Jump to content

Why does Lord of The Rings look infinitely more modern and clean than Pulp Fiction despite being shot on a smaller format with a faster film stock?


Owen A. Davies

Recommended Posts

I rewatched both Pulp Fiction (1994) and The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) recently and picked up on something that's got me really stumped. Both films were shot using Kodak EXR film, with Pulp Fiction being on 5245 (EXR 50D) and LOTR being on 5293 (EXR 200T). Additionally, Pulp Fiction was shot 3-Perf anamorphic whereas LOTR was 4-Perf and cropped to 2.39 widescreen (24.89mm x 10.41mm). This in turn should've significantly reduced the image quality for LOTR seeing how it was also on a faster speed film. Yet Pulp Fiction, being both shot with Super 35 anamorphic and a very slow film speed, looks as if it was released 20 years prior to LOTR. You can see this in the overall color and detail present in the film stock. It just looks rougher and more harsh, as if it were from the early 80s. Why is this? I've included a dropbox link below with some visual comparisons. 

https://www.dropbox.com/t/RuRflbIZyvFlrdfW

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

First I'd say the age of the scan and color correct makes a major impact. Also the format you watched them in.

But I think mostly what you are reacting to is the style of the films. These are totally different projects. Tarantino likes the look of B-Films that use harsh lighting techniques and you can see that at play here. It was also 1994, so the large soft source lighting of the mid 2000's and 2010's was not popular yet. Lord of the rings for sure used softer more contemporary lighting techniques and had a DI color correct (early digital process where the film was scanned, color corrected digitally and re-printed to film) so the color is much more manipulated.

the speed and size of the film negative really only impacts grain and neither of these projects show much grain at all.

personally, I think Pulp fictions looks way more interesting and you are now seeing a return to some of the harsher 90's lighting techniques now in newer work.

Edited by Albion Hockney
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

"Pulp Fiction" was shot in 4-perf 35mm 2X anamorphic for contact printing through release prints.

You may just be responding to the harder, more old-fashioned lighting or maybe the video transfer is not as good but certainly in a movie theater, "Pulp Fiction" had a somewhat cleaner, sharper look on the big screen than "Lord of the Rings" did.

Also, at first parts of "Lord of the Ring" went through a D.I. but over the years, the entire movie has so what you are seeing comes from a scan of the original negative, whereas likely any home video transfers of "Pulp Fiction" are still using an interpositive dupe run through an HD telecine (I assume your frame grabs are from HD blu-rays.)

Also, "Lord of the Rings" was mostly shot on EXR 200T, some day work on 100T, so it's not as fast a stock as if it were all shot on 500T stock.  And being spherical, there would be less focus issues than with anamorphic.

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

The newest Lord of the Rings 4K release suffers from a ton of DNR, so I don't think it is a good representation of how it looked in theaters. A bit of revisionism from Peter Jackson. He used the same horrible de-noising on his Beatles doc.

Also, the current available transfer of Pulp Fiction is very old. A 4K release is coming out next month. I presume it will be quite good considering the quality of the recent Reservoir Dogs restoration.

Edited by Raymond Zrike
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

As David said, Pulp Fiction uses MUCH more of the negative. 

LOTR was also a 2k DI, so they scanned the film, finished it and recorded it back to film in 2k. So a 4k version of LOTR is just an up-res of the 2k master. It's also HEAVY visual effects. I can't think of any shot in LOTR that has NO visual effects of some kind. They're usually just set extensions, but still once you manipulate the image in the computer, you're never going to get the same crispness as watching a scan of the original negative, which is what you get with Pulp Fiction. 

This is part of the reason I dislike visual effects storytelling. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As others have mentioned, lighting is a major factor, Pulp Fiction favoring hard light. 

Lenses are another. C series Panavisions have a lot of optical flaws. Even where they're not "soft" they have flaws.

I think the biggest factor is the grade. I remember LOTR had a really aggressive DI. Pulp Fiction didn't have one.

Speaking of which... I notice some of the log film scans I get (both S16 and 35mm) end up having a more "old school" look when I apply a simple Log C to rec709 LUT than the final graded material. I've also noticed film emulations look more like late-80s or early-90s films before applying a print stock emulation. After a print stock emulation, they take on a teal/orange look that feels modern.

For something like Pulp Fiction – or any other feature from that era, how true is the Blu Ray to the release print? I imagine the scan is from the negative, so there has to be a film print emulation LUT applied thereafter; however, are any contemporaneous film print stocks even available to model? What is the reference point for the "look" of the Blu Ray and what, if any, print stock emulation is employed? 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

Film print emulations are not used to create a “film look” or a “print look” — they are used in a D.I. when you want to create one master that works for both a DCP and a film-out by limiting corrections to the color space that a film print can contain. Contrast can be set to any creative look you want even if using the film print emulation.

