Second Sight Films (UK)

[tenia]

Addition : I'm not sure I'm fond of the new grading either. While it's clear the older one probably is too neutral, the newer one makes me think of whatever has been going on for the past few years on several Paramount restorations, which tend to harmonise gradings between various movies into getting always the same kind of creamy skintones. Well, here it's the same but powered by 100, along with an overall golden tint (that can make the colors shift towards teal in darker scenes). In some cases, it's not too bad looking. In others, it looks, again, like something shot 2 years ago on digital.

In any case, the comparison with the Criterion disc makes it all the more frustrating, as it turns out the new restoration is so filtered it makes the older master not looking too bad against it. You're clearly getting a better delineation on very fine patterns, but otherwise, it's nowhere near the upgrade one would/should expect.

Here you go : https://slow.pics/c/DGh5XA1Z

[Finch]

Oh man.

I like the grading better for the outdoor shots for the most part as the Criterion looks too neutral for what is meant to be almost uncomfortably hot weather but everyone's skin tones in interior shots are just ugh. I like to think that the new release is still worth getting for the inclusion of the theatrical and the book (which, if the writing is comparable to the essays in Martin and The Witch, should be an awesome addition) but my excitement for this release has definitely been dampened and the sad thing is I don't see anyone else doing another restoration anytime soon.

A big thank you though to tenia for this write up and the comparison caps!

[tenia]

The review (in French) is now up for those who want to have the overall feel of it (extras and al) : https://testsbluray.com/2023/04/17/test ... ging-rock/

I'm not 4k equipped so can't speak for that, and I 99% of the time can't get my hands on a pdf version of the written contents which is why I don't detail the boon content here (and why I used the BD-only visual as main visual, since that's pretty much what I end up reviewing).

A big thank you though to tenia for this write up and the comparison caps!

Thanks !

I like the grading better for the outdoor shots for the most part as the Criterion looks too neutral for what is meant to be almost uncomfortably hot weather but everyone's skin tones in interior shots are just ugh.

That's also my impression. Yes, it does give a golden hue that can feel too digital and modern but it's overall more subtle than whatever happened on many interior shots (especially the low lit ones). I also think that's where the Criterion disc had the most obviously video look, so the gap is the biggest here.

But interior shots, my god. With the DNR slapped on top of it, it felt at times like watching a 20 years old Universal HD master.

It's unfortunate, because it does offer a slight improvement in very fine details (like fabric), so you can see how it's improved thanks to the work being more recent and in 4K and from the OCN, but everything else is pretty much everything we shouldn't be seeing used in such extent on restoration in 2022. There's absolutely no reason to see a 2022 4K restoration from an 35mm OCN scanned on an Arriscan XT looking so smooth. None.

[tenia]

EDIT : I'm seeing on Blu-ray.com that my review or comments might seemingly read as if I believe the restoration might not come from the OCN. I'm not sure where exactly people might infer that's what I meant : I know it does, and in several respects, it looks like it does. What I meant was that :
* the opening credits are so filtered they might well be coming from an intermediate source, and a good chunk of the movie does too.
* since the opening credits are digitally rebuilt over the textless OCN and not taken from an optically printed intermediate source, there's no reason for the opening credits to look like they do, ie like credits sourced from an IP, so you'd expect the rest of the movie to look better, except it doesn't, because it's filtered. I simply used this to express my first impression looking at it and thinking "wow that's weird, but maybe the credits are from an intermediate so the rest will look better", and then realising it never does.

Anyway, I've updated my review to clarify this.

