John Hodson

Home Theater Forum

Falc04

Yes, I was reading that thread over there as well. I'm also hoping Barry wouldn't mind answering a question about their newly released 'John Wayne In Color' set. It appears to my eye, that these are the colorized prints used from the 1980 releases of the Lone Star films. Compared to Legend's "My Man Godfrey" and "Terror By Night" (in which the colors are magnificent looking), the colors on "Blue Steel" and "Sagebrush Trail" are dull...and the prints are pretty faded.

Barry_Sandrew

The black and white version was most definitely NOT the colorized version without the color. The black and white film was telecined on a Spirit at 1080/24P at IVC in Burbank, CA. The black and white digital frames were restored using Legend's proprietary restoration software and colorized. The restored black and white frames were rendered back to high definition tape and the restored colorized frames were separately rendered back to a different high definition tape. This can be confirmed by Scott Call, the GM of IVC. I think Paul Penna might consider a new television :-). The black and white print was pristine with excellent dynamic range.

Another misconception needs to be addressed. Colorization using the Legend Films system does not alter in any way the underlying luminance or gray scale and we never modify the gray scale before or during the colorization process. The colorized version and the black and white version are identical in that two copies of the restored high definition digital frames are created. One for the black and white version and one for the colorized version.

The Valeyard

Be sure to post this over on the HTF.

uebetan12@yahoo

i dont care if a movie is colorized or not, as long as the movie is good.....besides it's better to release the movie in black and white and in color ......................it's better if the colorization process is made with extreme caution and beautifully made...............................................................yeah, the wages of fear in colorized version should have also been released by criterion for better comparison and appreciation of its fans

John Hodson

Many thanks Barry.

baracine

BTW, Legend Films' Little Shop of Horrors made it to DVD Savant's list of the most impressive DVDs of 2006: http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s2193pick.html

Ambassador

Boy, I sometimes get the feeling I've entered some Bizarro world when I visit this forum!

The Valeyard

It's not on his Most Impressive List. It's on his Recommended List along with a couple hundred more.

And it's mainly for having the best Black & White ORIGINAL around:


Definately not in the Top Ten of Most Impressive. But being on the Recommended List isn't a bad thing.

ken_572002

Hey Barry...I'd be curious to to know about this as well. Any comment?

Barry_Sandrew

The John Wayne releases, as all releases by Legend Films are newly telecined in high definition from various film prints or negatives and subsequently restored using our proprietary restoration software . In addition, the John Wayne films have all new scoring by Legend Films. The original release of these John Wayne titles had no scoring due to budgetary reasons and was obvious by its absence.

I disagree that the film is faded and that the color is dull compared to My Man Godfrey. Indeed it's difficult if not impossible to compare the titles. My Man Godfrey is obviously a different genre than a western and therefore requires a different approach to color design. It's not our intent to make all films look brand new nor have them all look the same. As a creative process, it's our feeling that each film should look appropriate for the year they were originally lensed but with the addition of Legend color... had color film been available to the producers and directors at the time.

Falc04

Barry...thanks for responding back. I'm certainly not disappointed in the three Lone Star films you released, but they do seem to come up a might short when compared to Legend's release of 'Terror By Night' or 'My Man Godfrey'. I know there can not be a comparision between an indoor comedy and an outdoor western...but I'm inclined to think that you just had much better prints to work with the your previous releases, as opposed to these three John Wayne films.

Anyway, a BIG thanks for releasing them. I look forward to the next 3 John Wayne films you are releasing come Spring '07.

The Valeyard

Hey Barry.

If you do requests, I'd love to see a restored Terror of Tiny Town.

ken_572002

Thanks for replying Barry. After watching the 3 John Wayne films, I have to admit that they are the best looking (and sounding) versions of these Lone Star films I've ever seen. It says inside the DVD jackets that 3 more are coming....I'll be looking forward to that.

Alfred Bergman

Hi Barry

I suspect that a poor print, like 16mm, tends to dificult colorizatrion, since turns more dificult to your automatic and semiautomatic toold detect edges and gradients from a heavy grain texture frames. Also intense flicker and spatial flicker distorts the gray gradient which is based the color gradient choosed to cover the B&W.