  • Like 1
  • Upvote 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 minutes ago, David Mullen ASC said:

Film print emulations are not used to create a “film look” or a “print look” — they are used in a D.I. when you want to create one master that works for both a DCP and a film-out by limiting corrections to the color space that a film print can contain. Contrast can be set to any creative look you want even if using the film print emulation.

Thanks, that makes more sense.

I guess a better question is: the 2383 film print emulation LUTs I see have a teal/orange look that looks "modern" for lack of a better word to me. Those scans of Pulp Fiction don't have it. 

How similar do those scans from Pulp Fiction look to how the movie looked in theaters (on print film) and how do colorists account for whatever the contemporaneous print film was being different from what's used today? I much prefer that look in Pulp Fiction. 

I've been watching late 80s and early 90s movies and the colors feel much more neutral than Last Jedi, for instance. I'm wondering what's responsible for it.

Edited by M Joel W
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

There is no teal-orange look built into the film print emulation LUT — you can color-correct the movie in any direction you want, you could turn it purple or b&w if you wanted to. Shifting your blues to cyan is a purely creative decision.

Neutral skin tones is mostly a stylistic choice that was more common in the past, in fact, it was practically mandated in the old studio era, you were limited to how often you could deviate from perfect flesh tones because that was considered the goal of proper color photography, color biases were only allowed for select sequences. Look at movies set in the age of candlelight and firelight in 1940s through mid-1960s — faces were rarely lit orange. Today it’s almost the opposite, we rarely use a neutral key light on a face.

The point of color-correction is not to technically emulate a print stock, it’s to reproduce the colors as the filmmakers intended. So in the case of an older movie, a starting point would be to first view a print or color-timed intermediate dupe element if possible to see how it looked originally. You’re over-thinking the importance of the print stock in terms of emulating it exactly. I mean what if they just wanted to strike a new print off of a negative from a 1980s movie? The original print stock doesn’t exist any more. So does that mean that old movies should never have new prints made?

I can’t imagine Tarantino not allowing new prints to be shown of “Pulp Fiction” because the original print stock doesn’t exist now.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

In my experience 2383 emulation LUTs apply a teal/blue cast, pushing blue more toward green than toward magenta. When I google 2383 LUT that’s what I see, too. I could be wrong, it's just what I see.

I don’t mean that Tarantino wouldn’t strike new prints, just that the original prints (and the blu ray) have a look that reminds me of its era. And I'm wondering how that's maintained in the blu ray, assuming it's been scanned from the negative and not a print. (What film emulation LUT – or none at all and just contrast – is applied to the grade.)

I think I was mistakenly ascribing too much of a "look" to the print film/print LUT. But when I work with 200T it usually looks more like Pulp Fiction than it does a contemporary film – until the grade…. Nevermind. I’ll just trust my eyes and/or hire someone. I should have saved this for its own thread and not gone off topic.

Edited by M Joel W
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

I don't think you understand the color-correction process -- you can make a shade of blue any color you want.

I just spent an afternoon at Fotokem with the ASC Master Class in a D.I. suite looking at MacBeth Charts with a 2383 LUT on the projector, of film and digital test footage. There was no teal bias to the blue patch of the color chart.  Teal was teal, blue was blue, purple was purple...

  • Like 1
  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

A home video transfer from a film element would be color-corrected in Rec.709.  If both theatrical and home video masters were needed, probably in P3 with the film print LUT then a color trim pass for Rec.709 for broadcast/home video.

The whole orange-teal trend is a CREATIVE CHOICE, it's not built into any system... and if it were, which it isn't, it would easily be removed if not wanted, that's the whole point of color-correction. No one spends over $100,000 on color-correcting a feature film and says "if only I could have gotten that teal bias out of my blues! If only there was some way to turn a knob and shift the blue channel on the green-magenta axis... hopefully someone will invent such a device someday."

  • Like 1
  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I understand how digital color correction works. The optical side is where I'm confused. I'm overthinking this, not under thinking it.

I should have posted this question in another thread anyway.

But now that we're discussing it....

Where I might be confused is in how the look of a print film affects the final image in an optical workflow and how that is emulated if you're delivering digitally. I always assumed print film LUTs were meant to emulate a specific print film, and each film print has its own look (color and contrast) that the LUT is emulating. So either you use a film print LUT to preview how something will look before printing it back to that film, or keep the film print LUT on to output a digital master that emulates the chosen print stock. This is where I might be wrong and would appreciate any correction. I understand how lift/gamma/gain etc. and the fundamentals of Resolve, etc. all work, but not print films.

