![]() ![]() Heck, as long as even one of the dye layers is intact, they can do quite a bit in the digital realm. Nowadays, when one layer of emulsion has faded (like the cyan record), making everything magenta, it's possible to recreate the faded layer digitally and fix a lot of this. They do their best today, but most of the damage was done in the 1960s and 1970s, when very few execs cared about film preservation. I think they went through about 30 years of neglect, until Sony took over at the end of the 1980s. If you ask me, the Columbia Pictures film elements looked worse. Fox is actually one of the better-organized studios in terms of keeping track of their negatives and other materials, and they've spent quite a bit of money sprucing things up over the years. But since Fox always owned DeLuxe (since 1919), that was pretty much always their main lab. Some of the 3-strip Fox Technicolor negatives did survive. We use a digital still of the last "good" frame as a reference, but sometimes, all we can do is just put a bandaid on the problem and say "this is the best we can do." To fix this, we have to resort to power windows, gradiated filter effects, and all kinds of nonsense. Sometimes, two perfs are bad, so the top half of the picture is one color, and the bottom half is another color. And the stuff from the 1950s and 1960s can be really awful.Ĭompounding this is that the lab technicians from that era tried to color-time the transitions, and their optical printers sometimes malfunctioned, resulting in the change happening on the top half of the frame first (what I call a 1-perf mislight). It got better in the 1980s, but I'd say anything earlier than that is difficult. Often, the color-matching is non-linear, meaning the picture is brighter on the left than it is on the right, or it's purple at the top but greenish at the bottom, so trying to get the images to match 100% is almost impossible with very old films. We try very, very hard in digital mastering to meticulously match these transitions so that the "bump" on the splice isn't too visible, but the knobs only go so far. ![]() ![]() Because the dissolve or fade requires going down two generations (interpositive -> internegative), and the film stock is completely different from the virgin camera negative stock into which it's spliced, it has completely different shading, color, grain, and sharpness characteristics. After the credits are over and you are out of "dupe-world", it does indeed look very nice.Ĭlick to expand.In lab terms, it's a cut-in optical (as explained by several people above). I eventualy figured out that he was basing his entire assessment on the opening scenes of the film. I remembered it being one of the better looking VistaVision films from that era on home video, and was puzzled by the reviewers comments. I read an online review of the Kirk Douglas/Burt Lancaster "Gunfight at the OK Corral" DVD from Paramount one time where the reviewer savaged it for its terrible picture quality. Opticals used for the title sequences of films can exhibit the same issues. There are a lot of long takes in the film on the poor dupe stock. Not only is the dupe stock horrible and replete with "ringing" artifacts that look like extreme video edge enhancement, but they used the dupe film stock from the fade all the way until the next hard cut rather rather than just for the length of the fade. Perhaps the worst example in existence for a major film is George Stevens' "Giant". They are always a couple of generations lower than the source, and the issue is often compounded because a lot of crappy dupe stocks were used over the years (with occasionally crappy lab work, particularly by the in-house labs at the studios in the early Eastman color era ). In early years of digitalizing those movies, those transitions were left as they were and only "clean negative" was dust busted, stabilized and color graded. The biggest problem is to match color of the rest, stabilizing and dust busting those transitions and fades, because it is time consuming. But now, when using digital technology and scanning original negatives, or in many cases, scanning new intermediate positives made from negatives, it is really "beating the eyes". #FADE IN FILM MOVIE#Intermediates and positive prints have a tendention to loss some colors and details too, so if you saw a movie back then in movie theatre, those transitions and fades weren't so different as other scenes. So there was automaticaly two generation loss. Then they made fades on printer onto another negative, which was then spliced to a master negative. So, in that times, they made an intermediate positive from negative and a projection positive from intermediate. Truth is, that fades were made on optical printer. ![]() Click to expand.Well, this is not reassembling old prints with negative. ![]()
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