that is the way the film looked projected. The blu-ray has a much more natural range from light to dark that the rather over processed looking DVD.
I've seen the HD versions of this film showed on cable, and while it has more detail, it still looks crushed and pushed to the blue side, which is not at all how I remember the film looking.
Doug

 

[Paul_Scott]

I was talking primarily about the second HDTV transfer.
Here it is (The Bd cap is the first, with the second HDTV transfer cap below it)- you tell me which looks more crushed
I mean, C'mon. Does you honestly think Raiders had a teal and orange push to it back in 1981?
Or how about this shot for shadow detail
I don't recall any of the Tanis set shots looking as artificially labored as the Bd portion does. Aamzing in the midst of all that orange haze they manged to pull out some teal highlights on the boots.
It is also interesting to note that in the trailer for the Bd set, they use HD clips, but nothing that looks as stylized as the Bd caps. Everything looks balanced and natural. I was fully on board with what i saw in the trailers. But the actual Bd is a different story.
And while I do admit this conversation has made me go back and take a second look at some of these shots- and that there may in fact be a blue bias to some of them that itself isn't entirely accurate (to the original theatrical look), the alternative that you seem to think is more so just looks like cartoon land to me it is so overboard in the other direction.
Had the final result been some composite between the two, I wouldn't have thought twice about it.
In fact, the composite looks the closest to I how I recall this sequence. I honestly don't recall Indy and company being bathed in orange (clothes and all). That would have been a highly stylized move and I'm sure by the fourth or fifth viewing of the film (in a theater) I would have picked up on it- especially being as how I was just entering HS and a future career in art was the focus of all my chosen elective courses. I may not have been a prodigy on the subject, but I was a lot more keyed into things like color, composition, lighting, etc than most of my peer age group were (and still are).

 

[kenkraly20212]

Paul_Scott once again your over re acting about the transfer of Raiders. It's a warm color pallet not a teal and orange push as you clam it is. Sorry I agree with what Douglas said. The DVD had crushed black levels on the transfer and not a lot of detail.

 

[Paul_Scott]

Kenneth, look at the trunk of the sub in the background of the first shot. The Bd most definitely is pushing that towards teal. The coloring in the second is far more more natural, more neutral, less manipulated, and consistent with what you would have seen at a theater in 1981.

 

[kenkraly20212]

Kenneth, look at the trunk of the sub in the background of the first shot. The Bd most definitely is pushing that towards teal. The coloring in the second is far more more natural, more neutral, less manipulated, and consistent with what you would have seen at a theater in 1981.

I did not see the film until it came out on dvd in 2003 and I was born 2 years after Raiders came out in 1983 so I don't know what the film looked like color wise originally. And I don't agree it's not a teal and orange push as you clam it to be.

 

[DVDvision]

Paul, You're NOT supposed to see every detail on any given shot. It was the case on many VHS, LD and DVD masters because they had to make up for every Joe Blow badly set up TV set.

Now, with the HDTV sets and the HD format, we are so much advanced, that any director can finally color time and contrast his movie without fear of it looking drab on any given set. ie you're not obliged to make every detail in your picture stand out. You can actually control how you contrast it. So if it means some previously seen set detail is now more dark, good.

When HD started, many color timers used to set the masters as you like and are used to, very bright, with all the details lightened out. That's not how any filmmaker with any good tools at his disposal would light his movie, that makes it looks like a TV movie.

Your composite may appeal to you, but you're not the color timer of the movie, or the DP, or the director. You can dislike their choices, but not on a technical level, just an artistic level.

I'm watching now again, for the second time this week after the Fox screening, Raiders. It blows the old HDTV master out of the water. You can like the HDTV master, it just means you are used to how the movie looked like on previous home-video format.

 

[Paul_Scott]

Whoa, I was responding the assertion that the Bd wasn't crushing shadow detail that the DVD was.
It's amusing how the goal post keeps moving. First it was the crushing of shadow detail was one key that the DVD was not a faithful translation. Now it's that the non Bd HD transfer has too much shadow detail that makes it incorrect. How convenient. The Bd is always right.

I'm watching now again, for the second time this week after the Fox screening, Raiders. It blows the old HDTV master out of the water. You can like the HDTV master, it just means you are used to how the movie looked like on previous home-video format.

It means that none of the previous home video formats ever struck me as being a wildly uncharacteristic representation of the films visuals as I remembered them.

The original press release for the DVD claims it is was "painstakingly restored" and "completely remastered", which doesnt sound like rubber stamped approvals were involved.
http://www.theindyexperience.com/indy_dvds/1st_dvd_press_release.php
I recall that the same claims were made about the VHS and laserdisc releases, which look much closer to the DVD color timing than the blu ray. It seems highly unlikely that Spielberg would go through 3 complex and high profile home video transfers and releases, plus an HD TV broadcast release and not get the color timing he wanted. It is much more likely that the blu ray release is the one which is botched or rubber stamped, or he perhaps he just changed his mind.

