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WWII in HD


Will Montgomery

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I was watching the special features on the WWII in HD Blu-Ray and saw that they had setup a film chain transfer system using 16mm & 35mm projectors with a RED camera for capturing RAW 4k images.

 

While some of the footage in the show looked good, some looked really bad (overly contrasty). And some had major stability issues that looked like flutter from a projector.

 

I guess what I'm asking is a process like that truly effective or would it have looked much better through a proper HD telecine? Why would they have gone that route? Cost?

 

Seems like that might have been a great project for a telecine house to do the transfer and restoration themselves then produce and market the program to the History channel or Discovery. Could that be another stream of income while film transfers are going down in frequency?

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Ha this again!

 

Some of the more valuable footage went through real telecine (Spirits and a DSX) and then they ran a fair amount of cheaply acquired 8mm and 16mm through a projection based setup. They had announced to great fanfare that they had used a Red-one for the transfers and that they had destroyed a fair amount of old film using this method. I had called BS on them on CML etc. at the time and some peeps were pissed at me.

 

There were photos of the film chain setups in some article at the time this thing came out and you could see that they were transferring the 8mm stuff by filming it off of a screen, so not even a real film chain just a total amateur hack. If they had cared at all or had any technical intelligence they could have setup the projectors to film an aerial image with the Red-One and a macro lens, they did not so there is the texture of the screen in the footage.

 

Outside of the film that was transferred properly on a Spirit or DSX the rest of this show looks like crap.

 

-Rob-

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Absolutely for the amount of film they had and the budget they could have bought a set of Kinetta scanners and had higher quality images and not destroyed the originals.

 

It was their show and they did what they wanted to do even though it was totally hack.

 

-Rob-

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I agree with Rob. I actually had the chance to meet with one of the producers of this show, and I turned it down because I would've given him the biggest piece of my mind for destroying some of that footage, or even RISKING destroying some of it. Totally a BS job.

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Ok, then I'm not crazy. The transfers were really all over the place and some were so bad you could tell that it was shot off a screen.

 

If any of the shops that frequent this forum had done the project it would have been 10x better! What a load of marketing BS...promoting it like it was some amazing technical achievement.

 

4K RED images of a crappy projected image still equals CRAPPY. What a waste of time on their part. With the 10% of the money the History Channel made off of that they could have bought a Spirit or Millennium and done the job 100% correctly.

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