.....Then she walks up to the door, opens it and steps out into the land of Oz, in glorious Technicolor. If you look closely you can see the change in the picture/color quality. Most people won't notice it.
Back in the day, I bet most people went to see the movie, thinking it was in Technicolor, saw the beginning reel and thought, "BAH!!! This isn't in color!" When that changeover hit I bet there was a huge, "GASP!!!", arising from the audience as they realized it WAS in color! I would have loved to see that!
GWTW rerelease was IB-Tech, although the results weren't quite as spectacular as we would have liked. The original matrices had shrunk... all at different rates, producing an effect where people sometimes looked like they had 3 mouths and 9 eyes.
A lot of the Bug's Life prints were IB, if I'm not mistaken, as well. Now, that one looked good, except for the end part when they put on the new blooper reel. They didn't make those ones IB. The difference in picture quality was noticable.
I was thinking about the blooper reels and didn't remember that both movies had them.
I've read that only about 50 dye-transfer prints were made, with the rest being Eastmancolor. Also, the Eastmancolor prints were reduced in size to compensate for the lack of 1.37:1 Academy full-frame aperture plates among multiplexes. (BTW, anybody know how they were reduced? A windowboxed picture in scope, like _Gone with the Wind_, or, even worse, a reduced picture fitted inside the widescreen area of a flat frame?) I'd like to run Oz for our classic film series this coming fall term (or next spring term), and there's no way I want to get stuck with an Eastmancolor prints if dye-transfers are available. Besides that, advertising the Technicolor might draw some interest to the classic series -- after all, Technicolor was founded by an MIT graduate.
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Tao Yue
MIT '04: Course VI-2, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Projectionist, MIT Lecture Series Committee
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Bob Throop
The fact that we got an IB print being an accident I don't know. All the kid shows we are running this year are from warner bros. They have been sending them by a special courior. The prints are coming from the warner bros. film archives. If you want an IB print I guess you could get in touch with the Warner bros. film archive and see about getting one. The print number we were sent is print #11. It is in pretty good shape except reel two did have a litlle section of splices in it. Can post the warner bros. archive information off of can later this week if you need it.
If you can't get a definite booking of a dye transfer print of "Wizard of Oz" from your normal Warner Bros. channels, try contacting the office of Richard P. May, Vice President of Film Preservation:
richard_may@warnerbros.com
Showing a dye transfer print at MIT, the alma mater of Herbert T. Kalmus (founder of Technicolor), may be of interest to them. Do remember that a dye transfer print of "The Wizard of Oz" should be shown with the "Academy" 1.37:1 aspect ratio (projectable image area 0.825 x 0.602 inches).
Technicolor Process
Technicolor Adventures in Cinemaland
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John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Eastman Kodak Company
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7419
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: 716-477-5325 Cell: 716-781-4036 Fax: 716-722-7243
E-Mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion
FYI, LSC is an entirely student-run organization, and usually goes through Swank (http://www.swank.com/), which handles the educational licensing for most new releases. That way, we get a discount and run movies vs. 50% of ticket sales.
I'll certainly make sure it's run with the proper 1.37:1 aspect ratio. It would be a great injustice to the film if it weren't. Martin Hart has just added a new section to his Widescreen Museum that includes scans of film frames. It's pretty distressing to see the 70mm rerelease of _Gone With the Wind_ compared with the full frame, and to find out just how much was chopped off.
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Tao Yue
MIT '04: Course VI-2, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Projectionist, MIT Lecture Series Committee
The original release prints of "Oz" had the black & white portions printed on a tinted stock that was brownish called "sepia".
The dead giveaway is (as Randy mentioned) the changeover that's between the last black & white reel into the first color reel. The inside of the house & Dorothy's costume are photographed in color, they are in color, but the art direction has them in all sepia tones to match the sepia black & white reels.
I remember also seeing Oz on TV a few times with a print that had the b/w sections were printed on straight black & white stock, not sepia stock, & then when it hit the first color reel the sepia costume & interior by contrast seemed to be covered with brown dirt & mud. It blew the whole illusion out of the water.