[Finch]

I'm not impressed by the new Legacy documentary on the TCM 4k release. The editing is annoying, complete with flashy visuals and superimposed lens flares over still images, and half of the participants have little more to offer than banal insights. I would much rather have had the likes of Rob Savage in a single interview instead of the constant cross cutting between the Fangoria editor and all the filmmakers of the inferior sequels. Like Bill Chambers of FFC, I did enjoy one participant's admission that they didn't like the film (admittedly on first viewing). It was refreshing to hear that some people took a while to warm to the film which, given how abrasive it is, is only a fair and understandable reaction. I was only 20 minutes into the Legacy documentary and I already checked my watch and realised, oh God we've got another hour to go. Not a good sign. The 2002 Blue Underground documentary involving the cast and crew themselves on the other hand is excellent.

I realise it sounds like I'm piling on, but the booklet disappointed me too. This is pretty much exclusively academic content and I'm two-thirds through it, and I see myself re-reading maybe two or three this far. The style of too many of the chosen writers is too dryly academic in my opinion for such a visceral work. Although I've liked other hardbound books, including Martin's, I'm now a bit nervous about what the Picnic at Hanging Rock essays are going to be like especially now that it's established that the film's restoration has been compromised. I know blu-ray.com users were disappointed with the Dog Soldiers book too (I don't like the film so can't speak for myself) so if Picnic's book turns out to be iffy as well, I'll abstain from Second Sight's LEs for a while (in Martin's case it helped that they also included the soundtrack CD with the book but annoyingly, the track listings are nowhere to be found except on the disc itself).

For a hard of hearing person like me, it's also disappointing that they have only subtitled the film itself and at least none of the on-disc extras that I have watched so far. I'm going to email Second Sight and suggest that they may wish to consider doing so going forward. Indicator have been doing it and I'm so grateful to them for it.

I want to stress that my mixed reaction to the Limited Edition should not deter any fan of the film from at least buying the standard edition 4k or Blu-Rays, and your mileage re the new extras plus book essays may vary. If anyone here is desperate to have the Limited Edition and unable to source it from retailers anymore, PM me as I'm not ruling out to replace my copy with the standard 4k.

[MichaelB]

For a hard of hearing person like me, it's also disappointing that they have only subtitled the film itself and at least none of the on-disc extras that I have watched so far. I'm going to email Second Sight and suggest that they may wish to consider doing so going forward. Indicator have been doing it and I'm so grateful to them for it.

Indicator's policy is to subtitle the main feature and all supporting films, but not newly-created extras.

Of course, if subtitles are supplied with the extra (as was the case with that superb doc on Orphans) or there was another reason for including them (Lady Lee wanted a transcript of the two Christopher Lee interviews in the Fu Manchu box before she'd grant permission for their inclusion, and having already gone to that trouble it made sense to turn them into subtitles as well), but in general subtitling everything would push the budget up by such a huge amount that it would unavoidably impact the RRP. It's a surprisingly hefty part of overall production costs.

[Finch]

It's a surprisingly hefty part of overall production costs.

I'm curious as to why that is, and I'm really not trying to be facetious here. I have DaVinci Resolve 17 on my PC here and even the free basic version lets you add subtitles to your project. Is it "just" the hours spent trying to transcribe and placing the subtitles and paying the individual(s) for it, or are there more costs involved (if the film in question is a studio license, does the studio insist on seeing those subs etc for review)? I have not done subtitling as a paid job so I don't know what the average salary for this is but I have subtitled a feature film for a friend so I know just how many man hours go into just doing the feature, never mind anything else that may be on the disc.

So, yeah, now that I think about it, I should consider myself lucky when extras are subtitled and simply hope that the audio on said extras is clear enough for me not to strain too hard to hear the participants. (I struggled a little during the 2002 Blue Underground documentary but managed fine on the Legacy documentary).

[Finch]

Geoff chimes in on the Picnic restoration. The credits were recreated digitally and Second Sight, after having been warned by Geoff about the DNR, went back to the restoration team and were told that this is exactly how Peter Weir wanted it.

[MichaelB]

I'm curious as to why that is, and I'm really not trying to be facetious here. I have DaVinci Resolve 17 on my PC here and even the free basic version lets you add subtitles to your project.

