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Posted by Demetris Thoupis (Member # 833) on 12-17-2002, 02:19 PM:
 
Hi Again,
A school asked for a special show of Schindler's List for the film club. During the show I noticed at the scene where Liam Neeson is overlooking the Getto takeover and watching the young girl in the red dress, each time the shot changes from Liam to the coloured girl, there is a splice. I know is a bit old film but can anyone explain why?
Demetris
 

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Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 12-17-2002, 02:45 PM:
 
IF I remember right... "Schindler" was filmed and printed on black and white stock for most of the movie. The few scenes that are supposed to be in color were filmed on color stock. Thus, when there's a transition between b/w and color there is a splice because that's where they joined the two stocks in the release print.

They could have just made the negatives in B/W and printed to color stock but that wouldn't have given as good a result as if they had used black and white print film.
 

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Posted by Paul Linfesty (Member # 214) on 12-17-2002, 02:56 PM:
 
I think a better solution would have been to print most of the film on B&W stock, but use all color stock for that one sequence (instead of cutting back and forth). true, the B&W shots in this sequence would look a little different, but the problem was, that unless the theatre was using DTS (I THINK that was the only format for the film), the constant cuts would have been distracting. Also, many theatres had projectors that JUMPED at every splice anyway (including one I saw the film from). I also remember this film opening and closing in color.
 

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Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 12-17-2002, 02:58 PM:
 
Didn't they do the general release (North America) on all color stock due to the focus shift between stocks? Besides simply being different stock there are heat issues with B&W film as the silver image absorbs IR while on color film the IR sails right on through the dye image (this being the reason for special handling during processing of the analog soundtrack region of color film to retain the silver in that area).
 

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Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 12-17-2002, 04:29 PM:
 
I wrote about the focus issues with intercutting color and B&W film in Kodak's "Film Notes for Reel People", Spring 1994:

http://www.film-tech.com/manuals/H5033.pdf
 

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Posted by Darryl Spicer (Member # 711) on 12-17-2002, 05:54 PM:
 
Nope, it was Black and White mixed with color film for the sequences that had the color mixed in. If they had printed the black and white onto color for the entire film it would of had that tinted feel to it. That movie also shedded like a son of o bitch with extreme dandruff.
 

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Posted by Ian Price (Member # 14) on 12-17-2002, 06:01 PM:
 
The initial release was Black and White stock with the color bits spliced in. After 4-weeks they replaced all the prints with color stock prints. There as a visual difference. The black and white stock looked much better. And yes, they shreaded like a bitch.
 

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Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 12-17-2002, 06:22 PM:
 
The print of "Schindler's List" I watched at GCC Northpark Mall theater in Dallas was a mix of B&W and color stock. But I remember the visual difference being apparant in whole reels.

The first and last reels of the movie, as well as the reel with the "red dress" cue in it were color stock. Those reels had kind of a slightly blue-ish tint to them that looked different from the rest of the film. All the other reels had black and white stock --at least I am pretty darned sure of it. The look of it gave me art school flashbacks from foundation year and all that B&W still work I had to do. I can still remember that wierd pickle smell of the chemicals to this day. Nonetheless, "Schindler's List" looked excellent at that theater.

If the entire print that played at Northpark in Dallas was on color stock, then there was some kind of serious color timing problem with certain reels.
 

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Posted by Paul Linfesty (Member # 214) on 12-17-2002, 06:29 PM:
 
All three prints i saw (GCC Beverly Connection, Los Angeles, Edwards Town Center, Valencia, and UA East Hills, Bakersfield) were with the B&Wn prints with the color sequences spliced in. Focusing seemed to be a problem at all three theatres, as were the jumps with the splicing. Fortunately all three theatres were running DTS systems.
 

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Posted by Gerard S. Cohen (Member # 994) on 12-17-2002, 06:54 PM:
 
I ran Schindler's list when first released, three shows per day for four months. It was our second DTS film. The girl in the red coat,
the candle lighting at the kiddush blessing near the end, and the final scene at the cemetery are the color shots I remember.
I don't remember any distraction caused by splices. Nor was their any shedding of the print in the Century JJ.

Incidentally, several classes from a neighborhood school were brought to the theatre by their teachers who developed a unit on the historical subject. I started a bulletin board of photos, reviews, comments and clippings on the filmmaker, the film, and the subject. It grew to some twelve feet in length in the lobby, and when the feature shipped out, I donated the display to the school. We received a second, edited set of DTS disks, so I kept the first set as a souvenir. The manager kept those of our first DTS--Jurassic Park.
 