If you spent let's say a X value to colorize "She", would be different if instead you of this yuo had veen approached by a director offering a budget of 400% of the X budget? Would be thwe tecnical quality bether, maybe with more carefull segemntation of objects, or segment the human skin in more areas in turn to make it look more natual?

Regards


Alfred

Alfred Bergman

Hi Barry


If you didn't mind I have a friendly sugestion.

I believe it's possible to improve even more the colorization process, even having you the best technology worldwide.

There are algorithm able to estimate 3D form of object easier than never. It can estimate shape by countorns or by shadows relations. Other algorithms analyze a moving sequence of a object and automaticly give a 3D field. The tridimentional information would help your colorization algorithms to add color variance that are not already well calculated, causing some few artificial effect noticeable by accurate viewer.

Despite of huge improviment over ealrlier atempts in 80's and 90's, the basis of colorization process it's still the image segmantation of the 2D surface of frames. Each object in frame it's rotoscoped in order to fill with a color gradient varing colors a bit from a dak to brigh pixels. Today the delineation rotoscope it's very precise and less time consuming, allowing you to use isolate bether all objects, textures, transparences, and due computer processing and memory been higher you have a huge palette to use. But there are still limitations that enforces you to choose pastel color in turns to hide a bit characteristics that would be easily noticed case had you opted for strong colors.
Those limitations are lack of depth, since the consideration to apply color come from a 2D plane, and lack of few color interaction as light sources, walls, hue reflection. The objects that have no easily noticeable reflex are not colorized with those variances, only strong sources as abatjour reflex are separated ad proper colors applied.
The pastel look of colors are a option comunly used to try to hide flat look provenient from 2D analize limitations, otherwise a strong color pallete would unmask the weak side of the process.


The good point is that you already have all obejcts isolated in layers, which it's a prety good start to the tridimentional calculation, making everything easier. With all isolated would be less time consuming and less expensive to get deepth of objects.
Those algorithms would need to be adapted to you technology, software in a easy and fast interface. According to your realises I asume you have been upgrading your technology constantly, since the improvments was noticeable comparing earlier realises to resent ones.
Do you have a own programing department, reponsible to upgrade the software?


I wish we could debate ways to turn colorization more and more natural.


Best regards


Alfred

Alfred Bergman

I invete everyone to take a look on those still coloriztions in this page:

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/1/alberto/web/alberto.htm

baracine

Alfred Bergman is Alberto D'Arce and these are some of his mouth-watering colourizations of scenes from Metropolis:









and Nosferatu:



[Not that I approve of that sort of thing, you understand.]

The Valeyard

Metropolis looks too garish to my eyes but I'm sure others would rejoice.

I will admit that the Nosferatu pix looks very well done and on par to what could have been achieved at the time it was made.

Found out this weekend that Legend is releasing The Three Stooges: Swing Parade in March. Really looking forward to this one (for the obvious reasons).

baracine

I took me a long time to respond to that one but it finally hit me.

Criterion already has two editions of Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête in print ("Beauty and the Beast"). Both of them feature, as an alternate soundtrack, Philip Glass' operatic score for this film, in which he took the French dialogue from the film, shortened it to make it fit his bland and repetitive, uninspired music, which was then sung by obviously non-French speaking singers. The result is atrocious. It robs the dialogue of every bit of poetry and believability it once possessed, sometimes with absurd results. Since Glass makes absolutely no effort to make the French language flow naturally according to the French tonic accent, the sung words don't have any particular meaning or rhythm and sometimes convey the exact opposite of what they meant in the original text. Furthermore, the bad French pronunciation (what the French call "speaking French like a Spanish cow") is an insult to the original, not to mention the outrage of assuming that one can improve on Georges Auric's original score. Glass also commits obvious blunders like adding song birds to a night scene (er, don't birds sleep in the night time?), etc.

My point is this: If this kind of musical and artistic rape is permissible in the audio portion of a Criterion edition of a film classic, why the hell should we be deprived of the colourized, estate-approved version of Le Salaire de la peur as a valid extra? I believe a competent colourization is at least as much a valid work of art or addition as an "opera" inspired by a film that didn't need improvement on its music score in the first place.

