Quote:
Originally Posted by REPLAY
Sure would like to see Warner Archive bring the 1951 MGM film SHOW BOAT to blu-ray. Does anybody know what kind of shape the film print or negative is in. This would be a great Technicolor film with great music to be out on blu-ray.
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This film needs a lot of work, which is probably going to be very expensive to restore properly since it's a three-strip technicolor film. The dvd looks to be the same print with the same problems that occasionally airs on TCM. Blurriness, softness, wobble & other problems are present throughout the film. With it being a three-strip technicolor film, I'm guessing that color bleeding might be a problem too, like with the dvd transfer of The Barkley's of Broadway (1949) & the blu-ray of Bend of the River (1952) for instance.
As a frame of reference from what looks to be at least from 2005 & 2017 respectively. From DVDBeaver:
The Barkley's of Broadway (1949)
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Matt says: ...I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Technicolor registration errors in the film. It's simply the nature of the beast. Technicolor holds its colors, but--like all film--it is likely to shrink over time. This is not really a problem with single-strip processes like black and white or monopack color, but in the case of Technicolor where you have three different strips of film that are supposed to match up precisely to create a single image, shrinkage will be much more readily apparent.
Currently, the only way around this is Warners' Ultra Resolution process which has the nasty drawback of being painstakingly slow and excruciatingly expensive. If you look hard enough in any recent print or transfer of a Technicolor film (excepting those created digitally through a process such as Ultra Resolution), you will find registration errors, even if only briefly at the reel ends (where film shrinks first and most).
Bend of the River (1952)
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Color bleeding, Simon tell us in email: "As you probably know, this is inherent in only pre-1954 3-strip Technicolor movies...... The 3 negatives shrink slightly at different rates. The 3-strip process is a dye transfer process from 3 b/w film negs shot simultaneously thru color filters. The cameras were huge & bulky. The colors are pretty permanent, unlike post 1954 single strip color that is highly prone to fading of different colors at different rates. For some reason the 3 b/w negs are not equally stable in film dimension, although theoretically they should be.
The first time this was publicised was when MGM did their WS reissue of Gone with the Wind around 1960 or early 61..... They had to re-register the 1939 Technicolor negs---especially the yellow, as I recall reading then...... Perhaps the mis-register was more obvious because of the big blow up they gave the movie to maybe 70mm & cropping off the top & bottom to give it a WS ratio, which was so badly received critically that it was junked for subsequent reissues. Probably it’s not been as noticeable in DVD releases of older 3-strip movies because of the lower resolution.
There’s probably a bunch of technical writing on this subject that I’ve not seen, & the particulars to how much which color separation negative shrinks, but I’ve never researched. However, we are liable to see the color haloing from the out of register colors in any pre-1954 movie BD that has not undergone expensive restoration, or perhaps been drawn from perhaps a single color master that was made from the 3 color before they shrunk. It was a problem with the Barefoot Contessa BD last year."
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Show boat mgm 1951
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