Something to bear in mind is the "breathing" quality of early Technicolor, which creates a slight fluctuation in the colour palette, as I think can be seen here. I noticed the same thing in The Life And Death of Colonel Blimp.
Edit: 2nd grab replaced by link to site.
Last edited by reaky on Sun Jan 04, 2009 8:52 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Thanks Reaky! Livesey still looks af if the room he's sitting in hasn't got an oven, but at least he doesn't seem to freeze to death anymore as in Gary's cap.
Stealing bandwidth is one thing. Pictures from a movie from the middle of the twentieth century is another-- you don't own the rights to those films. You take images from someone elses discs & movies to compare. He took images from your site which you took from someone elses disc and movie to compare. It's the internet furchrissakes.
..and I'm writing this on faith that you're coming at this as a rights issue, not that Mr. Comparison is trying to block being compared himself.
Listen up Herr Schreck,
Just extrapolate taking images from my site - be it SD or Blu-ray - and then hosting them elsewhere.
It's my efforts (over years) that allowed me to receive an early screener and my efforts that matched the captures.
My toil has a goal - to send people to DVDBeaver. This is circumventing that purpose - be it on a small scale or (eventually) much larger.
I've had individuals copy my entire review at another Forum - every single word - and every image hosted on ImageShack - until I vehemently complained. I don't have time to chase around the Net and do this.
I've made my request. You may abide by it - or not.
Regards,
Gary, c'mon. Tell it to someone else. With a view like that you'd call the police on a housefly because "an intruder is an intruder is an intruder."
The fact is you have no right of ownership to the content of the single image, he took none of your original text, and he attributed you as its original capturer. The guy clearly has no interest in starting his own review service with you providing the content, and even if you did have any claim to a picture of Roger Livesy made by Powell & Pressburger and with distribution rights held in this case by Sony, Fair Use would certainly apply here in this pathetic instance of innocent cross checking.
You do what you do because you want to do it, and you do it in the wide open-- and within certain boundaries accept the consequences of participating in a public discourse. Regardless how you perceive your 'toil', you are opening conversation, not closing it. And as your caps have proven flawed at times, you're no exception to the public surgeries experienced by the disc-production companies you often rightfully dissect. People have a right to compare comparisons before making decisions to buy or not to buy.
Reaky have you had a chance to listen to the commentary? Just wondering if Christie makes mention of the transfer or indeed there is any discussion in the booklet etc.
You collared that copy pretty damn quickly from the US. I'm still waiting for mine from Amazon.
Haven't listened to the commentary yet; there's no booklet in the package (sleeved digipak). The swift arrival is down to those marvellous Danes at Axelmusic.
That David managed to avoid taking your introduction to "the joys of grabbing and posting" into certain uh territories shall we say is mildly depressing to me.
It's not only the color values, either: there's a richness and and a depth-- a patina-- to reaky's caps that's lacking in beev's. Reaky's look gorgeously hi-bitrate, look amber-filtered in the appropriate spots, and the fleshtones lack the cold purple hue of the morgue.
This has been a classic zone of weakness on Gary's site. Nick Wrigley of MoC had to rescue his release of La Vie Jesus from the flawed beev caps, versus which the differences were like night and day. Similar recent examples were the problems Nick pointed out on Nosferatu, and Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon.
Thank you your reakdom for these.
Chiming in with everyone else I am largely relieved by these caps compared to the montrosities on the Beaver site.
I think there has been some 'creative' licence at TK with the cross colouring in the flesh tone highlights which, whilst not in total accord with my take on the restored print, I do not find personally offensive. Maybe some die- hard-core members might still disagree. But at least the jury has come back in and I think we can rescind the Helen Keller award to the colourist.
These colors seem disagreeable to Powell and Pressburger. I tend to think that criterion has reproduced theirs films with the right attention to color, aside from Tales of Hoffman where I would wager they are off, agreeing with what David Hare has said; everyone appears to have a tan, and black hair shimmers green. But this example here reminds me of the contrast between criterion's Colonel Blimp and carlton's-- link. It's anyone's guess which is accurate, but the more theatrical use of color is more in line with both the film and filmmaker's habits. I don't know much at all about color timing, but why would their films on dvd continually be released with exaggerated colors if they were not in the film to begin with. It seems to me that where these companies go wrong is in trying to create neutrality, as in the skin tones. Trying to even out colors originally shot with amber filters, would cool down everything else at the expense of accurate skin tones, since skin tones are probably the most effected by amber filters.
Apparently Gary supplied the BLIMP caps to celtoslavica-- Gary's own review is here. These caps and their difference, duplicate the difference in color schemes between the Sony and the CArlton AMOLAD... the Carlton looks studded with corpses vs the CC, which is clearly-- clearly viz my eyes anyhoo-- the more authentic transfer.
Extremely difficult to decide. In Frame #6 the actress really looks like she's completely drained of blood in the Carlton. But the wide shots in Frame #3 and #7 look not only slightly sharper, but also far more natural in the Carlton. A good indication is the cap of the credits: everything there, from the writing to the grass, looks reddish in the Criterion, and not necessarily in a way that looks like it's intended. These comparisons can be misleading though; I'm sure I would opt for the Carlton "Red Shoes" over the CC from caps any time, but once you've seen both versions in motion there can be no doubt that the CC is by far the superior transfer, simply because of the way colours are emotionally employed by Powell.
As to AMOLAD: reaky's caps also put me back to ease about the new Sony, it seems it's surely an acceptable transfer. But here again I think I'll wait till I've seen it before I finally make up my mind. But I really hope that I'll find the Sony acceptable, simply because the sharpness and lack of edge enhancement and colour smear makes it obviously superior at least in these departments.
As usual, the armchair experts have it - unfortunately for them, they've never seen an IB Tech print of the film, had they they'd know just how ridiculous they're being. The Carlton is the one that's not correct. I ran Martin Scorsese's 16mm IB Tech print and it very closely resembles the new Columbia transfer and looked nothing like the Carlton. Everyone thinks films should look like today's films, where they suck the color out or turn it yellow. IB Tech did not have this yellow bias - it had a lot of blue, which was the favored look of cameramen back then. So we get lots of dreary yellow transfers today that the armchair experts all rave about because they're sharper than previous transfers - Breakfast At Tiffany's being a prime example.
Those who sit here and believe people like Herr Schreck are depriving themselves of a very nice and pretty accurate transfer from Columbia. The caps don't really do it justice, just as caps never do, but it's lots more fun to get on the old high horse and say "fuckin'" a lot, isn't it? But someone's got to speak up and it may as well be me.