This.

 

[Nick*Z]

Temple of Doom gets rained on a lot. It doesn't help that Spielberg's gone on record as saying it's his least favorite. Personally, I've always loved it. It's not better than the first film. None of them are. But it's my close second favorite. Never cared for Crusade. Absolutely hated Crystal Skull.
Reasons? Raiders is a high octane adventure yarn that effortlessly mixes its comedy and adventure to really capture that Saturday matinee serial feel. It's a roller coaster ride and it works on every level. Temple of Doom is a much darker, more serious outing. But according to the time line set up by the films themselves, Temple is supposed to predate the Raiders adventure. The first half of Temple plays like Lost Horizon, the last half like Gunga Din. But it still works. And it's imbued with some wonderful sequences that are among the best Spielberg has ever done: the escape from the nightclub, the improbable but exhilarating jump from the plane, the escape from the bug infested cave of spikes, the mine car ride, and, the penultimate bridge collapse. Great stuff. It's a darker film, yes. But hardly inferior to its predecessor. It's just different.
Crusade ruined the series for me. The relationship between Sean Connery and Harrison Ford became too coy with Connery's dad chronically referring to him as 'junior'. Part of the appeal, at least for me, of the original Jones character was that he was a guy that every guy - myself included - wished he could be and that most every woman would want to be with. He was a rogue who knew how to get the job done either with villains or women and that made him an appealing adventurer. In Crusade he became largely a figure of fun, the early sequence with River Phoenix as Indy illustrating an ineptitude in the character that the rest of the film seemed to play up rather than down. Indy just keeps getting stumped and tromped on by the Nazis in Crusade. He's always getting the short end of the stick and forced to bend, if still never to break, to their will. Also, the unforgivable sin for me was that Crusade had no loyal gal pal for our Indy to save, seduce, etc.. Okay, I get it - this is a father/son story. But it didn't really work for me.
Crystal Skull? Let's not go there, okay? Digital red ant invasion, swinging like Tarzan from the vines, Cate's horribly mangled Russian accent, hiding from a nuclear bomb inside a fridge. I rest my case. Not to mention the extensive use of CGI. Part of the ever lasting appeal of the first two movies is that everything's done full scale, with clever use of matte paintings and stunt men and visual effects craftsman giving it their all. The oh so obvious CGI in part three ruined the experience for me, particularly the last sequence in the cave that was a shameless and ineffectual attempt to reproduce the finale to Raiders with its swirling ghost-like aliens.
Bottom line: I can't wait for the Blu-ray because of the first two movies and it's so good to hear that so far it looks like we're in for one heck of a good treat. Needed that to substitute for the malaise surrounding the Hitchcock Masterpiece Collection.

 

[Joe Bernardi]

I can't wait for delivery of the Blu-ray Indiana Jones Collection so I can post screen grabs.

 

[zoetmb]

The best, in my opinion, is the 7 channel Cinerama sound, especially on How The West Was Won. Properly played on vintage speakers, this is a huge treat.
Some fine sonic experiences include the following, all before 1963:
Around the World in 80 Days (70mm 30fps 6 track mag with directional dialogue)
Ben-hur
South Pacific
HTWWW
The Music Man (35mm 4 track but was apparently recorded with 70mm exhibition planned)

"How The West Was Won", which I saw in its original release at the Loew's Cinerama (Capitol) in NYC, was the movie that made me want to be a recording engineer (which I eventually became). Of course back in the day, any mag soundtrack was such a revelation compared to optical that they were all impressive. There was one scene in HTWWW where one of the characters is standing in front of a glass window in a saloon or bar and there are dancing girls (or something similar) behind the glass. That sounded so realistic to me, I was completely blown away. I haven't seen the Blu-ray, so I don't know if it's as impressive there.
And I remember seeing "It's A Mad....World" at the Warner Cinerama, but being disappointed by the sound as I was when I first saw "2001: A Space Odyssey" at the Boston Cinerama in the Fall of 1968. Of course in those days, I was very unsophisticated and would have found "ping-pong sound" to be quite desirable.
The other film of that era that blew me away was "West Side Story" in 70mm at the Rivoli. After I saw that film and acquired the LP soundtrack, I used to torture my childhood friends by forcing them to put their heads between the speakers of my suitcase stereo record player. Of course, it wasn't the same, but that was as close as I could get in the home environment.
Many people on this site claim that we don't have the memory to remember substantial quality factors of presentations so long ago and I agree to some extent, but when we're really impressed, we tend to remember. I can even remember where I was sitting for West Side Story - it was the first row of the mezzanine, right in the middle and to this day (almost 50 years later), I can remember my father eyeing a very attractive woman wearing a Jackie Kennedy-type dress. For HTWWW, I first sat in an ideal seat in the orchestra and then saw the film again with my junior high school class where we sat in the balcony. Considering I can't remember what I ate for breakfast yesterday, I find this to be amazing.

