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Question about Eastmancolor


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It's really all in the timing. The only real de facto authority on the way THE GOOD,THE BAD, AND THE UGLY should look is Tonino

Delli Colli who was the cinematographer. And I'm assuming he supervised the original timing of the movie back in 1966

but one never knows. The colorists quite often are just going by what their own preferences are. There's so much ability

to change the looks in movies with digital grading of DVDs and BluRays. The great thing about 5251 which is the Kodak stock that

was used on TGTBATU is that it was the best stock ever for skin tones. The flesh to neutral balance was incredible.

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It's really all in the timing. And the only person who knows the de facto way in which THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY should look is the late Tonino Delli Colli who was the cinematographer. I don't know if he supervised the timing back in 1966. I would think

so. Many times these days it comes down to the personal preferences of the colorists who are doing the grading. The looks

can be varied so drastically. The great thing about Kodak 5251 which was used on TGTBATU is that it was the best stock ever

for rendering skin tones. The best flesh to neutral balance ever. 5254 was great as well for skin tones.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I think I've read that some restorers combine a scan of the original negative, which has color fading problems but is the sharpest and finest-grained source, with scans of the b&w YCM separations made for archiving, which have the original color information if done correctly but often have grain and contrast problems. Not sure how they combine those elements digitally.

OK, that is kinda' freaky because I was just having a discussion with somebody about some films I have that have completely lost their yellow & cyan dyes. I saw a VHS copy of one from the 80s that had natural color but is obviously not sharp. I started to think there has to be a way to map the C-channel from an inverse 3:2 pull-down copy of VHS to a scan of the film to get the best of both worlds.

 

 

That sounds interesting! And again, it would be great if they would explain that in a booklet, how they had done the restauration :(

People in the industry are told by consultants to avoid technical talk as much as possible. Three syllable words, any kind of jargon, proper grammar etc. are all explicitly shunned to boot.

 

 

The way they write it, to an unexperienced viewer like me it sounds like they have the original negative and used it for the Blu-ray. A regular viewer like me doesn´t know about original negatives, YCM separations etc.

Most back-catalogue titles come from inter-positives, which are color-timed positive copies of the negatives. They are usually in the best shape out of all the elements because they had the least handling and at the same time, they have the color/contrast that the director/DP approved. For a lot of older films, prints were struck directly from the negatives, so the negative is often in really bad shape due to excessive handling and there often aren't any pristine prints. On top of that, each print is timed directly from the neg so there can be variations in color etc. if a film had another set of prints made later.

 

YCM separations are positive copies of the camera negative, done to three strips of black & white film. Each strip was exposed separately by yellow, cyan and magenta lights when they were made. They were originally intended to be used for making Technicolor IB prints. You can think of IB prints as the celluloid version of lithographs, where relief separation "masters" are actually run through dyes and pressed into the print. Now, separations are integral to preserving and restoring movies because they don't fade. YCM separations are even being made for current movies that are shot on video, because they are such a reliable and fool-proof method of preservation.

 

On a side-note there's times where the colorist (usually under direction of some corporate presence) does whatever they want without approval from the director. One example is Snow White, where they flat out changed things for the restoration just because they could, turning green trees in the moonlight blue etc. I remember a matte painter complaining about a movie he did in the 60s. He did this great moon-lit sky background that looked natural and beautiful in the original prints and the first run of home releases. When it got "digitally remastered", they completely blew out the moon and tinted the sky an odd yellow color. Or "The Sound of Music" where they actually had a director-approved restoration inter-positive to use as reference, but decided to scan the original negative and saturate the snot out of things so it looks almost cartoonish in some shots.

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attachicon.gif1909.jpg

 

It´s quite strange for me to see that, because, as I mentioned before, I only know that time through old, bad pictures in b/w or sepia, that creates a distance between me and the photo. But then there are pictures like this, and suddenly there is no distance anymore, it shows that back then the colors were just like today.

It looks like it was hand-colored by pencil. It was a common practice at the time and I learned to do it as a high school student.

 

BTW, if you ever want an accurate idea of what the Old West truly looked like, check out "Tombstone" 1993. While the Blu-Ray has a yellow cast to it and mid-tones are often pulled down unnecessarily, you can tell that clothes were colorful, vibrant and well-made. We as a society seem to have been trained to associate brown and yellow with the past due to sepia-tinted photos but that's not what their world looked like. Honestly, I really wish modern movies taking place in modern times had natural color too.

