Platinum restored video transfer (against Special Ed.?)

[Evil Genie Jafar]

I'm watching Aladdin again and I simply can't believe how pristine and vibrant it looks; as if it was Finding Nemo.

The thing is that of course, this isn't just Aladdin, but also TLK and the other Platinum.

In contrast I don't think (having them), that Sleeping Beauty and Alice in Wonderland look this way, even tough they both had their video cleaned and restored also.... can't say about Mulan (it's coming soon from the DMC).

Someone else noticed this or is it just me?

If so, any reason why this is? (Not that I'm complaining, just curious).

[The Monkey's Uncle]

sometimes I wish they would leave the older movies alone. all this restoring makes them look to new.

take this quote from the new bambi commercial:

"Fully restored BEYOND its original brilliance"

that scares me.

[Teen Artist]

Are you asking why Sleeping Beauty and Alice don't look as vibrant as Aladdin? I suppose the answer is simply because the movies are from different time periods. Aladdin was made in the 90s, a time where colors were very prominent in our culture (as opposed to today, where people prefer muted, dark colors), and the use of those colors was probably easier than it was in the 50s (due to technology and budget).
There's only so much they can do to enhance the older films, any more and it wouldn't be the same movie.

[Evil Genie Jafar]

Are you asking why Sleeping Beauty and Alice don't look as vibrant as Aladdin? I suppose the answer is simply because the movies are from different time periods. Aladdin was made in the 90s, a time where colors were very prominent in our culture (as opposed to today, where people prefer muted, dark colors), and the use of those colors was probably easier than it was in the 50s (due to technology and budget).
There's only so much they can do to enhance the older films, any more and it wouldn't be the same movie.

But I do think Snow White looks the same way... I just saw it once tough.

And besides... Alice is quite colorful.

[toonaspie]

sometimes I wish they would leave the older movies alone. all this restoring makes them look to new.

take this quote from the new bambi commercial:

"Fully restored BEYOND its original brilliance"

that scares me.

hahahaha
I'm scared too

But look at it this way, few of us were actually alive when Bambi first came out. How do you know that your VHS copies of Bambi and a fresh film print from 1942 wouldnt be different? I mean film prints can age over time ya know.

[deathie mouse]

Jafar, Aladdin was made with the CAPS stuff where the DVD can be transfered from the digital source with no film step in between. So it can look completely "pure" and "pristine". When you watch it on the theater, or watch a video sourced from film, what you watch is something duplicated (copied) onto film. The regular modern Easmancolor print is normaly a third copy of the original negative:

Original Negative film-> Interpositive film -> Internegative film -> Print film

For video transfer they may use one of the earlier steps.
With the CAPS stuff you *bypass* the film steps.

Sleeping Beauty and Alice were shot on sequential Technicolor which is b/w negative film shot sequentially thru 3 color primary filters (RGB) so you make a separated b/w pure "record" of the colors that you can then reconstitute back by printing thru the same RGB filters onto Easmancolor intepositives and prints, or by using the ORIGINAL method of using the b/w records to create Cyan Magenta Yellow matrixes to print onto blank film (or sometimes onto film with a "Key" or Black record already on it)(Similar to CYMK magazine printing but better cus it uses pure color dyes and NO dots and it has the full contrast of trasmissive film, equal or even better than Kodachrome/Ektachome/Fujichrome slides) called Technicolor IB (Imbibition) Prints.

For videos of Technicolor shot films they usually first make a normal modern Eastmacolor print or interpositive before they transfer. (They used to transfer from actual Technicolor IBs or special low contrast made for TV IBs many years ago ) Lately , finally!, it ocurred to people at Lowry and other places, to transfer the b/w records direct to video/computer RGB and mix the colors electronically. But it still is film. Lowry goes a step further and removes the grain which i think it's all the steps done to Snow White.

I haven't seen the new Alice actually on DVD but the NTSC "Lowryed" Sleeping Beauty looks like my PAL non Lowryed Sleeping Beauty, except somewhat passed thru NR, which softened it, and edge enhanced, to compensate for it, so IMHDO it looks to me it was just the video master already made from film that was processed. (I could be wrong of course )


As for the color vibrancy thru the ages I might add that the look on today's video is mostly dependent on the guy at the controls and is limited theoretically only by the current TV systems (PAL, NTSC-SMPTE "C", HDTV-sRGB) and in actual practice by your display's color primaries.

"Old" films shot in true Technicolor actually can have on those b/w tricolor negatives (and Technicolor IB prints) much more saturated primary hues than almost all modern TV displays, which have a reduced color pallette. (Try a Kodak Wratten #25 red filter to see true deep blood reds )

Alice musta had very vibrant reds in the Queen of Hearts sequence on the Technicolor print. In fact the old ancient Laserdisc i watched a few years ago looked pretty vibrant and it hadn't been remastered 2 or 3 times like the new one has... which isn't as saturated as the previous dvd at least on the screen caps i seen...

It all depends on the artistic intent of the original and how the telecine colorist translates it.