 

[zoetmb]

I disagree. I have been looking at several books and magazines with film blow ups and production photographs and they do NOT match the blu ray. Do you have some examples?

Come now...that's a completely unreliable way of matching color. The photographer on the set is not necessarily shooting with the same white balance as the cinematographer. Even if he/she was, the film print gets color timed, not for accuracy but for aesthetic appeal. Each of those publications adjust the color (whether knowingly or not) and then were further limited by their own printing press limitations. I have gone to press checks to approve color for printed packaging and it's NEVER the same as the original - it's always a compromise. Besides, transparencies (film) and printing on paper (pigment) are completely different technologies and they're never going to look the same.
And as RAH has pointed out, even in a theatre, both due to the differences from print to print and differences in the quality of projection and the environment (projection glass, dirty screen, etc.), the look of the film varied from theatre to theatre.
I used to consult for a company who I can't name here, but my job was to evaluate opening-day presentation quality at theatres. If the film was playing on more than one screen of a multiplex, I had to watch it on every screen. I can tell you that the experience was different on every screen to the extent where each audience reacted completely differently to the same film. There are too many factors to go into here but every difference you can imagine in visual and audio quality as will as screen size and the atmosphere of the theatre itself contributed to how the audience reacted to the film and it was always different. And then compound that by the fact that I saw the presentation on the first day. Especially in the film days and when films would actually play in theatres for months, not just a week or two, how different the experience would be as the print wore out.

 

[Mark Booth]

http://www.hometheaterforum.com/content/type/61/id/167018/width/500/height/1000

Sorry, but the composite you created is still too blue. The foliage in the background has too much blue and the mist on the right side is still too blue. The 2012 Blu-ray grab looks the most natural to me, and how I remember it looking in the theater in 1981. The whole thing had this "dusty" look to it.
Speaking of dust, look at the scene with the boots up on the table. The Blu-ray grab has the appearance of a dusty haze in the air, just as an archeological dig should have. The HD grab (and DVD) lack that dusty feel.
Yes, it's possible that the color timing of the Blu-ray has taking things a bit too far toward the yellow side, but the Blu-ray grabs still look closer to what I remember and are very much more realistic.
Mark

 

[bigshot]

The color is quite different from the way it's looked in the past with the modern "teal and orange" color palette that's so popular now. Even the jungle scenes at the beginning have teal pushed into the shadows. The color isn't pushed one way or the other. It looks like it was semi colorized by making dark things teal and light things orange. It looks nice, but it really isn't the way the film looked in theaters. It originally looked pretty brown and muted.

 

[Paul_Scott]

As long as we are posting images....

Film Negative:
]


Blu-ray:


[/QUOTE]It's interesting that Paramount released a promotional trailer released in conjunction with the initial announcement of the Bd set, just as Universal did with Jaws, that contains those two still images in a glitzy little before and after demo.
It also shows the sequence below, live action, illustrating the restoration/refurbishment that went on.



I was willing to concede that some shots may in fact be less blue than I remembered- but not this one. This looks absolutely nothing like this sequence has ever looked at the theater until this new Bd revision.
Again, congrats if you like it ("thank you, sir. May I have another?") . I think it looks like utter ca-ca.


.

 

[the butcher]

I literally just signed up here to say I agree entirely with Paul Scott and I'm glad that I'm not the only one who thinks the BD transfer's color scheme is off. That latest bit of comparison between the Blu-ray trailer and the actual Blu-ray should convince some people.
You can also plainly see that the yellow filter (it looks like they dropped an orange gel on the camera lens!) is muting or dulling the whites, mostly seen on the top of the Ark.
I have never seen Indy in its original theatrical run, but I watched it on VHS, on TV and on DVD, and as soon as I saw the IMAX trailer, I thought "this doesn't look right". Would so many years of home video get the color palette wrong and now, miraculously, the BD reveals entirely different colors that are supposedly "the true ones"?
Maybe some choose to remember this hot, sun-drenched movie filled with magical golden artefacts as actually golden-hued, but it's not my case and this transfer's colors are just wrong.

 

[kenkraly20212]

I don't agree with anyone who does not like the new transfer of Raiders. Granted the color timing looks different but it's not all that bad as some clam it is. It's not a teal and orange push it's a warm color pallet. You expect too much perfection for this release you can't get older titles to look like avatar you just can't. And no I will not get the Blu-Ray's until Tuesday so until I see I it I won't know what it looks like.