Resolve's 2383 LUT, and similar ones available online, do add a teal bias to darker areas and an orange one to highlights. I ran a monochrome gradient through the 2383 LUT in Resolve and posted it here. I understand the teal/orange look is normally applied by moving lift toward blue and gamma toward orange – but Resolve's 2383 LUT turns highlights warmer and shadows cooler, too. So I have to assume 2383 prints take on a similar look if you're doing a DI and printing to that stock. You seem to be implying print stocks all have an identical and neutral color rendering, and I don't think that's the case, even if the differences are relatively small compared with creative decisions in the DI.

I associate this look (however it's applied) with contemporary films - and 2383 is a contemporary print film (I think late nineties forward, not sure?). I notice the Pulp Fiction frame grabs (and most 80s and early 90s movies I see on streaming) don't look like this. When I work with film (lately mostly 5213/7213 for some reason) using the LUT the lab provided it has more of the "old school" Pulp Fiction look compared with the more "modern" look of Resolve's 2383 LUT – but that's just my subjective impression.

So this is where I really don't understand what's going on, and I should have just posted this question (in another thread) in the first place: 

If you're going back to the camera negative for a Blu Ray or streaming or DCP release, I figure the intent of the color grade is often (not always) to emulate the original print. Not precisely, but approximately, and not always. But let's say it is....

For something like Pulp Fiction, where the print stock that was used at the time is no longer available, what do colorists use to emulate it? The Blu Ray is scanned from the camera negative, not a print, right? (I could be totally wrong here.)

I could be wrong (this is where I genuinely have no idea how this works), but for the digital release of something where the theatrical release had gone through ENR or bleach bypass – ENR or bleach bypass is typically not done on the camera negative, right? Usually on the internegative? So in that case, for a digital remaster or for the Blu Ray, you'd be scanning the internegative, or the camera negative and then applying an ENR LUT or otherwise matching the look of ENR in post? 

This is what I should have been asking from the get-go rather than derailing this thread. I've been watching more movies from the 80s and 90s, made before the DI, and wondering if the digital versions are scanned from the camera negative or from the internegative or print film – and, if from the camera negative, how optical processes like ENR or beach bypass or just printing to discontinued print stock are emulated digitally in a contemporaneously accurate way. 

Long story short I was trying to get the look of something from the 90s while shooting on an Alexa or with 7219 or 7213 and accidentally completely derailed this thread in the process. I understand the basics of digital color correction – but not how to do that. The Blu Ray of Pulp Fiction or Catch Me if you Can looks approximately how I remember the theatrical release looking (just cleaned up). I was wondering how to accurately recreate that look on something shot today.

Screen Shot 2022-11-20 at 1.19.57 AM.png

Edited by M Joel W
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

I think, to some extent, you have to give up on the notion of perfect recreation of past processes because you are comparing apples to oranges -- digital to film, additive color to subtractive color, digital projection to print projection, etc.  Even if you completely stayed out of the digital realm, you can't make new prints of old negatives that match exactly to the print stocks of the past, especially not to Technicolor dye transfer printing. You can't make new prints of new negatives either that match old negatives and old print stocks. And even if you had old print stock in storage, you couldn't make a new print of an old negative that matched exactly because the old negative has aged. And you couldn't use that old print stock on new negative to match the old look either because that's a new negative. And I'm just talking about staying completely out of the digital realm. 

Now throw in digital and the variations increase exponentially!  Digital to P3 projection, with or without a 2383 emulation, film to digital to film, film to digital theatrical, to streaming, to broadcast, UHD, HDR, etc.

So all you can do in the end is eyeball things.  And if it's not a look that can be seen by human eyes, it's not particularly relevant anyway.  Sure, it would be nice to have plug-ins in D.I. theaters that have labels like "3-strip Technicolor to dye transfer print", "5254 to dye transfer print", etc. but I'm sure in the end, half the filmmakers would say it doesn't look right to their eyes based on personal memory.  We're creating visual art here, not doing a science experiment. Evocating old processes for a look is fine, but it's again about triggering an emotional response in the viewer, not putting up comparison charts and running side-by-side projectors, etc.

You have to understand that for the most part, Kodak engineers weren't interested in creating looks, that was up to the filmmakers. They were interested in accuracy and consistency, and even more so as you went past the camera negative into the duplication and print stocks.  And Fuji and Agfa followed Kodak's lead for the most part.  Most studio print releases in the 1990s and 2000s mixed up Kodak, Fuji, and Agfa print stocks so they tried to be similar.

What happened with Vision 2383 print stock in 1999 was that Kodak was trying to improve the stock technically -- sharper, better blacks, etc. but their first version was a bit on the contrasty side (in their attempt to improve blacks) -- and thus more saturated because sharpness / saturation / contrast are tied together -- so over the course of a year or two, they pulled back on the contrast and what we ended up with wasn't too far off from the previous stock.  But in terms of color reproduction, Kodak engineers have always mainly aimed for accuracy, not for creating color biases. Of course, that's based on engineers looking at test charts and faces so there is always the human factor.

