Are the Blu-Rays of digital movies made in the analog projection era scanned from print film?

Geffen Avraham · February 16

Could this be one reason why early digitally captured films, like the Star Wars prequels or Apocalypto, look better than your average Alexa-captured Netflix movie? We laud the digital-film-digital process for Dune and the Batman, but did all digitally shot films once do this? Are the Blu-Rays made from scanned 2383, or from the digital intermediate?

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Perry Paolantonio · February 16

Blu-rays are made from whatever sources are available. If there's no limit to the budget, and original elements (neg) are available, that's what gets scanned, graded, restored, and put on the disc. Smaller labels may only have what is already transferred, so that's what they use.

Print is almost never a first choice though sometimes that's all that's left. Film prints were never meant to be scanned or viewed digitally, they were engineered to be seen in a darkened room, and designed to take advantage of the way the human vision system adjusts to that darkness. Digital sensors are not eyes, so scans of prints never look as good as scans of camera original material or in some cases, earlier generation intermediates.

Edited February 16 by Perry Paolantonio

Don Cunningham · February 16

I have provided elements from my film collection to a couple of labels over the past five or so years and each one worked differently. What I have are print elements for films in question, but different versions than what was made available by the studio or licensor. Two very different outcomes.

Label 1 - I offered them access to my 16mm print for a fresh scan, an over the air VHS recording from the 1980's, and a low-end telecine I had made a few years prior via a moviestuff sniper unit. They did not want to spend any additional money, so went with the later which I felt was not good. The presentation looked awful.

Label 2 - I offered them access to a 16mm partial print which they wanted scanned in 2K. Now, in this particular case this is the only found element with English titles known to currently exist and the only film based element with certain variant scenes. The label paid to have it scanned at 2K and I paid the slight difference to have it done at 4K for posterity. Other sources had to be "spliced" into the final master for the export version because my print is incomplete. This has just been released.

It comes down to budget and who is producing the disc. Label 1 was a higher end non-studio label and label 2 is a boutique label. I will say that the boutique label was a pleasure to work with.

Edited February 16 by Don Cunningham

Don Cunningham · February 16

The original negative is the preferred source for best presentation. However there have been instances where a print or notes have not been referenced while grading and things such as day for night have not been done on the new grade. That can really stick out when you have vampires out in daylight!

Geffen Avraham · February 16

13 hours ago, Don Cunningham said:

The original negative is the preferred source for best presentation. However there have been instances where a print or notes have not been referenced while grading and things such as day for night have not been done on the new grade. That can really stick out when you have vampires out in daylight!

Then in that case, is any work taken to replicate the look of contact-printed print film for the digital presentation?

Scanned negatives look quite different without print film emulation - or actually being contact-printed. Kodak 2383 LUTs are a dime a dozen today, but how old are they? Are older Blu-Rays giving us a substantially different image color-wise than theatrical moviegoers would have experienced?

I have little way of judging for myself, since I don't have any 35mm prints lying around, and apart from Oppenheimer I haven't seen any movies projected from celluloid in years.

Don Cunningham · February 16

15 minutes ago, Geffen Avraham said:

Then in that case, is any work taken to replicate the look of contact-printed print film for the digital presentation?

Scanned negatives look quite different without print film emulation - or actually being contact-printed. Kodak 2383 LUTs are a dime a dozen today, but how old are they? Are older Blu-Rays giving us a substantially different image color-wise than theatrical moviegoers would have experienced?

I have little way of judging for myself, since I don't have any 35mm prints lying around, and apart from Oppenheimer I haven't seen any movies projected from celluloid in years.

There is not a definite answer as each studio and/or label works differently. One case is (Horror of) Dracula. BFI released their "restoration" on blu ray in 2013. Well, lots of folks started to claim it had a blue cast to it. There was even a documentary video and the person grading the restoration spoke oddly, almost stating that he was providing what HE thought it should look like (it's been some time since I've seen it so don't hold me to it).

After some nagging from fans, Warner Archive released a disc in the US in 2019. They utilized the BFI master as a starting point but referenced IB Technicolor prints. What they released was almost on point with 35mm presentations. I had owned a 35mm Technicolor pint and screened it in 2018 so do know first hand.

Here are grabs from the two Blu Rays and a cell phone picture from the showing of my print. In the end, it depends who is on the team and the budget.

Aapo Lettinen · February 16

Here the blu rays were normally made from hdcam/hdcamsr or proreshq tv masters because they were already in correct colour space, sound mix and framerate converted to 25fps. This applied to all films including the imported foreign ones. The quality difference compared to separate workflow is close to 0 but one saves thousands on costs so everyone did it this way

Aapo Lettinen · February 16

As for why old stuff may look better than new one, budget is a big factor and hastiness the other. Cheap and fast and basic and Led definitely shows. Good modern camera just shows it even better

Geffen Avraham · February 17

33 minutes ago, Aapo Lettinen said:

Here the blu rays were normally made from hdcam/hdcamsr or proreshq tv masters because they were already in correct colour space, sound mix and framerate converted to 25fps. This applied to all films including the imported foreign ones. The quality difference compared to separate workflow is close to 0 but one saves thousands on costs so everyone did it this way

how were those masters made?

Geffen Avraham · February 17

also - when digitally-captured films were printed to film for distribution, were they printed in some kind of special gamut like cineon log so they would work well with the 2383?

how did they make sure the printed film shown to theatergoers would match the DI they were editing? or was there an entire new layer of contrast and color shifts added in print that they just let happen?

Edited February 17 by Geffen Avraham

Geffen Avraham · February 17

I took a further look at Dracula, and while I think they definitely graded it better in the US version, I do not think they applied any print film emulation. I took a shot from the British version, and was able to grade it with simple tools to look almost exactly like the US version. A version with 2383 emulation looks substantially different. This admittedly imperfect and not rigorously scientific analysis leads me to conclude that no complex print emulation was used on the US version - at least that was not already taken from the UK version.

