Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian81
Will have to get back to you on that, I just compared what I saw to the caps.
Edit - threw in the 4K. Other than the 4K disc being grainy and the 70mm being smooth, the first 19 minutes up through the sunrise are pretty damn close, after that is where it deviates. Print more golden. 21 minutes in at night, pretty damn close - the branches did look a bit more teal looking on the print, but other than that, close. 28m in Well scenes, it also had a more faded out look, maybe wrong on this part when I referenced it in my prior post. Right now I much prefer the clean 70mm print over this chunky grain on the 4K. Though the guy approaching to shoot the 'friend' - the camels legs in the distance is the first time I actually notice more detail on the 4K. But so far, I still prefer the 70mm. Once Lawrence meets up with his fellow Brit and witnesses Turkish bombings and the night scene, those I saw as more natural and appears very close to the 4K. Seems pretty close until the tornado, remember it being more golden here. I might stop soon, perhaps the differences in color are closer than I thought after looking at the caps. Though in the spot where Lawrence executes the guy I thought it wasn't quite this dark in this scene. But I guess the 4K is actually really close most of the time, just more golden during the daylight exteriors. And all this grain was not visible. Addition, scene where kid sinks in the sand was definitely not so dark as on the 4K and was more daylight and golden. On the 4K here it seems more grayish and darker up until they reach the city. After that and meeting up with the Brits to the intermission looks similar.
Usually I prefer a grainier image because it makes it look sharper to me, but here honestly I don't think it is any sharper because of the grain, it just looks like it might as well be noise.
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If you look at The New York Times article about the restoration I linked in my last comment, and also the Geoff D review of the 4K disc, it makes sense why the disc is grainier than a film print. The 2012 digital restorations was made from the original negative, and had to fix a lot of flaws that wouldn't normally be visible in a print.
To quote from The New York Times:
The 8K scanning, again one frame at a time, consumed the first half of 2010. Then they looked at the result. “It was amazingly more detailed and sharp,” Mr. Crisp recalled in a phone interview. “That’s the blessing of 4K. The curse is that it exposes a lot more flaws” — dirt, scratches, faded colors and more.
When “Lawrence” was last restored, in 1988, some of these flaws could be disguised by “wetgate printing,” a process of dousing the print in a special solution. But the new restoration has no prints. The film’s digital data are stored on a hard drive, about the size of an old videocassette, which is inserted into a 4K digital projector. In short, the problems would now have to be fixed.
Below is part of Geoff D's review of the UHD, and also a link to the entirety of it.
https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.p...&postcount=531
By the mid-80s the decision was made at Columbia to restore the film which is when Mr Harris enters the story, backed by the likes of Lawrence super-fan Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, and despite some typical studio wrangling at Columbia - Harris launching a lawsuit against the studio when they backed out of a deal with him, which no doubt steered them away from reteaming with him for the subsequent Bridge on the River Kwai restoration - the final product was as good as photochemical technology would allow. They located the material deleted from the original cut after a two month search in Columbia's vaults across the world, working with Lean and original editor Anne V. Coates to not just restore what was lost but to fine-tune what was there, to create a true "director's cut", bringing back most of the principle actors to redub certain scenes for which audio could no longer be located (the audio masters having been cut to match the shorter versions and the trims junked), resulting in a final length of 216 minutes (227 minutes including the overture, entr'acte and end credits).
Photochemical technology being what it was (and still is, in most respects) then most of the damage to the negative - warping, scratching, staining, tearing, literal cracking of the emulsion, you name it - remained in place, mollified by certain printing techniques like wetgates or using new dupe negative created from the YCM separations, but when finalising the new 65mm interpositive that would become the 'gold standard' element for the restored Lawrence the negative essentially 'died', opening up splices all over the place and tearing many valuable frames of original information. It was just too fragile to physically print from any more (the restored IP would be used to generate prints via the IN, as well as for home video transfer), so its life as a photochemical element had come to an undignified end. It would be more than two decades before technology was truly ready to attempt to restore Lawrence to his former glory.