The technical process is straightforward. I myself don't use free basic software, but I probably could get away with it for most commissions - you certainly wouldn't be able to do what I did with The Pillow Book (where subtitle placement had to be pixel-precise to avoid clashing with onscreen text elsewhere), but that's an extreme outlier in terms of technical demands.

Is it "just" the hours spent trying to transcribe and placing the subtitles and paying the individual(s) for it, or are there more costs involved (if the film in question is a studio license, does the studio insist on seeing those subs etc for review)? I have not done subtitling as a paid job so I don't know what the average salary for this is but I have subtitled a feature film for a friend so I know just how many man hours go into just doing the feature, never mind anything else that may be on the disc.

What's demanding is the transcription and timing, at least if you do it properly. Talking-heads extras, by definition, tend to require a lot of subtitles per minute, and they have to be transcribed from scratch, whereas with feature films you almost always get an official transcript and sometimes a pre-existing subtitle file. (The Michael J. Murphy box was highly unusual in that all feature content had to be subtitled by ear, because he worked outside the system and had never sold his films to a label that required a subtitle file as part of the deal.) By way of example, the Christopher Lee interview ran 86 minutes and needed 1,689 subtitles - that's a fair bit talkier than the average 86-minute feature. (I'd consider "normal" for that length to be in the 800-1,200 range.) I had to create every single one of those 1,689 subtitles, and by "create" I mean calculate frame-precise in and out points as well as sort out the textual side of things.

Unavoidably, this takes several hours, and is of course chargeable at an appropriate rate. And then it has to be thoroughly proofed (some labels very obviously cut corners here; Indicator doesn't) and corrections made, and so on.

And if you multiply that for all the extras on a typical disc, you're looking at a week or more just for subtitling. In fact, if you look at just that one disc, The Brides of Fu Manchu, you're faced with:

• Audio commentary with film historians Kevin Lyons and Jonathan Rigby (2020)
• The BEHP Interview with Don Sharp – Part Two: A Director of Substance (1993, 95 mins): archival audio recording, made as part of the British Entertainment History Project, featuring Sharp in conversation with Teddy Darvas and Alan Lawson
• The BEHP Interview with Ernest Steward – Part Two: From Teddington to ‘Carry On’ (1990, 93 mins): archival audio recording of an interview with the respected cinematographer, made as part of the British Entertainment History Project
• The Guardian Interview with Christopher Lee (1994, 87 mins): wide-ranging onstage interview with the legendary actor, conducted by the film critic David Robinson
• Vic Pratt Introduces ‘The Brides of Fu Manchu’ (2020, 7 mins): appreciation by the BFI curator
• Pages of Peril (2020, 21 mins): genre-film expert, critic and author Kim Newman discusses Sax Rohmer and the Fu Manchu novels

So that's only a whisker under 400 minutes of subtitling required, or nearly 8,000 subtitles if the verbosity is as dense as it is for the Christopher Lee interview (which it most likely is given that it'll all be wall-to-wall talk). That's a truly colossal amount of work, for just one disc in a five-disc box set. (And the main feature gets subtitled as well, so that should be factored into the overall workload, making it nearer 500 minutes.) It's simply not feasible for a small boutique label either to take on that amount of work themselves or contract it out to professional subtitling houses at the usual going rate.

[Finch]

Thanks for that, Michael; that absolutely puts it into perspective for me. Appreciate the insight and peek behind the curtains!

[Calvin]

I don't really understand the outrage over the Picnic at Hanging Rock restoration; I certainly understand (and agree with) negative reactions towards revisionism (e.g. Wong Kar-Wai) but Picnic at Hanging Rock has always looked soft, we've always known that it was intended to look soft, and the fact that Weir still wants it to look soft - even with the assistance of DNR - is surely not a surprise? What would the reaction have been if Second Sight ignored Weir and put out a release that was contrary to the intended look of the film?