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Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 12-17-2002, 10:17 PM:
 
I don't quite understand why there would be a problem with analog sound at the splices. I make splices every day and they are totally silent on the analog track. I take it all the color sequences had to be manually spliced in, no? No automation doing the inserts, right? So you just need good splicers, good splicing tape and someone who has been trained well. When considering that there had to be upwards of thousands of prints for this engagement and each with, what was it, 3 or 4 sequences? This must have been one daunting project. Surely it wasn't left up to Technicolor to splice in the color sequences, was it?

Personally I thought the switch to color was way out in left field -- much too much of a gimmick and a distraction calling attention to itself, and I didn't think it fit the feel of the rest of the film. It works in WIZARD OF OZ and PLEASANTVILLE, but not here. But that's just my taste. Plus, I feel sorry for those hundreds of TES employees splicing all those reels and trying to keep rolls of B&W and color segments all in order. That must have looked like a Marxs Brothers sequence itself.

Frank
 

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Posted by Paul Linfesty (Member # 214) on 12-17-2002, 10:22 PM:
 
THere were some cheap projectors out there that caused the image to jump at every splice (even when splicing reels together). Why I don't know. I can't really say what the movie sounded like in analog, since all screenings I saw were in DTS. Of course focusing was off a bit, due to the thinner nature of the b&W film (theatres received bulletins to notify theaters of some of these problems, but apparently went unheeded in some cases...what a surprise!
 

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Posted by Stephen Furley (Member # 1277) on 12-18-2002, 04:42 AM:
 
Gerard wrote:

quote:

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the candle lighting at the kiddush blessing near the end

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Wasn't this at the start of the film? I don't remember a similar scene near the end, but it's several years since I last saw the film.

The prints we had here in the uk were spliced, at least the ones I saw were. The trailer was printed on Agfa stock, and I'm almost certain that the prints were as well. The negative edge print was Kodak, I don't know which lab made the prints, but they looked supurb. The colour scenes were a problem, There was a very clear difference in the look of the film where it was printed on colour stock, you could always tell when the girl in the red coat was about to be seen as a few seconds before, at the start of the scene, the colour stock would cut in, the image would take on an unpleasant greenish tone, and the look of dye was quite different to that of silver. I don't know what the answer is to this problem; I would hate to have seen the whole film printed on colour stock. Maybe the whole film could be printed on black and white stock, and the red coat added by dye transfer, a bit like a modern-day Pathecolour, but Technicolor weren't doing dye transfer at the time. I have the laserdisc of the film, and they have managed to match the scenes quite well in the video transfer, but I don't know what that was made from.

A few years ago in the Projected Picture Trust exhibit at Bletchley Park, a print was being run which had been made for the now closed Museum of the Moving Image, in London. This print contained short clips from various films, mainly black and white, but had obviously been printed on colour stock. I asked Charles Beddow about this, and he said that it was done because there were problems with running black and white stock on the continuous loop platters in use at the museum. Does anyone know what these problems may have been. Leo, maybe you know something about this.

I saw the film twice, once in DTS, and once in SR, and there were no problems with the sound in either case. I also projected the film once, using the analogue track, again without problems. I made a point of listening for any difference in sound between the silver only and silver plus dye parts of the track; you don't often get to hear a pure silver print of a modern track. There was a slight difference, but I don't think I would have noticed it if I wasn't looking for it. There were no pops, clicks etc. at the splices, I don't remember if they were blooped or not.

The first can contained a printed request that the film be shown without an interval wherever possible. Unfortunately, this was not possible at this venue, as it now has only a single projector, and the tower can't take a film of this length.. I seem to remember that, strangely, two versions of one part were supplied, one with an intermission title on the end, and the other without; I've never seen this done before.

Mention has been made of the prints shedding bady. Does this mean that the prints were polyester? If so, did this apply to both black and white and colour stocks? I'm pretty sure that the British prints were triacetate.
 

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Posted by Stan Gunn (Member # 554) on 12-18-2002, 04:53 AM:
 
I ran list on its release here in oz.
It was all on colour stock, the word at the time was that it presented many problems in the processing.
 

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Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 12-18-2002, 08:42 AM:
 
As I recall, the prints were triacetate. It was especially important to edgewax the B&W prints (SMPTE Recommended Practice RP151) to minimize emulsion-side shedding in some projectors. I wrote about the issues with B&W and "Schindler's List" in the October 1994 issue of Kodak's "Film Notes for Reel People":

http://www.film-tech.com/manuals/H5034.pdf

Black-and-white images can be printed onto color film, but the image will usually have a slight tint, since color print film is optimized for color images, with slightly warm highlights and cool shadows. Even one "printer point" of color variation in the printer setup is noticeable with a black-and-white image printed to a color print.
 

