DVD Josh

I'm pretty sure I just look all respect for Harris after reading his comments about Pan. This is the same person who bashed all the non-SB cuts of Lawrence of Arabia, and supervised a new transfer to rectify it, for the same reasons as Pan suffers from. I guess he forgot all about that. Shameful on his part.

Al_Tahoe

Isn't he the same guy who went on and on and on about how FANTASTIC the new standard DVD release of The Searchers was - and it turned out that the new edition has ugly green skies instead of blue, as well as some other significant problems?

baracine

Would it be possible for you to post the source for your quote?

But whatever else Harris says, he is clear about one thing: the colour problems are with the choices made during the transfer and NOT with the photochemical resoration of the film elements which yielded the colours we (well, some of us) know and love. The bad colour choices were entirely a decision at the digital level and, as such, totally arbitrary.

I other words, Harris does not attack the restoration work on the film itself (by Lowry/DTS), which is good and will be preserved for posterity but the horrible transfer of the latest edition. You can't attack the technical expertise of Lowry/DTS after the wonderful job they did on the restoration of Cinderella - which had a good DVD transfer - and the evidence of the preceding DVD transfers of Peter Pan, which were excellent (colour-wise).

The Valeyard

Home Theater Forum:

http://www.hometheaterforum.com/htf/...d.php?t=254760


I only take issue with this comment:

I guess this means that in his eyes, any changes made to a film and released to DVD is A-OK because the original is trapped in a vault somewhere...never to be seen again. It gives license to the color changes in Pan & Mermaid, digital alterations to the Star Wars films and any other edits made for home video. Funny words coming from one of the top restoration experts. I guess he can stop his efforts to restore the edits made to It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

baracine

Yes, it does sound strange and fatalistic, as if there is nothing anybody can do about it - except maybe criticize.

Robert Harris is a guy who really cares about old films and has sweated buckets trying to get Kim Novak's green sweater just right in Vertigo. But he is also a realist. His interview with the restorer of The Searchers ( http://www.thedigitalbits.com/articl...ris082106.html ) shows that nothing miraculous could be done with the faded original negative, the untested colour separations and the original "bad photography" the restorers had to work with.

In the case of Peter Pan, however, a film whose picture portion has always been magnificiently preserved, there is simply no excuse to make the latest DVD transfer intentionally look like it was made from a film print that is missing half of its yellow (negative) layer's information. I guess Harris can't attack Disney directly because Disney owns its films and can make guitar picks out of them if they wish, because he hates to attack the work of a fellow restorer ... and because he can always be called upon to set things straight eventually.

I guess you have to read between the lines here:
- He doesn't like the new transfer, as "pretty" as it looks.
- Some of those guys really don't care about the original colours.
- And it's not as bad as it seems, since the original film elements have been preserved for posterity.

B.A.

I didn't know any of this before I picked it up for my two-year-old, who liked it quite a bit by the way.

I'll have to pay better attention the movie the next time we watch to see if I notice many of the things that has been pointed out in this thread in regards to the colors. I did think the picture looked fairly clean and artifact-free. And the soundtrack was excellent.

I skipped The Little Mermaid PE release because I had read/heard bad things about it.