962 Death in Venice

[Drucker]

They added the green to Shoah, or it is a subpar encode? I thought a by-product of the latter?

[dwk]

Doesn't fill me with hope for the Criterion Police Story release.

Eureka commented that they were contractually barred from altering the Police Story masters. It is almost certain that Criterion has the same restriction.

Honestly, this doesn't look like your usual Ritrovata mess. Sure many of the caps lean green (maybe too green, I don't know), but, even though it isn't close to the same shot, Beaver cap 6 looks closer to the WB DVD caps posted earlier in this thread than it does to the "restoration clip" caps (shots 7 and 8 also look fine to me.)

[nitin]

I actually agree with that, although it has the usual Ritrovata signs, this is better than what we usually get from them colour wise.

[nitin]

Also it is presumably some type of sensitive issue as Arrow are opting to do their own grading on a lot of their recent Italian titles (and using a Ritrovata only for scanning and restoration). If it was as simple as pointing out the obvious, I imagine Arrow (and Camera Obscura) wouldn’t resort to what they are doing.

[Finch]

It'd be interesting to know if Arrow and CO either told Ritrovata upfront, we'll do the colour correction, you focus on the scanning and restoration, or they got the files with the colours fucked up and decided to fix the damage retrospectively.

[colinr0380]

I'm just amazed that for a site that often can find the merest brief flash of a pair of breasts to take a screen capture of, that DVDBeaver could not manage to show a single shot of Tadzio facing the camera.

[movielocke]

Not that I was ever going to buy this, but to the surprise of no one Ritrovata did it again

One day I will visit Italy and marvel in person at the famed green skies I’ve seen in their films.

[Fred Holywell]

I'm just amazed that for a site that often can find the merest brief flash of a pair of breasts to take a screen capture of, that DVDBeaver could not manage to show a single shot of Tadzio facing the camera.

I was thinking the exact same thing. Do you think the Beav even understands what the movie's about? Or maybe he just doesn't care anymore, if he ever did. Just like the folks at Ritrovata. (He could have at least provided some caps from the WB DVD for comparison. Or would that have been like pouring brine in Criterion's wounds.)

[Fred Holywell]

i am speechless.

David, what you said back in November, is even more appropriate now.

[dwk]

this review of the DVD has one cap (the 1st) that is roughly the same as the 5th cap in the DVD Beaver review and they are pretty close. The Blu-ray is a little greener on the water and buildings/trees in the background, but the sky is pretty close. However, this review has one cap (the 5th) that is roughly the same as the 15th cap in the DVD Beaver review and that one looks like the work of our friends at L'Immagine Ritrovata.

[nitin]

It'd be interesting to know if Arrow and CO either told Ritrovata upfront, we'll do the colour correction, you focus on the scanning and restoration, or they got the files with the colours fucked up and decided to fix the damage retrospectively.

CO and Arrow have tried in the past to correct Ritrovata’s grading (Amuck, Deep Red, Tree Of Wooden Clogs etc) but CO has commented twice about how that takes about at least twice as long as grading it from scratch and also still isn’t as good as grading it from scratch. So I think the change in approach in just asking for the scan and restoration but not the colour grading might reflect that.

[tenia]

IIRC, Arrow have performed some restorations whose scans were done at Ritrovata and the rest at Deluxe. CO has posted on blu-ray.com they explicitly requested for a movie (I don't recall which one, maybe Amuck) to Ritrovata not to do the grading, Ritrovata sent them a flat sample for approval, CO approved and... Ritrovata did the grading anyway, which CO had to correct.

They added the green to Shoah, or it is a subpar encode? I thought a by-product of the latter?

I don't think it is a by-product of the encode.

[nitin]

A number of Arrow’s recent Italian titles have had the colour grading done at R3store Studios in London (and the scans and restoration work by Ritrovata, although sometimes even the restoration has been done by R3store studios itself).

[tenia]

Thanks for the confirmation.

[nitin]

Take a look at R3store Studios’ Twitter account as they promote the Arrow titles for which they have done grading and also those where they done grading and restoration (they also promote recent BFI titles but that is less relevant to this discussion)

[Fred Holywell]

However, this review has one cap (the 5th) that is roughly the same as the 15th cap in the DVD Beaver review and that one looks like the work of our friends at L'Immagine Ritrovata.

