SE7EN & How 35mm Scans Lie to You

Comments · 1.6K

• BR

  @brendanmohareful · 1 year ago

  Me watching this on a cracked phone screen, nodding my head and quietly saying "yes, mhmm".

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• FA

  @FabioBedoya · 1 year ago

  I work in film restoration at a facility in Hollywood, and I can tell you that most, if not all, restoration projects are based on the original camera negatives, internegatives, or, in the worst-case scenario, a positive print. Occasionally, we receive the digital intermediate from the early 2000s. When it comes to damage and dust, that's to be expected—cleaning up negatives is generally much easier than working with positive prints. Regarding color, many clients, like directors, prefer to draw inspiration from the release print, but usually, a new color scheme is created based on the scan. There have been some advancements in achieving a kind of perceptual matching between the negative and the release print, but it's not quite production-ready yet. And, as you pointed out, due to the instability of Eastman color, we can never truly know how it originally looked. Personally, I believe that having the telecine as a reference will be the closest we can get to the original color, as it’s the most reliable source we have.

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• ST

  @stargazer2504 · 1 year ago (edited)

  As someone who worked IN the movie industry in the early 1990&apos;s, and by that I mean I ran the projectors at a multiplex cinema for $7.00/hour, I can tell you that we had serious variations with the projectors themselves. We had arc light bulbs that were new and ones that were old; large screens and small screens; clear and not so clear projector lenses. We joked about the crappy setup and alignment from the manufacturer. It all made a difference.<br>If you watched Se7en on the day it came out, in the large theater, it would project differently than if you watched it on week 12 in the small theater with the worn out arc lamp. So what your memories are might not even be the same as your neighbor because you watched the same film running through different projectors on different screens- one with gummy bears stuck to the screen and one without.

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• LA

  @lanolinlight · 1 year ago (edited)

  1995. I saw SEVEN in a $4 second run theater in Times Square. Dark, contrasty and projected with a very faint bulb. It was magnificent. The fact that the auditorium was in the basement of an ammonia-reeking former porno theater also helped make it a 4D grunge experience.

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• GU

  @guaposneeze · 1 year ago

  Color is such an absurdly complicated topic when you go far enough down the rabbit hole.<br>Most everything you talked about was the print. &nbsp;But of course, the film frame doesn&apos;t look like anything by itself. &nbsp;You need a projector with a light bulb. &nbsp;What kind of bulb were you watching with in 1995? &nbsp;What illuminant is used in your modern scanner? &nbsp;How many hours are on the bulb. &nbsp;Is it aging? &nbsp;The same bulb won&apos;t have exactly the same color temperature today that it did a month ago. &nbsp;Are you seeing the first showing of the day? &nbsp;Bulb temperature may not stabilize until part way through the film, so color may drift measurably during projection.<br>What sort of house lights are in the theater and in the lobby. &nbsp;If you were looking at super blue fixtures right before the projection started, the projection will appear warmer, and visa versa. &nbsp;A person who rushes in from the lobby lighting will have slightly different color perception of the exact same projection than somebody who has been sitting in the theater for 15 minutes before the projection started.<br>... &nbsp;Then there&apos;s the screen. &nbsp;Different theaters will have screens made of slightly different materials, which will slightly effect the look.<br>There&apos;s a zillion factors that influence what you &quot;really saw&quot; in 1995 that aren&apos;t on that 35mm film frame. &nbsp;People get stuck arguing over one or two factors, and miss the forest for the tree. &nbsp;Are you seeing exactly what you saw in 1995 with a modern scan? &nbsp;Of course not. &nbsp;But the guy who saw the matinee across town on the exact same day in the exact same city as you may have also seen something quite different from what you saw.

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• 35

  @35mmMovieTrailersScans · 1 year ago

  You forget to mention an important point about the perception of colors. The human eye has one of the most effective &quot;auto-white-balance&quot; there is. So when humans see a movie with a hue in a dark theater then the eyes adapts almost instantaneously, the hue almost disappear. Not the case when you watch the same movie on a tv screen in a room lit by daylight or some lamps. That&apos;s why people don&apos;t remember the original hue, that&apos;s why people don&apos;t recognize the movie in home releases.

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• LE

  @lezieuteur · 1 year ago (edited)

  Truth is I don&apos;t remember what I ate 2 hours ago so the exact &nbsp;look of the movie I watched as a kid?

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• AL

  @algi1 · 1 year ago

  As I understand the point of 4K77 isn&apos;t the exact colors, but that it&apos;s the first restoration of Star Wars that&apos;s actually based on the original film. For his version Harmy had to do a lot of digital trickery, including he himself had to animate certain elements. The 4K77 version should be a good basis for later color correction.

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• JO

  @joschavandeijk · 1 year ago

  When beloved paintings are restored, similar issues often arise. In 2010-2011 they restored ‘Woman in Blue Reading a Letter’ by Johannes Vermeer, removing the yellowed varnish they revealed much brighter and saturated colors than people had been seeing all these years. But many people disliked these ‘new’ colors, feeling this was no longer the painting they knew and loved.

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• TH

  @TheDominitri · 1 year ago

  &quot;Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” - Brian Eno

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• FI

  @Fionor01 · 1 year ago

  As part of my work is film restoration (mainly old Czech movies) I confirm this - most negatives we scan are in terrible shape (they were used to make distribution prints at small scale, so the damage is not that bad and oftern the stock is higher quality) - followup color grading includes people who worked on the movie (if possible) - director, cinematographer, editor--- whoever have at least some idea of artistic choices made before firts theatrical release. But it&apos;s always well meant aproximation based on experiences.<br><br>I often find 4K remasters of these films made with AI from television copy and it really pains me- The framerate is wrong, grain is gone and colours are off. <br>People rarely appreciate well done (and well researched) restoration work - they just want sharpened picture and artificialy high fps.

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• RE

  @ResizeFilms · 6 months ago

  In many restorations, color information from the negative alone is insufficient because prints faded, timing notes were lost, lab processes changed over decades.<br>Before even scanning, films have to be physically prepared by cleaning dust and mold, repairing splices, stabilizing warped sections, repairing perforations.<br>And then, digital work is required to correct degradation accumulated over the years. This time consuming process is often done frame-by-frame.<br><br>The recent 4K restoration of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Le Mépris”, which is one of the greatest films ever made, shot in 1963 in CinemaScope in Europe extracted maximum information from the 35mm film negatives, the interpostive for damaged sections and a reference print. Over 220 hours of digital work. It’s currently the closest version to how the film would have looked in a pristine 1963 projection.<br>A masterpiece.

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