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Posted by Joe Beres (Member # 678) on 12-18-2002, 09:42 AM:
 
I remember seeing a B&W print of Schindler's List when it was first released. For those of you that saw the color prints, do you remember any color shift reel to reel Similar to those on the color prints of The Man Who Wasn't There?
 

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Posted by Thomas Procyk (Member # 1170) on 12-18-2002, 09:53 AM:
 
I remember when "Pleasantville" came out, there was a note in the cans to not mix-and-match reels from other prints (if your theater received two prints, for example) because they were selected specially so that there is minimal color shift in the b/w scenes.

I noticed some reels had those little round colored stickers on the heads. One reel had a red one, one had a green one, and one had a green and a blue one. When we ran the print, that's exactly how the colors shifted, as indicated by the stickers.

Which gets me confused. You'd think they'd try to use all "red" reels or all "blue" reels for the whole print.

=TMP=
 

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Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 12-18-2002, 04:22 PM:
 
Ian remembers this one correctly. Initial prints were hot spliced together between B&W and color stock and most theters screamed bloody murder about the shedding. A few weeks into the run, all further prints were on color stock and did have an annoying blue tint to the B&W sequences. All Schindler's List prints were triacetate.

Bobby, Northpark's print was B&W/color mix. It was print #8 and arrived used from some other theater from a screening. I remember we were not particularly impressed with the film handling damage at the reel changes, but Universal would not replace it for some reason. I guess those prints were extra expensive due to the splicing.
 

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Posted by Jeff Joseph (Member # 511) on 12-21-2002, 02:17 AM:
 
After it became apparent that there was a problem with shedding on the black and white prints of this title and also "Ed Wood", the late Tom Ogburn of Benke Filmtex coated the prints of both titles with TomaCote. This helped eliminate the shedding and focus issues on both features.

Jeff Joseph
SabuCat Productions
 

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Posted by Pete Naples (Member # 761) on 12-21-2002, 03:49 AM:
 
Yes, we had dreadful shedding problems with 'Schindlers List' and 'Ed Wood'. The dust coming off the rpints gets everywhere, all over the image, all over the soundtrack, gets behind the spring runners in the trap and knocks the focus all over the place...... The renters here kept sending us replacement prints every two weeks of the run, as even PTR rollers or web media cleaner wasn't taking the dust off. The solution would have been to wax the B&W prints, but renters point blank refused to pay for this. We'd no waxing machine in the booth anymore, so an ago old trick since documented by Kodak was employed. Clear 'Kiwi' brand show polish was sparingly applied to the edges of the reels and problem solved!
 

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Posted by Michael Barry (Member # 237) on 12-21-2002, 08:29 AM:
 
To paraphrase a line from 'Cinema Paradiso', sometimes the solution arrives a bit too late...

The perfect solution for 'Schindler' would have been to do the whole print in IB tech so that going from black and white to color would be seamless (no splices required) while still maintaining the richness of real black and white print stock.

Then FilmGuard could have been used to eliminate shedding entirely.

If only!
 

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Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 12-21-2002, 10:09 AM:
 
B&W on IB Tech sometimes referred to as Dye Monochrome is still not real B&W although it has a good and interesting look (see "Stairway to Heaven" aka "A Matter of Life and Death").

However, you raise an interesting possibility which is to actually print the black & white sequences directly at the same time the soundtrack is laid down. That presumes that the receiver film stock can produce a quality projection contrast image as it may have been optimized for its soundtrack and dye receiver functions. Theoretically it's possible. There would still probably be some focus shift as the silver image B&W sections are going to run warmer than the color portions.
 

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Posted by Christopher Seo (Member # 7) on 12-21-2002, 01:56 PM:
 
If indeed the receiver is capable of a quality silver image, then it would just be a matter of overlaying the dye onto the parts of the image that required it, during the scenes which required it. This doesn't seem any different from the original IB process which used a partial silver 'key' image over which the CMY dyes were applied (although whether this key was of sufficient quality to provide anything more than additional contrast, I don't know). Thus for "Schindler's List", during the shots with both B&W and color, the B&W image could still be pure silver while the dye could be selectively applied to the dress, etc.