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  • 2 months later...

When TGTBATU came out it instantly became one of my favourite movies and I have extremely vivid memories of watching it and re-watching it many times.

 

It did not look like that yellowish thing, on the big screen. I don't know who thought that would be accurate.

 

I also remember watching SUPERMAN in 1978. Now there's a movie that seemed to shun yellow. Even considering the desert scenes, when I close my eyes and think of it, all I see are the night colours of Metropolis, the red and blue of the Superman suit, and black and white. Unfortunately when I think of MAN OF STEEL all I see it orange and teal. And if I absolutely have to think of Marvel Universe videos...movies... I just think of grey and brown.

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You're right about "Superman: The Movie" - even the wheat fields of Smallville and desert scene with Lois are timed for neutral skin tones (and the accurate reproduction of the red & blue costume), and with the use of fog filters, which tend to have a blue cast to the halation, and in this case, they are mostly reacting the the blue skies in the scenes, there are no scenes where a warm golden cast has been timed into the image overall.

 

Metropolis (NYC) has blue-green mercury-vapor streetlamps in the distance at night, Krypton & the Fortress of Solitude have a wintery look so there are some cooler scenes, and plenty of neutral-toned scenes with warmer color accents in the set dressing, but no overly warm scenes.

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Unsworth! What a talented man! Certainly fond of his #2 fog filter. I wish I knew more about his processes for SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE. That film has a very unique look and I think in part it has to do with how the lighting and set pieces complement the Superman suit. Donner and Unsworth were quite the combination.

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By the way, I've recently developed an interest in Techniscope and found out that TGTBATU had been filmed in 2-Perf. One of those things I feel like I should've known for years but didn't.

 

Yeah, most of the Spaghetti Westerns were Techniscope as far as I know. It saved money not only in production but also in licensing fees. The down side is not only are they starting with half the real estate, but using an optical printer to enlarge the image further reduces resolution. They often used unsharp masks in post, so people complaining the Blu-Rays have edge enhancement can shove it.

That brings me to "Super-35", which combines the expense of 4-perf with the low quality of 2-perf.

Edited by Stephen Baldassarre
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  • 4 months later...
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The very first Eastmancolor stock in 1950, 5247, was 16 ASA daylight, replaced two years later by 5248 25T... but after that, you didn't see a daylight color negative stock until 250D 5297 in 1986. 50D 5245 came along in 1989.

 

3-strip Technicolor was also a daylight-balanced system until it changed to one balanced for tungsten around 1948 I believe (Jack Cardiff mentions switching to tungsten lights for "Under Capricorn", which came out in 1949. He tells a story about assuring Ingrid Bergman that she wouldn't have to loop her dialogue due to the noise of carbon arcs on set, only to discover that when he lit the set with all-tungsten, the mics could pick up the sound of the camera despite it being in a blimp.)

 

I mention this only because when Kodak worked on creating Eastmancolor in the mid 1940's, they said their goal was to match the speed and color balance of "popular color film systems", i.e. Technicolor.

 

 

I want to correct myself -- I re-read the interview with Jack Cardiff and he says he gelled tungsten lamps to daylight for a scene in "Under Capricorn" (1949) at the request of Ingrid Bergman, who wanted quieter lights so her dialogue recorded on set could be used, only to discover that now the microphone could pick up the sound of the camera even under the blimp. He says he "barely got away with gelling the lights" or something to that effect in terms of having enough exposure.

 

Roy Wagner, ASC was telling me the other day that it was in 1951 when George Barnes was starting tests of "The Greatest Show on Earth" that they discovered that the big circus tents had to be lit with tungsten units and Barnes got Technicolor to switch the color balance of the camera system. This explains why the first Eastmancolor film in 1950 was daylight-balanced and then in 1952 it was replaced by a tungsten-balanced stock.

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Affectations have no place in cinematography. But, we all must sin at least once so that we may truly know righteousness.

 

I hope that Instagram eventually eliminates filters. Unfiltered images actually get more engagement, according to one metric I saw. In any case, I do not want to see another filtered plate of eggs on toast. It's very unappetizing.

 

Let the film, light, lens and production design do the talking. Keep the BS out of photography.

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