posted 08-28-2011 02:32 AM                    

quote: Indiana Jones 3 poster from previous page

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Play the Indy game
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posted 12-25-2011 05:03 AM                    

Nice product placement.

quote:

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By Joshua Dixon, Staff Writer
Redwood Gazette
Posted Dec 22, 2011 @ 10:54 AM
Print Comment
Redwood Falls, Minn. —


If you get the Blu-Ray HDTV disk of Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty for Christmas, take a moment to appreciate the fine surround sound coming from your home theater’s speakers.
Then take a moment to thank Redwood’s Scott Balko for the small part he played in helping restore the sound.
About a dozen years ago, Balko decided a big-screen TV wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to see movies the way they were meant to be seen.
Having an empty barn available on his rural Redwood Falls farm, he did what anyone would do — salvaged several 35mm movie projectors from actual movie theaters, then built his own, professional quality movie theater.
With theaters today rapidly making the switch to digital projection, film projectors are becoming obsolete. Balko estimates movie studios will stop sending out actual film prints within a few years.
“Film projectors that cost $400,000 just a few years ago are basically selling for scrap today,” he said.
That’s good news for collectors such as himself. Balko was able to pick up a combination 35mm-70mm movie projector a few years ago for basically the cost of showing up and carting it home.
Getting prints for it, though, was a bit of a legal gray area. Legally, movie prints belong to the studio that paid for them.
Nevertheless, it turns out there’s a whole network of collectors who trade actual theatrical movie prints they way other people trade baseball cards.
“The studios know we collectors are out there, but they don’t make a fuss as long as we’re not abusing the copywrite and showing the movies for profit,” Balko said.
“We’re actually an important resource for the studios. If they lose a movie from their archives, they might need us collectors to provide them with a copy of it later.”
Within a few years, Balko built up a collection of several dozen 35mm movies, mostly action films and comedies.
Meanwhile, out in Hollywood several years ago, Disney decided to release their 1959 movie Sleeping Beauty on Blu-Ray, and went all out on restoring it.
For the picture, the original camera negative was scanned at high resolution, and the original sound recordings were cleaned up to the latest technical standards.
However, one detail was off.
Sleeping Beauty was the first animated movie released in the 70mm film format, which meant it should have had six separate tracks for sound.
However, Disney’s records said the sound was only mixed for four tracks, which didn’t strike the technicians as right.
Disney put out a call to movie print collectors of the world: did anyone have an original 1959 70mm print of Sleeping Beauty?
As it happened, Balko had one in his barn. Several years ago he traded one of his old movies for it, just on a whim.
After checking with several trusted sources to see if the call-out was legit, Balko contacted Disney.
At their okay, he shipped a reel of the movie — all 50 or so pounds of it — to Palmdale, California for six weeks.
The Disney sound technicians put the print on their own projectors, and discovered their records were correct — the sound was mixed for four channels, with the extra ones on the 70mm print just repeating others.
Was Balko nervous that Disney might not send the print back, considering that, technically speaking, it’s theirs anyway?
“No, I wasn’t worried,” he said. “You’re not supposed to own these things, so they could have kept it, but they sent it back without any problem.”
The final Blu-Ray disk lets you choose between two sound tracks: a new, seven-track version mixed for today’s home theaters, or a four track version mixed to match Balko’s.
The biggest irony in all this?
“I still haven’t seen Sleeping Beauty. I’ve never even seen it on TV,” Balko laughed.
“The magnetic sound tracks are pretty fragile, and I’m afraid if I run them through my projector, I’ll damage them. And at this point, they’re irreplaceable.”
Balko adds, “I hear it’s a pretty good movie, though.”

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