It's just a matter of creating selective CMYK elements, and with digital image processing the effect should be very controllable. It would be very simple to process the image and output both B&W and color negs for the shot (perhaps even recording directly to the matrices!). The B&W neg would contain the entire image while the CMY matrices would contain information only in the dress area. In this way the dress area could be restricted to dye only (i.e., totally dark on the B&W neg), or for a more desaturated look it could contain both dye and silver.

In fact this process would be a lot more sophisticated than bleach-bypass since the amount of silver in the image could be changed from shot to shot and in different areas of the shot as well, though digital processing.
 

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Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 12-21-2002, 07:40 PM:
 
I was thinking of an either/or scene to scene thing but your idea is really excellent. Her coat gets whited out on the B&W image during the digital stage and IB only lays down the image of the coat (primarily just magenta and yellow dyes). I don't think IB is going to haze up the rest of the image but there might be problems with occasional color speckles in the B&W.

Did anyone ever publish photos of the "new" IB printer?
 

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Posted by Christopher Seo (Member # 7) on 12-21-2002, 08:51 PM:
 
Steve,

Earlier posts on "Schindler's List" had got me thinking, and I concluded that this system doesn't seem much different from Technicolor's original three-color system, updated of course for the digital age.

I hadn't thought of color speckles (from matrix dust?), although for a movie like "Schindler's List" it could perhaps be minimized by intercutting the matrices with polyester blank for B&W-only shots. B&W-only reels wouldn't have to be run through the printer at all, and perhaps could be printed on regular B&W stock if they were consistent enough with the receiver stock.

It would be great to see a movie like "Pleasantville" or "Frida" (which has some mixed B&W/color shots that "desaturate" in and out) printed in this manner. Direct-to-matrix recording at 4K resolution could yield phenomenal results. Alas, it may be a moot point anyway with dye-transfer's future again uncertain.
 

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Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 12-22-2002, 01:11 AM:
 
Some other firm was supposed to be working on a dye transfer process but that was a few years back and nothing seems to have come of it. I think they were touting digital techniques.
 

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Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 12-24-2002, 06:10 AM:
 
Jeff Joseph wrote: "After it became apparent that there was a problem with shedding on the black and white prints of this title and also "Ed Wood", the late Tom Ogburn of Benke Filmtex coated the prints of both titles with TomaCote. This helped eliminate the shedding and focus issues on both features."

"TomaKote" is a proprietary film treatment that provides print lubrication. I recall that Tom Ogburn's daughter Paula took over the business (ICS Services in Glendale, CA) after her father died, and provides print treatment services and screening facilities to film studios.
 

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Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 12-24-2002, 06:20 AM:
 
Pete Naples wrote: "We'd no waxing machine in the booth anymore, so an ago old trick since documented by Kodak was employed. Clear 'Kiwi' brand show polish was sparingly applied to the edges of the reels and problem solved!"

The "emergency" method of edgewaxing prints with paste wax or clear paste shoe polish does work, although it is difficult to control the amount of application. These waxes are usually a mix of hard waxes (solid paraffin or carnauba) dissolved in a solvent like naphtha or Stoddards solvent to make them soft. After the solvent evaporates, only a thin coating of wax remains, lubricating the print to resist projector abrasion.

Kodak recommends edge waxing by the lab as the preferred method of print lubrication, per SMPTE Recommended Practice RP151:

Kodak Print Lubrication Recommendation

Print Lubrication Methods
 

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Posted by Jeff Joseph (Member # 511) on 12-24-2002, 07:46 AM:
 
Jeff Joseph wrote: "After it became apparent that there was a problem with shedding on the black and white prints of this title and also "Ed Wood", the late Tom Ogburn of Benke Filmtex coated the prints of both titles with TomaCote. This helped eliminate the shedding and focus issues on both features."

John P. Pytlak wrote:

"TomaKote" is a proprietary film treatment that provides print lubrication. I recall that Tom Ogburn's daughter Paula took over the business (ICS Services in Glendale, CA) after her father died, and provides print treatment services and screening facilities to film studios."

John: To the best of my knowledge, Paula no longer does this. She never really made any money doing this and stopped both making TomaKote and coating films.

Tom's business was "Benke Filmtex", not ICS. I believe ICS is still around, but they had nothing to do with Tom or Paula.

It's too bad, as TomaKote is a terrific product. At one point (when Tom was still alive), I tried selling the stuff, but: making it (legally) is tough; so is shipping.

Jeff Joseph
SabuCat Productions

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John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
 

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Posted by Christopher Seo (Member # 7) on 12-26-2002, 09:32 PM:
 

quote:

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Some other firm was supposed to be working on a dye transfer process but that was a few years back and nothing seems to have come of it. I think they were touting digital techniques.

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