Please compare Philip Glass' anaemic Overture to Georges Auric's Opening Titles.

Here's another heapin' helpin' of Philip Glass' musical porridge - The brother and his friend send an arrow flying into the sisters' room (hurl!)

[It's almost impossible, even for a French-speaking person who has memorized the script like I have, to understand most of what goes on here. But particularly offensive is the phrase "Vous avez failli tuer le Cabriole"/"You almost hit the dog", which, in this version, is just a throwaway deprived of any emotion, just one example among a thousand of Philip Glass' music's life-robbing properties.]

Alfred Bergman

Hi Valeyard . Thank for enjoy Nosferatu colorization. Those specific metropolis coloring was from faded video captures, so the colors over the fadded B&W didn't fit so well. Today I can adjust contrast very well, avoiding few problems.

baracine

From correspondence with Alfred/Alberto, I gather that he has developed or is using software that attenuates contrast on black and white images, allowing for a more realistic colourization. I wish he would demonstrate...

Barry_Sandrew

Alfred.

I appreciate your input. However, your assumptions regarding the Legend Films process is off the mark. We don't use traditional rotoscope and layering is unnecessary. I believe your assumptions are based on a familiarity with Photoshop. We do automatically address light sources when appropriate in a manner that uses 3D approximation within the 2D image. However it's done in a way that is much different than you have speculated in your post.

It is not our intention to make evey film look "natural". Colorization is not meant to level all films to a common denominator. Indeed each film is treated as a unique entity and color designed accordingly. SHE was originally produced as a fantasy by Cooper. However when RKO cut his budget at the last minute Cooper was forced to shoot the film in black and white. Ray Harryhausen worked with our designers in San Diego in an effort to fullfill the color vision of his mentor, Merian C. Cooper and to bring his fantasy film into the realm of color.

It is not always appropriate to apply saturated colors to a vintage film. Our technology automomatically adjusts the saturation so that it is appropriate to the age of the film. The objective is to enhance the film without being intrusive.

Thanks,
Barry

Alfred Bergman

Thank you Barry


I honestly doubt that any other company's president would have courage to go to a forum and respond so many questions.

Watching Swing Parade clip, despite of the small screen, seens the skin colorization present some improvement over the earlier realises.
Color cheek would be excelent to family films. No colorization technology was able to add color cheek precisilly yet. You will probably be the first to achieve that.

Woman in Green clip it's not available. Wooden Soldiers's clips have much flickering, as recorded from a screen or something, and so do'nt represent well the good edition on DVD.

One chalenging to colorization: In B&W photographiic direction, specially in early cinema days, there was very common to use color filter to change the contrast to specific colors on set. So in many films, even from great prints, there is "shinning faces, as result of pink or red filter, that bright white skin; and also some bright leaves or threes, due use of green filters, or white sky due use of blue filter. Those characteristic makes difficult to colorize the image, and we get funny faces and whited leaves.

A comamdement of colorization, as you confirmed, is that colorization don't alter the original tones of B&W. I ask: why not do that in some few cases?
If you could perfect isolate the skin, threes and leaves, perhaps would got bether effect if turn dow a little bit the tones. Would require extreme precision delineation, so precise as used in image compositions.
Been colorization a creative process I see no harm about, specially because today you offer the colorized and the B&W in the same DVD, despite of the desatured colorized edition be near the same of thew B&W.

Some curiosity about your restoration process: Lowry Digital Images managed to recover image contrast from third generation prints for Sunset Boulevasrd and Roman Holiday restoration. They recovered hiden tones in dark and bright areas, resulting in a pleasant natural contrast. Why not try something like that before colorize a tranfer froma contrast print?
The color when added to contrast print tranfers got weird, since are not contrast print colors. Contrast print colors have constrating hues and contrasting saturation, for example geeting skin with the darker portions more red and the brighter portions more yellow.

The flicker in old prints need bether atention. The local flickering (flicker not homogeneous distrubuted along frame are) wasn't correct for Things to come.
Maybe some aperture correction (image sharpning) would be welcome to fuzzy or out of focus scenes.

Regards

A. Bergman

Barry_Sandrew

Thanks Alfred