[MichaelB]

Did you see the screening in Bologna? Looked absolutely fine to me - as you say, it's supposed to look soft and dreamy.

It also doesn't look anything like Wake in Fright, and I think it's somewhat misleading to invoke that film, which had to be cobbled together from desperately substandard materials.

[EddieLarkin]

Isn't that the argument used for all director approved DNR'd transfers? The film was never supposed to look this sharp, this grainy, this detailed, so we've smudged it and softened it instead? The problem is, the more you turn the knob, the less and less the transfer looks like film. And whilst I acknowledge this one is very far away from being a disaster, it does have that flat textureless look in actor's faces. Indeed, the grain field of the old transfer (which was also director approved!) I say gives the film its authentic dream like diffuse look. With the grain largely gone, that velvetly layer is removed and now everything looks more "real". It all just smells like typical grain hating to me by the director and DP. Since when did grain make something NOT soft? There are a ton of new 4K transfers out there with all their grain intact that come with the caveat that they're soft, because of how they were shot.

The act of taking the OCN of a given film, scanning it in 4K+ resolution and grading it in HDR and WCG, is in itself a total act of revisionism. Your starting point is revisionist. To try and then work back to some less revisionist look is futile, and to do it with these blunt instruments practically defeats the purpose of doing the restoration in the first place. The primary concern should be to honour the material you're working from, to create something new by using a first generation element and having no loss of information, something that was not achievable when the film was made. To try and replicate that generational loss today is pointless, you'd be better off just scanning a print or intermediate element, as was done with earlier transfers (for example, Christopher Nolan insists on this, none of his films released on 4K UHD are based off the negatives, because he considers using them directly as revisionist. Instead they are all from interpositives, and are softer and less grainy as a result).

[tenia]

I’m from a generation which was told for years that stuff like Texas Chainsaw Massacre was looking that bad on home video releases (VHS and DVD) because the movie was gritty and grainy and so on. We now know it’s clearly not the case because look at what we got since. In the end, these were just poor home video retranscriptions.

The problem is, the more you turn the knob, the less and less the transfer looks like film.

The issue here is exactly this : the more you turn the knob of the filtering, the more intrusive the filtering gets, the easier it is to pick up that it’s been applied, because the less the result looks like film.

There’s really nothing more to it : if DNR is applied in such a slight touch that you can’t detect it... then there’s no problem, because even sharper eyes can’t notice it. But if you can pick it up like on Picnic at Hanging Rock, it just means there’s too much of it. If Picnic’s 4K restoration was just soft/diffuse because that’s what it is, there would be no DNR to pick up, except I did pick some up because it’s there and visibly so, and it’s now been confirmed that it’s been applied in liberal fashion. So there’s no mistaking about how it looks (digitally tinkered with) and why it looks this way (because of the digital filtering).

And in the case of Picnic at Hanging Rock, while the most obvious tinkering is the DNR, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn there’s also a slight touch of EE on top of that.

It also doesn't look anything like Wake in Fright, and I think it's somewhat misleading to invoke that film, which had to be cobbled together from desperately substandard materials.

(I always believe the matter with Wake in Fright is settled, but just like Terminator 2 or Children of Paradise, it never really seem to be).
I invoked Wake in Fright because it’s a notorious Australian DNRed work, so as an anchor point, even as an opposite one (remember I’m saying Picnic doesn’t look that bad), it’s a fitting image.

However, it hasn’t been “cobbled from desperately substandard materials” : it has been sourced from the rediscovered 35mm OCN, found in Pittsburgh in 2003, and the biggest issues were “Significant colour fade and emulsion scratching”, ie not issues likely to impact the film-like texture of the elements. On top of that, despite the restoration having been finalized in 2009, the elements were scanned on a pin-registered scanner (and not a Spirit DataCine-type one), which yields better registration of the high frequencies present on the elements scanned. This means Wake in Fright is a 4K OCN pin-registered-scan restoration... and it looks nothing like any consensually-acclaimed restoration having this workflow, including the ones based on notoriously beaten-up elements (those still look like sourced from film elements). So no : just like Hanging Rock, though in a more intense fashion, Wake in Fright simply IS DNRed in an intrusive way.