Filmmakers, in the meanwhile, are always trying to create a distinct look -- some doing it within the system of Kodak negative and print stocks under normal processing, so they used odd lenses or filters or do it with lighting, etc. Some added variations to the system like push and pull processing, flashing, skip-bleach printing. By the late 90s, Kodak, Fuji, and Agfa were starting to put out special-look stocks, mainly ones with lower contrast though Fuji had some higher-contrast negative stocks. Kodak and Fuji also made a higher-contrast print stock.  All of that went out the window by the mid-2000s as digital color-correction took over, all optimized to use laser recorders sending digital files to intermediate dupe stock following LAD specifications.  So lots of variations introduced by digital color-correction, but conversely more standardization / less options in the printing end. And then digital projection killed most of the use of film prints anyway.

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

Blu-rays of older movies come from all sorts of sources and are post-processed in different ways -- it's mainly about budget. Look at something like "Out of Africa" for example, mainly transferred from a color-timed IP on a telecine to HD and SD, but then in the late 2000s, Universal decided they should remaster it in 4K as a form of archiving it, so they scanned the original negative on an Arriscanner at 6K then downsampled it to 4K and color-corrected that.  But I'm sure the colorist looked at previous home video transfers OK'd by Sidney Pollack (and hopefully David Watkin) and maybe even screened a print but that's not standard operating procedure. Some movies have more budget allotted to digital remastering than others.

Look at the "Star Trek" movies -- for some reason "Star Trek 2" had two digital remasters from scans of the original negative done in the 2000s whereas all the others just had an HD telecine from an IP until very recently.

One common mistake I see on transfers of old movies where clearly they haven't watched a print or even watched the movie with the sound on, is transferring day-for-night scenes as if they were day scenes. 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks, David, I appreciate your patience and expertise. Trusting your eyes (and using references) is probably the way to go.

I was wrong to claim 2383 print stock turns blues cyan. But the emulation LUT in Resolve does tint shadows cyan and highlights orange. I posted the result I got with it on a grayscale gradient, and it's consistent with the look of recent films I've watched that have been printed on that stock. And different stocks do render colors differently, even those intended for neutrality. I feel like 50D is a bit more magenta, more similar to Portra maybe, and 200T is more gold – but the host of variables with processing and scanning and what filter you have in front of each make this statement sort of meaningless, especially when you can correct for it digitally in a much more meaningful way.

Chances are I'm responding to something as simple as older movies having a simple rec709 LUT and newer ones having more attention in the grade. I don't actually remember what things looked like in the 90s in theaters beyond a vague impression. I do remember thinking Lord of the Rings had a "heavily color graded" feel when I saw it in theaters, but the impression, not the specifics. 

Edited by M Joel W
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi!

It’s not only the lighting and potential flaws in the transfer. You should also take a look at the props, haircuts, dresses, …: Everything in Pulp Fiction looks like „typically 70s“: Samuel L. Jackson‘s haircut, the reel-to-reel-tape-recorder in the Marsellus‘ flat, … . The Jack Rabbit Slim‘s even looks like 50s, … . So it’s very, very hard for you brain to agree to the fact that it’s a film shot in the 1990s.

Just my 2 cents

Jörg

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

Yeah it could be the case that raw scans of Vision3 are associated to look somewhat early 90s because they would just color-time an IP, scan with a telecine and call it a day. Here's a raw scan of Vision3 250D.

1790156080_1raw_1_19.1.thumb.jpg.a59b7550c93b4f359b37087102bf3416.jpg

Vectorscope:

043bc3ca82002afc98d751807bc30db3.png.57d033efc432620c3194944742352484.png

As you can see the water in this scene from this raw scan is clearly pulling toward blue, with skin tones where you'd expect. When I take that same raw scan and apply Davinci's built-in Kodak 2383 D65 emulation LUT from cineon log, this is the outcome.

b59f4165c0bfe9d387c2758a31d25364-min.thumb.jpg.a3656cbfc34f63bff0c196ca6e965b62.jpg

Vectorscope:

1a1e80984f53ec759765331d106e024a.png.6e2caf0cdf0f3df66e22ee899125e290.png

As we can see by default, the 2383 gamut pulled the blues closer to cyan, with the water now sitting somewhere in between blue and cyan. And pulled the skin tones a little redder. This resulted in more of a complementary scheme between the skin tones, water and shadows. There does appear to a bias, to which can be easily corrected for of course if the goal is to match the scanned original negative.

When increasing the gamma manually to the raw scan to match the 2383 gamma, there isn't a natural bias towards cyan. So clearly there is something specific here to 2383.

Edited by Seth Baldwin
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...