That 5th cap appears to be a cropped publicity photo, rather than a frame from the film. There are a few others there that look to me more like cropped photos than actual screen caps.


PR photo


Warners DVD


Beaver BR cap

[Telstar]

His phrasing is ambiguous, in addition to being badly written:

It looks greenish in spots (so it's bad?) and some sequences are extremely textured and heavy. I thought the beautiful cinematography of Pasquale De Santis shone through better than I have ever seen. (OK, so it's good). These are impressionable visuals. (OK, it's really good, but you mean "impressive" right?) While there may be some softness - it seems inherent. I wouldn't use the negative term "Ritrovated" in regards to this restoration but its (sic) is not crisp...(Ok, it's not bad, but maybe not great) and was not meant to be. (What????)

I thought he might have meant 'impressionist" but 'impressive" is probably a better guess.
In any event I've asked this before, but is English Gary's first language?

[Fred Holywell]

Beaver Criterion BR caps (top) vs. Warners DVD (bottom):

[Fred Holywell]

A few more comparisons:

[tenia]

These last 2 caps could be coming from the EC of Once Upon A Time in America.
And the last one from your first post look like pretty much any giallo they restored and graded for Arrow.

This is total freaking non sense.

[jsteffe]

To bring back THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES, when I looked at the RGB Parade video scopes for that title, the blue channel was consistently shifted down and compressed (reduced gain) across the entire film. That was why it had the yellow tint, but there were also some crushed blacks because the blue channel was pushed so far down. I am seeing loss of detail in the blacks in the new resto of DEATH IN VENICE as well, and if anything that aspect may be worse based on the screen caps.

This is my least favorite Visconti film, but it is nonetheless frustrating because I would have liked to buy a copy.

[dwk]

I'm gonna walk my statement back, it is a Ritrovata mess. (Even though still I think the first two caps look ok.)

[movielocke]

Looking again, there’s obviously a magenta problem on the warner dvd, the beach sand and skies are unnatural on the warner for example, but the green is also visibly problematic in its own unique ways.

I’d say they’re actually quite similar in a corporate way, as the warner magenta bias is partly a fault with uninformed white balancing (and accompanying institutional bias towards “neutral” grading as the default “correct” choice). The green gauze that ritrovita prefers is also an institutional choice that seemingly overrides most other considerations.

[movielocke]

To bring back THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES, when I looked at the RGB Parade video scopes for that title, the blue channel was consistently shifted down and compressed (reduced gain) across the entire film. That was why it had the yellow tint, but there were also some crushed blacks because the blue channel was pushed so far down. I am seeing loss of detail in the blacks in the new resto of DEATH IN VENICE as well, and if anything that aspect may be worse based on the screen caps.

This is my least favorite Visconti film, but it is nonetheless frustrating because I would have liked to buy a copy.

If the scopes are showing an off kilter blue channel as you describe it, then it’s either a faulty scanner (bad blue channel in need of repair) or they’re correcting their black point with the blue channel and are pulling everything else off because of that approach. Bad way to approach grading because fucking up one of the channels in isolation to anchor one part of the image (the blacks) makes it damn hard to correctly grade the rest of the image.

[jsteffe]

If the scopes are showing an off kilter blue channel as you describe it, then it’s either a faulty scanner (bad blue channel in need of repair) or they’re correcting their black point with the blue channel and are pulling everything else off because of that approach. Bad way to approach grading because fucking up one of the channels in isolation to anchor one part of the image (the blacks) makes it damn hard to correctly grade the rest of the image.

Yes - the blue channel was consistently shifted down throughout the video of POMEGRANATES. I think the issue was that they applied a LUT to change the color profile so that it would reproduce correctly on film stock. So what the colorist was seeing may have been well balanced, but the output looks off when presented on DCP or home video. And Bologna only distributed that one grade, and not another one that was correctly timed for DCP. At least that is my understanding of what may have happened.

Maybe we are looking at something similar here.