Who's the idiot…
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strntz — 10 years ago(December 08, 2015 04:13 PM)
that came up with the brilliant [?] idea of colorizing this film?
That would be me
I wrote the studio dozens of times and asked them to colorize it, and thank God they did. It was good before, but even the marginal pastel colors transform the film. My favorite scene is the last one where Fred, Doris, and Susan are driving through that quaint post WWII neighborhood in that old Ford and pull up to the house. Like looking through a time machine.
Is very bad to steal Jobu's rum. Is very bad. -
strntz — 10 years ago(December 09, 2015 04:44 AM)
My guess is that there were others lacking in connected brain cells who also wrote those letters
Folks with an abundance of connected brain cells know that they can turn off the
c
o
l
o
r
on their TV and see it in black and white
Is very bad to steal Jobu's rum. Is very bad. -
PillowRock — 10 years ago(December 09, 2015 01:32 PM)
Folks with an abundance of connected brain cells know that they can turn off the color on their TV and see it in black and white
Folks with an abundance of connected brain cells know that turning off the monitor's color for a colorized movie does NOT give you back the original image. -
strntz — 10 years ago(December 09, 2015 07:06 PM)
A color TV that has the color control reduced to zero will display the luminance signal only and virtually the same picture as if the source was B&W. If your TV lacks sufficient range to reduce the chroma to zero, then you might see some color. Today, even garbage TVs source from China will reduce the color to zero if asked. Some early colorizations were less than completely successful, but other than the odd color hues, the rest of the process for Miracle are quite clean.
In any case, the slight difference a colorized version might as compared to the original is insignificant compared to the compression artifacts that cable, sat, and IPTV companies add in order to make up bandwidth.
Is very bad to steal Jobu's rum. Is very bad. -
PillowRock — 10 years ago(December 10, 2015 11:09 AM)
A color TV that has the color control reduced to zero will display the luminance signal only and virtually the same picture as if the source was B&W.
No.
The point is not to have just any old gray scale image. The point is to have the originally intended image (or as close to that as is possible given the aging of film stock before they could have been digitally scanned for preservation).
Taking a colorized movie and desaturating it back to a gray scale image will NOT get you back to the original B&W movie as if it had never been modified.
Keeping the luminance of every bit of every frame unchanged from the original B&W movie is not anywhere on the list of priorities when a movie is being colorized. Light areas often end up being less bright. Dark areas often end up being less dark. Overall, contrast ends up being reduced, but not in a consistent way that can be fixed with other adjustments.
Also, there are the issues of parts of the image where the colorization doesn't quite match the boundaries and movement of the original object. Once you desaturate back to gray scale, you're left with these odd shadow-like blobs around or near the object. One prime example that comes to mind from one of the colorized pieces of Miracle that I've seen (I've never been able to last more than about 5 minutes at a stretch with the colorized version), is Kris' mouth. In multi-person shots where Kris is moving his head the colorizers were less than completely successful in having the reddish blob track where his mouth actually was throughout the movement (that phrasing was being extremely kind). If desaturate the image, you'll still be left with that weird medium gray blob floating around in Kris' beard. -
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strntz — 10 years ago(December 10, 2015 07:37 PM)
Also, there are the issues of parts of the image where the colorization doesn't quite match the boundaries and movement of the original object. Once you desaturate back to gray scale, you're left with these odd shadow-like blobs around or near the object.
I'm watching Miracle right now, and I turned the color off on my two TVs and neither is showing any artifacts in the luminance signal other than the images themselves. Both TVs show crisp well defined B&W images with no sign of black level compression, at least as far as my two TVs can produce (one is a Mitsu DLP and the other is a Sony LCOS projector; neither of which has stellar black level retention).
But I do indeed recall early colorization efforts where the "flesh tones" on a person's face would suddenly encroach into the hairline and then just as quickly recede, and do this over and over. This film shows no such artifacts. Other than the odd pastel colors (which I concede), the picture of Miracle is certainly fine.
Keeping the luminance of every bit of every frame unchanged from the original B&W movie is not anywhere on the list of priorities when a movie is being colorized. Light areas often end up being less bright. Dark areas often end up being less dark. Overall, contrast ends up being reduced, but not in a consistent way that can be fixed with other adjustments.
I'm not saying this doesn't exist, but I don't think any changes to the source image by the colorization process are obvious unless directly compared to another monitor showing a true B&W copy.
Consider walking through a Best Buy, and seeing several dozen TVs running the same source but all showing a different picture, some of them dramatically different. Some differences such as color saturation, hue, black level (and expansion), contrast, artificial edge enhancements, back light push through, etc. can be adjusted to a degree from the cust menu, and others such as gamma errors in LCD/LEDs cannot. Yet despite the spin each one of these TVs puts on the original source, the people who buy them are going to take one home and be quite happy with the picture. My point is that unless we run the colorized version (sans color) against the source B&W copy, very few people on the planet will know the difference.
Is very bad to steal Jobu's rum. Is very bad. -
jgroub — 10 years ago(December 10, 2015 08:49 PM)
Yes. All of those thousands of letters on the judge's desk at the end? They weren't writing to Santa. They were writing for colorization.
I want the doctor to take your picture so I can look at you from inside as well.