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William Hooper
Junk drawer: http://www.geocities.com/hollywood/theater/3622
Theatre Empire: http://members.xoom.com/saenger.1
The 'real IB' "Special Edition" prints of 'Oz' are ALL 1.37:1, so if you have such a print I would hope you are showing it in the correct aspect ratio, which would require a new lens and aperture plate for the 1.37:1 ratio. Also, the 'sepia' portions on the IB prints are actually Eastman process footage (all of R-1 and the end of R-5, the beginning of R-2 is IB) that is lab-spliced into the last reels of the IB prints
The 'Eastman' prints of the above are a 1.37:1 frame printed to fit into a 1.85:1 frame. The picture will project at the correct ratio, but the image size will be somewhat smaller, IIRC (I have handled both prints, BTW)
Aaron
I saw an "Eastman" print at the Loews New Brunswick (New Jersey). For the small 100-seat room that I saw Oz in, the windowboxed 1.37 image fit nicely into the 1.85 frame with no spillover at all
quote:FWIW, the 1.33 prints I ran in the 70s and 80s were straight b/w.
It's not black and white like a lot of people think. It's a sepia toned print made off a b/w neg.
quote:http://www.amianet.org/04_Annual/04f02_Miami/4f02_04.html
Like reconstructing a crime scene in an Agatha Christie novel, it took numerous film experts and technicians months of intensive labor to produce the Special Edition of "The Wizard of Oz" for theatrical presentation. Chief among them was Phil Feiner, President/COO, Optical Effects Division and Digital Restoration at Pacific Title/Mirage, the company working on the restoration of the sepia bookend sequences on the Gale farm in Kansas.
"Our immediate problem we had to face was the fact that the original black and white negatives [which were printed into sepia] were destroyed in a fire at the Eastman House in the mid-1970s," explains Feiner. "What did exist were fine grain masters, which were made using an older method of reproduction called 'continuous dry gate printing'; it unfortunately transfers all of the flaws, scratches, dirt, digs and the like onto the film masters. So using these somewhat flawed fine grain masters, which are housed in the Library of Congress, we employed scanners to digitize them and then corrected the images on computer, frame by frame, eliminating any dirt or scratches; we also corrected any flickering of the image that also existed in the original at 4K by 3K lines of resolution."
Once this was completed following more than nine months of painstaking work, the new corrected digitized files were recorded out on a Kodak laser film recorder to transfer to film to create prints of the black and white Kansas sequences. These sections were then married to the color portion of the motion picture (which was struck from the existing three-strip negative of the Technicolor® Oz sequences).
Another improvement to the film can be heard rather than seen. Warner Bros.' Ned Price, Vice President of Mastering in Technical Operations, oversaw the Digital audio remastering of the film's soundtrack, which is heard for the very first time in true stereo. The original nitrate soundtrack and original orchestra session recordings were digitally remastered to Dolby Digital Sound -- so "Over the Rainbow" and Dorothy's magnificent trip in and out of Oz has never sounded better.
quote:
RESTORATION OF THE ORIGINAL SEPIA INTRODUCTORY SEQUENCE OF THE WIZARD OF OZ
Speaker: Phillip Feiner, Pacific Title / Mirage, Hollywood, California
Phillip Feiner began by describing the restoration of the monochrome sequences of "The Wizard of Oz" (or reels 1A, 1B, and 5B). Since the original negative elements for these sequences were destroyed in a nitrate fire, the best surviving elements, two Fine Grain Master Positives, were utilized. The Fine Grains were printed in 1960 and 1980 and contained a large number of defects including base and emulsion scratches, dust, dirt, digs, and flicker.
A three-part clip from reel 1B was screened and discussed. The clip first showed a reproduction of the source material with all defects. It was followed by the cleaned-up image after digital processing. Finally, the end product, which includes the sepia highlights, was shown...
Feiner clarified the process for the The Wizard of Oz cleanup: first automatic dust-busting at a Cineion station followed by a QC check until about 80% of defects were removed; then the "cleaning department" (six people on day shift, four at night) manually inspected and digitally cleaned up each image for approximately seven months.
The issue of digital archiving was addressed. Film outputs and records are produced for archival storage to insure that the end product of the digital work will be preserved on film. The more expensive DST tapes can be stored although, as most archivists know all too well, the machines which can read them may or may not be available in 100 years; these factors make film the best archival medium for this digital work.
quote:I recall seeing a presentation on the restoration of the 3-strip production of "Becky Sharp". They showed a separation print of each of the three color records. The red record (forms the cyan dye in the print) was surprisingly unsharp. In the original 3-strip Technicolor camera, the red image has to go through the strip of film recording the blue information in "bipack", diffusing the image:
This key image was routinely utilized in the '40's with dye transfer to produce a sharper image, something which was abandoned as the dye transfer process was improved