Geffen Avraham · February 17

I also put the US Bluray Dracula screenshot above through the 2383 LUT, and while far from scientific, it indeed seems even closer to the Technicolor print image.

Aapo Lettinen · February 17

10 hours ago, Geffen Avraham said:

how were those masters made?

it depends on the exact year and workflow they had available and what kind of equipment they had. For example it took quite long before it was possible to output fullhd422 or 444 from a file based workstation and at first it was common to record back to intermediate film first. When it was possible to output 25fps in real time from a dpx workstation it was possible to record the stream to d6/hdcam/hdcamsr directly for mastering which is how some of the higher quality masters were done. Some productions used linear colour grading suite based on hdcam-type system and timed on that digitally, then managed it one way or another to film and video tape. film scanner can record at whatever speed the workstation can output but a video tape deck needs real time full speed to work correctly and if that was not available at some point then a tv master might have been record to film - scan to video style for a brief period before better equipment became available. that is time consuming and expensive though so no one in their right mind would want to do that if there is an option to output the digitally graded image directly to hdcam sr tape without intermediate film steps. So it kind of changed all the time to sum it up.

when I was doing these things starting from 2013 it was common to grade in dpx if in lustre or from combination of dpx and prores or redcode raw files if in baselight or similar system. after the grade the stuff meant for DCP was often exported to dpx and converted in other software to jpeg2000 for dcp, the tv masters I think were made with only different colour space conversion and maybe brightness just very slightly lifted for tv viewing (brighter viewing environment) or just the colour space conversion. I think they outputted separate dpx with rec709 or if the grading system allowed, prores422 or 444. but the grade was essentially the same, sometimes only slightly brigher like couple of % but that was only done like 50% of the time because it was rarely needed at all.

completely separate grade on different releases is because the movie is remastered and regraded at some point OR someone has screwed up the conversion along the line and the otherwise similar looking grade was ruined because someone screwed up. Prores workflows can easily have these slight accidental gamma shifts and changes if not being careful or being in haste and skipping steps but completely different looking colours are either screw up or intentional ?

here in Northern Europe the budgets have always been relatively small and there was usually only budget for one proper grade, that is why they streamlined the workflow to get the additional(and lower paid) tv-masters as economically as possible. so no different tv grade and direct output from file based to tape it was unless someone paid extra for slightly brighter tv grade which was fully optional and in most cases not necessary at all for the viewing experience

Tyler Purcell · February 17

I personally don't much care for many of the original BluRay transfers.

Many were done in the late 90's and early 2000's for the DVD releases, many on telecine machines like the Spirit. I noticed over the years, the elements they used were subpar, internegatives sometimes instead of IP's or original camera negative.

I use to work for a company who did scans for distribution and we always got internegatives from the studio's. They never once sent us the original cut negative and honestly, IP's were very rare. I see Internegatives used a lot for BluRay's.

Restoration releases and UHD discs can be a lot better. But like everything, even they are hit or miss. I've seen a few which are stellar and a few which are pretty poor. I'd rather have a 1080p version of the original negative than have an upscaled version of an old transfer.

For movies I care about, I generally want the criterion or some restoration version. There are some great brands doing 3rd party restorations like Criterion today and the releases are wonderful.

But yes, it does depend on the quality of the elements. It also depends on if the director or DP was present during the coloring session. I have seen some very odd coloring choices, partially on T2 UHD, which make no sense and don't match anything of the film prints or prior video releases. It's a shame when people muck up the restorations, really pitiful since it's not difficult to nail. Just watch a print at Quentin's theater lol ?

Daniel D. Teoli Jr. · February 18

On 2/16/2024 at 4:53 PM, Don Cunningham said:

There is not a definite answer as each studio and/or label works differently. One case is (Horror of) Dracula. BFI released their "restoration" on blu ray in 2013. Well, lots of folks started to claim it had a blue cast to it. There was even a documentary video and the person grading the restoration spoke oddly, almost stating that he was providing what HE thought it should look like (it's been some time since I've seen it so don't hold me to it).

After some nagging from fans, Warner Archive released a disc in the US in 2019. They utilized the BFI master as a starting point but referenced IB Technicolor prints. What they released was almost on point with 35mm presentations. I had owned a 35mm Technicolor pint and screened it in 2018 so do know first hand.

Here are grabs from the two Blu Rays and a cell phone picture from the showing of my print. In the end, it depends who is on the team and the budget.

I'd go for the middle one.

Giovanni Louisor · February 29

I believe the reason for it, and I think you're right in your observations so most of this will be obvious, is that the digital masters resulting from the DI—at least in the case of "Apocalypto"—were likely designed to match the 35mm release prints—these being the primary models for the movie's final "look"—and was graded under a print film emulation LUT, both for the film-out, as referential necessity, and creatively, for the digital master.

In the same way a lot of movies shot on film were graded in the DI using print film emulation, before the inevitable film-out, digitally shot movies followed the same process, with additional considerations made to the digital material to bring it closer to, in gamma and color space.

It's also possible, as it appears in the case of "Revenge of the Sith," for example, that many digital shot movies were delivered digitally without a print film LUT as the final transforming element, even if necessary as part of the digital intermediate for film-out delivery. But it looks like "Apocalypto," "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," or even "Click," chose to keep the print film emulation as part of its final look for digital viewing.

Since film-outs generally came to an end in the early 2010s, the look of a digitally shot movies was no longer bound to the "limitations" of a print film model; and their use was then applied "creatively" rather than as a necessary process. This likely resulted in their lessened use—for movies shot digitally, and shot on film.