I actually have yet to see a restoration whose DNR look is original or elements-related and not coming from actual DNR appliance (and, on a side note, it's unfortunate that even many, if not most, technically-oriented reviews will manage not to pick this digital tinkering on Hanging Rock - though I'm not surprised someone like RAH not saw it given his track record there).

As for the Bologna screening, digital projectors are natively making things like DNR less obvious to pick up, so it wouldn’t be the first time that a home video release allows digital tinkering to be easier to pick up (though I’ve seen Drôle de drame at Lyon Film Festival after watching the DNR fest that the BD was showing, and it too was a DNR nightmare; same goes for Flowers of Shanghai, which I’ve seen in theater before seeing the BD, and the theatrical watch was enough to see the movie had been extensively DNRed).

[MichaelB]

Oh, I've seen big-screen showing of ghastly DNR jobs - Witold Lesczcyński's The Days of Matthew was borderline unwatchable in Gdynia, not least because every time there was a dissolve we briefly got a glimpse of what the source materials looked like (scratched to hell, but also showing far more detail). But Picnic at Hanging Rock definitely wasn't among them, and this was a huge screen.

(Obviously, I'm not remotely in a position to challenge your comments on the Blu-ray, not least because I haven't seen it myself.)

[tenia]

Oh, don't worry, I haven't take your post as a challenge of my comments ! I'm more interested here in how home video screenings vs theatrical ones might make some choices more or less visible. I know digital projections tend to make DNR a bit less obvious, so depending on how intense its appliance has been, I'm not surprised a theatrical projection might look fine (it might very well be that the bigger screen, the more dither it does).

It might simply be one of these cases (unlike our ghastlier exemples), and it might also mean that under certain circumstances, these choices might work despite their adversary effects.

not least because every time there was a dissolve we briefly got a glimpse of what the source materials looked like (scratched to hell, but also showing far more detail).

I'm getting flashbacks of GoldenEye's remaster, but I'm also quite certain I've seen more recently another restoration like this. They always make me wonder how much of the digital work has been automated.

[tenia]

Going back on this one now that the "dust is (vaguely) settling", it is interesting (though predictable) to note that all reviews that have now been published online fail to observe the fake grain and most of them are missing the DNR.
Which means the tricks work.

Hopefully, it won't give the idea to any restorer to restore other movies like this, but it is saddening to see how easily even such a heavy processing can go unnoticed and fool people (to the point I'm not too far from being called something between a plain liar or some crusader with an agenda), and how much some people will defend processed restorations like this one (I wish they would do the same with proper ones but it's rarely the case, since they don't have detractors to be vocal against).

I mean, it's one thing to say "I watched it and fortunately, the processing remained at a level that didn't catch my eye on my setup, though it is unfortunate they didn't simply left the elements' texture alone" and "it's gorgeous and breathtaking, I don't see why some people can have an issue with it, they must be disappointed by every single restoration they watch, those poor sods".

[dwk]

Going back on this one now that the "dust is (vaguely) settling", it is interesting (though predictable) to note that all reviews that have now been published online fail to observe the fake grain and most of them are missing the DNR.
Which means the tricks work.

Hopefully, it won't give the idea to any restorer to restore other movies like this, but it is saddening to see how easily even such a heavy processing can go unnoticed and fool people (to the point I'm not too far from being called something between a plain liar or some crusader with an agenda), and how much some people will defend processed restorations like this one (I wish they would do the same with proper ones but it's rarely the case, since they don't have detractors to be vocal against).

Reminds me of the early days of Blu-ray, when all those Italian transfers were full of scanner noise that people thought was grain (even though it never acted like grain.)