Mulan is muted next to Aladdin. both are CAPS, no?

sometimes I wish they would leave the older movies alone. all this restoring makes them look to new.
take this quote from the new bambi commercial:

"Fully restored BEYOND its original brilliance"

that scares me.

and then tooonaspie wrote:

hahahaha
I'm scared too

But look at it this way, few of us were actually alive when Bambi first came out. How do you know that your VHS copies of Bambi and a fresh film print from 1942 wouldnt be different? I mean film prints can age over time ya know.

mmm properly made Technicolor IB prints don't fade so if you have one (or film frames from it) you can actually see how they looked then.
Also since b/w records don't fade, if you use the proper filters yiou can get the colors back. (of course the person doing this has to know what he is doing )

Eastmancolor prints and negatives do fade (some vewry badly) but if stored properly in low temperature vaults can last for years. (but of course many werent )

Fully restored BEYOND its original brilliance must mean they 're doing to the Bambi b/w negative all the full Snow White "treatment", by "removing" the film artifacts like grain from the negative and edge blurring by the camera lens and film emulsion etc, going into pure RGB, so apart from the color phosphour/LCD filters display limitations in saturation, and the DVD limits of resolution, it'll probably look as if it was shot today directly into the CAPS system from the Cels. If transfered onto Blu-Ray or laser burned onto film it would probably look even better and sharper than the original prints.

So it may be like Disney said: ho ho, i have been secretly holding this 70mm Technirama CAPS version of Bambi all these years! I'm sure Bambi will look better than the soft LD i have.

Is this a good thing? art is subjective
the medium is the massage.
your milage might vary
some restrictions apply
now in full dimensional stereo
please deposit 10 cents
not available in antartica
collect all color variations!

[Jordan]

The restoration of "Alice.." in the Masterpiece Eidition was just GORGEOUS ! As good as the Snow White restoration was !

[2099net]

For more information on the restoration of the older Disney movies, check out the following (all lovingly re-typed by myself)

From UK magazine totalDVD issue 71

Saving the Animals
To date, the meticulous work that went into the restoration of Bambi has been the most involved of any Hollywood move. To find out more about how the process works, we caught up with Animation Director David Bossert and Director of Mastering and Restoration for Walt Disney Pictures, Steve Poehlein

Bambi was released in 1942 – do you still have the original negative?

SP: We have all our early feature films, although the negative for Bambi is on loan to the library of Congress because they have a special vault in which to house nitrate film stock. It's climate controlled and they try to do all they can to retard the eventual deterioration of nitrate film.
DB: Unfortunately, nitrate is a very volatile film stock and highly explosive so you can't store large quantities of it anywhere. And you don't want to go anywhere near the negative when it comes out of the vault. Not because it's dangerous, but because it’s the only one and you don't want to risk anything happening to it. So a lot of tender, loving care is put into how it is handled. We even transported it to the studio in a refrigerated truck.

Was the film shot in the old three-strip Technicolor method of printing a black and white negative for each of the three primary colours?

DB: No, Bambi was shot using the 'successive exposure' method, Basically, they would shoot each frame of film three times, through a colour wheel to get the three different colours. It was a brilliant process. In fact, we were using 'successive exposure' on our films until The Great Mouse Detective in 1988.

How complex is the cleaning up process and where there many artefacts on the original film that were inherent of the period?

DB: Dust was inherit in the technology of the day and so if you look at any films that were shot during that period, you'll see specks – unlike some of the later films we did, including Aladdin and The Lion King, which were done in the digital system.

SP: With modern films, you don't have these problems – dust or light reflections. You have these pristine images, but when you go back and look at a projected print of Bambi or Pinocchio you're surprised at how grubby they seem. They would try to keep the stuff as clean as possible, but when you're dealing with acetate cels there's a certain amount of static electricity that attracts dust and dirt, and it's virtually impossible to be 100 percent clean.

At present we’re working on the restoration of Cinderella and when that was made in the early 50s, technology had advanced considerably. For example, they decided to use compressed air to clean cels and between each shot of a frame they were blowing dust off the images.

DB: In one film that was worked on, you could actually see the reflection of an open door in the glass plate above the cel. Apparently, the cameraman had the door open when he shot this one frame because it wasn't there during the whole scene. It's worth remembering that 'successive exposure' film stock went through four processing staged before it was printed. With our restoration programme, we can bypass all they by returning to the original camera negative. The image that we get is crisper and cleaner than it was possible to produce in 1942. What really knocked my socks off was what happened when you lined up the three colour references in a mechanical process at the Technicolor facility. They just weren't in alignment which meant that the ink lines of the characters had a softness to them.

How were you sure to restore the colour picture to its correct hues?

DB: Some of the original animators were consulted. Veteran Disney animators like Frank Thomas and Olli Johnston were invaluable to us in sharing their memories of how the movies were produced. We always stick to the original concept, the intent of the film at that time. We don't set out to change anything, just to preserve a movie, return it to its original luster.

SP: We used colour backgrounds from the Animation Research Library to get the colour baselines. Sometimes the original backgrounds were painted in such a way as to compensate for the contrast that would be picked up later on film. So we'd take these backgrounds and reshoot them again on SE film to replicate what the colour would have been.

The process sounds expensive…

DB: At the end of the day, projects like Bambi have two major components; one is the restoration of the movie for the DVD release, but the other is to preserve the elements we have for future generations.