Dead Man’s Shoes (Second Sight) Blu-ray

[BudBaxter]

It's not my favourite Meadows (I can never quite get past that crappy 2CV the gang drive round in), but I was quite chuffed to find this signed DVD in a charity shop for 50p a few years back:





Interested to see what Second Sight do with it.

[Marv Inc.]

Originally Posted by Pecker

Worryingly, and I have to admit I didn’t initially think of this, if they can’t source the original elements for a 4K disc, what are they using for the Blu-ray?

I'd assume the licensor has an older HD master of sorts either 1080 or 2K.

[Cinematt]

Originally Posted by grahams76

I was surprised this was the case for a film released just 20 years ago.

The indie boom of the 90s-2000s is going to have a lot of this happening. Storing things like negatives, along with actual notation on what shots are on what reels, which take was used, what kind of process was used to create positive elements and create the colour timing - it's all labour intensive and costly, and the kind of thing major studios have facilities and processes for. So if you're not a big studio who is doing that? Who is keeping the stuff organised for 20 years in the hope someone will come knocking wanting to do a new edition of your film? And how much can you afford to spend while you wait? How many film cans can you lug from garage to garage before you lose one, or forget you stashed them somewhere?

It'll get worse with digital too, when even people that think they've got that covered find their old hard drives are corrupted.

[Sifox211]

Originally Posted by Cinematt

...It'll get worse with digital too, when even people that think they've got that covered find their old hard drives are corrupted.

It's a scary prospect. Reminds me of the Open Uni data centre fire back in the 80s - no problems, they said, we did daily backups! Only, no one had ever verified these backups and when it came to restoring them, they were empty. 15 years of research data down the can

[Cinematt]

Originally Posted by Sifox211

It's a scary prospect. Reminds me of the Open Uni data centre fire back in the 80s - no problems, they said, we did daily backups! Only, no one had ever verified these backups and when it came to restoring them, they were empty. 15 years of research data down the can

Ouch!
Digital archiving is a whole field, and people working in that field have been ringing alarm bells for a long time. No doubt one day we'll hear miraculous stories about how someone happened to check a hard drive on a laptop with an old OS that could read the file format and realised something wasn't junk but was actually the final cut files for their movie, but plenty more will just be lost to the bins, like that guy that has been trying to sue his council to let him excavate the dump because he threw away a hard drive with a bitcoin wallet on it that's now worth about £500M. So easily done when things are small and relatively anonymous.

IIRC Arrow had to include a version of Takashi Miike's Dead or Alive 3 with burned in Chinese subs in their set because the original unsubbed footage was lost. If it can happen to a name like that then it can happen to anyone.

[Pecker]

Originally Posted by Marv Inc.

I'd assume the licensor has an older HD master of sorts either 1080 or 2K.

So having thought about it...

Others will have a better memory than me. At the time of release, would a 2K DCP be likely to have been made, or would the cinema release have been 100% physical film.

If the latter, then at some point a HD scan was made to create the 1080i Blu-ray Disc. Would they most likely to have scanned at 1080p/24 and downsized that for TV, or scanned at 1080i?

That's 3 levels of possible archive available to them, I suppose, a 2K DCP, a 1080p/24 scan, or a 1080i/50 scan.

If it's the latter, I'm sure they can deinterlace back to 1080p/24 with whatever technology they have than we can in the home, and speed-change re-pitching is pretty easy these days.

Here's hoping. But what a shame we can't have a proper 4K.

EDIT: There was definitely a DCP made for the re-release, though what the source was for that, who knows.

https://www.parkcircus.com/film/111713-Dead-Man's-Shoes