[tenia]

For instance.
Or so many artificially sharpened masters people were preferring to the unfiltered ones.

But this was then, and we are now, and I still naively believe we'd have enough retrospective experience to hold accountable people mistreating restorations this way rather than trying to almost belittle those actually accurately pointing out how artificially processed it has been.

Hopefully, sharper eyes will still be around if more people decide to restore movies like Hanging Rock has been, otherwise : why restorers who bother should be bothering ?

[tenia]

On top of everything technical, some people were wondering why the TC as presented on the Second Sight was about 119min long and not 115 min (the older SS DVD was 110min with 4% PAL Speedup), and it looks like it's because the older Second Sight DVD was including a shorter international cut, while the new boxset includes the original Australian cut.

[MichaelB]

Just to nail this down and completely eliminate PAL speedup issues as a factor, the 35mm print that was released in the UK in 1976 was 10,388 feet, which at 24fps runs 1 hour, 54 mins, 52 seconds, or 115 mins rounded up.

(Source: Monthly Film Bulletin, September 1976 - and the MFB is normally rock-solid reliable; I've only caught it out once in a running-time error caused by a typo, which is pretty good going when I've been using it professionally for over thirty years.)

[GaryC]

I'll have to do a compare and contrast when I get the time, but according to IMDB, the director's cut includes a couple of scenes which weren't in the original theatrical cut (which according to the BBFC ran 115:00). These are:

A brief sequence of a photographer getting a picture of the school before being shooed off.
A smoother introduction to the scene where Albert tells Michael of his dream of Sarah, beginning with Michael telling him how he often dreams of the Rock.

As far as I can gather, these have been added to the theatrical cut for this restoration. Whether they add up to around four minutes, I don't know without checking. I do have a copy of Second Sight's DVD release of 2008 which if I remember rightly has a copy of the original theatrical cut in it.

[tenia]

Based on movie-censorship, the photographer's brief scene is about 31 sec long and the introduction of the other scene might makes a 5 sec difference.
I don't know the movie well enough to say what's what, and don't have the 2008 SS DVD, which indeed has the 110min (at 25fps) cut of the movie.

Just to nail this down and completely eliminate PAL speedup issues as a factor, the 35mm print that was released in the UK in 1976 was 10,388 feet, which at 24fps runs 1 hour, 54 mins, 52 seconds, or 115 mins rounded up.

Thanks for this info, Michael.
I guess the question now is : is the 119 min cut included in the new set indeed the actual original TC and whatever Second Sight included on DVD and that was released theatrically in the UK (and seemingly elsewhere in the world) was a mislabelled shorter cut ? Or is it the other way around and there was no "international shorter cut" and this 119 minutes is longer than it should ?

I have to say it'd be surprising to see something like "finally the true Australian OG theatrical cut, longer by 4 minutes than anything that was so far advertised to be the TC" not even being advertised anywhere in this new set or its PR.

[Adam X]

Don’t know what influence this might have on the look of Second Sight’s presentation, but Picnic’s DP Russell Boyd talks here about using a piece of pale yellow wedding veil material in front of the lense for the entire film, in order to soften the contemporary look of Eastman film stock:
https://www.nfsa.gov.au/collection/cura ... nging-rock

[tenia]

There's absolutely 0 doubt the movie is supposed to have a very diffuse look, achieved by such a practical mean. The issue is that this new restoration isn't it, but an electronic/artificial trial at reproducing this original look as captured on film. I've seen plenty of movies that were at least partially shot like this, and this look can perfectly be maintained without resorting to a DNR/fake grain combination, as all these movies' excellent restorations demonstrated (eg, Full Circle).

Actually, if it wasn't possible to do so, Hanging Rock's new restoration wouldn't be such an outlier but it'd be the norm. But I can't even fathom what would happen if the industry was to massively switch from what they're doing at the moment to routinely DNR/fake grain movies instead. In part because I wonder how many people would actually notice it and how big would be the backlash.