Cyrano de Bergerac (Jean-Paul Rappeneau - 1990)

[johnpaul2]

Originally Posted by Sifox211

After all, they've long used colour references for printed material.

Many of the older HD masters were graded in ways more in line with what customers were expected to like to see more on their CRT sets than what was the original photography, hence the tons of magenta-pushed overly-contrasted HD masters we got, especially from studios (and even more especially from Universal and MGM).

I don't doubt those were graded however with some color references anyway, but still, that's what we got for more than a decade.

The main specificity of Ritrovata is their over-reliance on LUT, especially some that seemingly applies some kind of "vintage" aspect to the photo (hence the warmer yellower aspect of their gradings).

From what I read, and from what I saw from them, 2-perf's explanation looks about right : that's what they feel replicate the original look of a movie. The issue however is that their LUT tends to give some kind of blanket color-signature to their gradings. It's not refined enough. I've seen numerous archive copies this past year projected during retrospectives, and none have this kind of blanket yellow dull aspect. They ARE kind of yellower and warmer, but even when this happens, you'll still find pure whites and pure blacks within the frames. You can't find that in these Ritrovata gradings. Instead, what you get is a color signature way too recognizable.

Originally Posted by kmhofmann

But more seriously, is there a good source for this information? I'm still very, very scared every time I hear the name L'Immagine Ritrovata, since they have ****ed up so many film restorations in the color grading stage, and so few of them had the chance to be redone. How on earth can their clients be happy with what they deliver(ed)?

This French DVD Classik member visited their Paris lab to discuss their gradings. They told him they agreed some of their past restorations were too "yellow" and if redone today, they would dial it down and that, as a whole, they have been toning down the intensity of this specificity of their gradings.