To commemorate the 50th anniversary in time for 2012 it was determined that a new digital restoration be undertaken at Sony (who had purchased Columbia in the interim), this time utilising the original camera negative itself - though like the previous photochemical restoration it would take longer to create than it took to make the actual movie! The superb book that comes packaged with the Columbia Classics collection goes into detail about the process so you don't need all that regurgitated, but the basics are that the movie was scanned in 8K (with the raw 8K scans vaulted) and then downrezzed into 4K data where the actual restoration would be performed, taking what was a very badly damaged (though not badly faded, ironically enough, given that that was the fate of many a film before and after) negative and imbuing it with new life. The results were largely seamless in the 2012 editions of that new master, the 1080p Blu-ray looking crisp and colourful with very fine grain, and although some mild fluctations remained in colour and density they helped to remind us that this was - is - film. Sony returned to this same 4K restoration to use as the basis for their new 4K HDR edition of the film but I'd be lying if I said that it was 100% successful for usage in the HDR realm.
We're conditioned to think that large format film like 65mm or 8-perf 35mm is virtually grainless, and I've said it before that older film stock was a lot slower and more fine-grained than the many emulsions which have been used since, but the UHD of Lawrence unequivocally proves that even large format can't withstand being doused with HDR without setting off the grain, and whatever else is being hidden in SDR. The grade is about as respectful as a Sony catalogue HDR pass is going to get, still exceeding a thousand nits peak brightness in the first part of the film (less in the second) with an average brightness in the low hundreds, and yet even though it's not a total Light Cannon™ job the grain is rampant, especially in areas of open sky - which this movie has a lot of! It doesn't always seem to be of a particularly high frequency either, looking surprisingly coarse in many scenes. Could this be something to do with the extensive digital restoration, that it had to repair and replace so much of this damaged imagery - of which the desert-based 2nd unit stuff seemed to have the most cracking in the emulsion - that the grain field was altered as a result? There's definitely some extra RGB noise in some scenes as a result of the combination of the YCM seps to replace a damaged section. Or is it truly just how this vintage of film would react when HDR is applied, the typical effect of the extended dynamic range on brighter tones and highlights pulling out all this hitherto unseen grain which SDR just rolled off into its usual neutered highlights? Have they rolled off some of the HF detail in an effort to quell this intense graininess without resorting to DNR? I dare say it's a little bit of all three.
What the HDR definitely does is reveal artefacts from the restoration that were invisible in the previous 1080p disc, buried in the greatly compressed brightness range and softer grain of SDR but all too apparent now. The start of chapter 5 where Lawrence and his guide stop at the well is a case in point, the hazy horizon contains patches of frozen grain lolling about as well as a slight 'force field' effect of grain around the actors wherever they break the horizon line and have the blue sky behind them. This is not something that plagues all scenes to be fair, but for whatever reasons those specific kind of 'heat haze' wide shots really do seem to suffer with some very odd-looking grain. Vertical artefacts like columns of noise also come and go, most likely where scratches or cracks in the film have been painted over. Again, not a chronic problem but more visible now in HDR. For some of these shots then I wonder if it would've been prudent to return to the raw 8K data and rework them, given how iconic some are like the reveal of Omar Sharif. Sometimes we can look somewhere else in a scene to stop from seeing a certain artefact but when it's right where you're supposed to be looking then it becomes harder to avoid. A wetgate transfer would've undoubtedly been the optimal solution for 'filling in' many of these issues a decade ago, but although the Imagica XE scanners used for datacine at FotoKem had a wetgate option it was only for 35mm gauges as I understand it, with the special 'Bigfoot' 65mm gate lacking this ability at that time. But if it was available, then why on earth didn't they use it? FotoKem were adept at wetgate 65mm printing at that same period, creating a new IP from the negative of South Pacific in this way in 2006, but then that's not the same process as transfer to video.
Fine detail is still very strong however, stronger than the 1080p Blu-ray, though it rarely razzle-dazzles according to 65mm's lofty reputation. This is not always some ultra-clean, ultra-sharp "it's like looking through a window" kind of experience, it seems to run out of puff in the absolute highest frequencies and the thickness of the grain doesn't help. I do realise that I'm the first person to chide someone when they complain that x UHD doesn't look like some razor-sharp piece of total eye candy, that x movie is supposed to look like that even if you don't appreciate it, but hey: this is Lawrence of frickin' Arabia. If there was one UHD title ever that would be assumed to be such a piece of content, this is it. As for the HF roll-off, Mr Harris noted that when comparing a print created directly from the restored negative to one created by IP-IN printing that the difference was minimal, and that Messrs Lean and Young actually preferred the IP-IN print for its more "velvety" (© RAH) grain structure, so perhaps there's something to be said for it not being as pin-sharp as it could potentially be. That's not to excuse whatever's been done to the 4K UHD transfer as the slight filtering may not have come from such a benevolent place, but I guess we'll never know unless someone has Grover Crisp's email address? In any case, it is what it is.
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