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Author
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Topic: The coloring of color classics! (grrr!)
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Osi Osgood
Film God
Posts: 10204
From: Mountian Home, ID.
Registered: Jul 2005
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posted February 09, 2012 12:53 PM
I was watching the TV channel "This" (a retro film channel) and the western "Vera Cruz" (Burt Lancaster/Gary Cooper) came on.
I thought , "cool" as I have a super 8 optical print of this.
Now, interestingly, the film was originally shot on early Eastmancolor stock (to save money) and then the release prints were done on Technicolor, so a perfect rendering of the colors like Technicolor wouldn't be there to begin with ...
However, I was shocked to see just how off the colors were. It appears that, for release to networks, this print was colorized with a blue filter, or they simply turned up the blue drive in mastering. Now, my optical super 8 print isn't perfect and has a little color fading, and the color grading of the print isn't perfect, but it still gives a better estimation of the original color.
A good example of that was the scene were a lovely senorita, is getting dressed in a lovely red dress next to a waterfall. In the TV print, the color of the two actors up from (the woman , Susa Montiel and Gary Cooper) were fairly accurate, but ALL the color behind them was a complete washout of blue ... everything.
I immediately got out my super 8 optical print and found that, yep, there are a variety of colors back there!
At other points in the film, I noticed that background shadows and trees and such, were all just a big bunch of blue. It looked so bad that it looked like one of those 1980's colorized black and white films.
I have heard that this was/is a Blu-ray release and that they supposedly went back to the original source prints. I'm betting that they went to a first generation technicolor print, as, if they went to the oeriginal eastmancolor source negative, they may have been shocked at the color fade, being shot in 1953.
But I was really saddened at the terrible color, when my slightly faded super 8 optical print actually held up color better!
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"All these moments will be lost in time, just like ... tears, in the rain. "
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