Film Print Quality

[kungfusamurai]

One thing I've noticed is that Shaw Brothers films seem to look the best overall in terms of print quality, colours, saturation and all that mumbo jumbo.

But when I watch Golden Harvest films or stuff from the 80s by Jackie Chan, etc.., it looks like shite. The colours look faded or bland, sometimes the print looks a little too bright. There's even a slight problem with ghosting on some DVDs I've seen, but think those were the old Megastars and Universe titles.

What I'm wondering is if it's even possible to bring those other films up to the same quality as the Shaw films? Or the Shaw Films look as good and bright as, say, an American film from the Technicolor era (50s and 60s) because they were filmed on indoor sets? Or was it because of the type of film stock and/or processing methods used? Or can film restoration ever make those other label's kung fu flicks look as beautiful as My Young Auntie, or Martial Club, etc...

KFS

[The Dragon]

If a company purchases the rights to the GH vaults, and remasters the catalog ala Celestial, then there you go.

[gorhama]

I'm more than sure someone here on the boards will provide a great detailed answer. I have a feeling it could be the difference in how the two companies stored their films. I've read many times that Hong Kong movie industry was notorious for not storing the original prints well that lead to the way various movies look when re-mastered.

I'll be waiting for someone with more knowledge to reply. :yociexpress01:

[kungfusamurai]

I'd definitely like to see the proper remastering happening for non-Shaw films, just to see if the prints would look as pristine as the Shaw movies.

Has Celestial thought about picking up non-Shaw kung fu clicks for cleaning up? I heard rumours that at one point, they would have worked on Shaolin Vs Wu Tang, but I think that was mentioned on the board, not from official release information.

KFS

[KyFi]

Interesting question.

I'm no expert, but I want to say that all the companies, Shaws, GH, independents---were using "industry standard" cameras and film stock---whatever was the standard at the time in the 70's. So I think that all of them, upon their initial release in theaters, would have been about the same quality in regards to picture quality and detail, and colors. I think the Shaws may have seemed a bit more impressive just because of their better production values: sets, costumes, etc. So I think that in theory the GH and independents, if the remaining physical film copies haven't degraded too much, could be restored to look just as sharp as the Shaws. Again, I don't know any of this for sure, but that's my impression.

[VenomsFan]

Here's a good start with a VIDEO that details the Shaw Remastering Process
http://www.celestialpictures.com/level2_remastering.cfm

There are a few issues here.

1. ALOT and I mean ALOT of time is needed. Each frame is touched. Each sound effect is enhanced.

2. The Shaw Library is very vast and not just full of Martial Arts movies. This fact alone helps the business case to invest so much money into the project. As opposed to a few dozen Golden Harvest films, etc.

3. Celestial is using state of the art technology that hadn't been used. But again it was there process. As opposed to a "transfer to dvd" dozens and dozens of filters and ehnancement procedures take a normal frame and make it that much better.

I responded to a post earlier today on the Five Deadly Venoms release coming from Dragon Dynasty. Although the print is from Celestial and not remastered by DD, the example is the same nonetheless.

Old DVD Release from the 90s (just a DVD from a VHS print, maybe film, but just "transferred" nonetheless).

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v178/VenomsFan/forum/fdv-compare1.jpg

Celestial Remastered Release
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v178/VenomsFan/forum/fdv-compare2.jpg

Again, watching the Celestial Demo Video posted at the beginning of this post. You can see what was done (remember for EACH FRAME):

1. Color Enhancement (Adding color to skin)
2. Digital Removal of specs, blurs
3. Sharpening Filters
4. Erasing saturated pixels - (the chinese writings in tha background are a perfect example here
5. Higher Resolution capture from source film. This allows for more detail in each artifact (color, text, skin, marks, deeper blacks, richer whites).

It is very detailed, expensive and time consuming. The Golden Harvest examples you use did not have the technology when their DVDs were made. What happened there was taking the film and digitizing the film to DVD studios that were pretty premature. Almost 10 years later, there are proved enhancements in such technologies:

1. Larger Hard drive space to store higher quality video and audio files
2. High Definition Captures
3. Improved Image Enhancement Programs that co exist with the video editing software they use.
4. Better compression software - high quality output at lower file size.

These are a few factors, but I hope this helps your understanding of what's going on here a little better.

From here, they would have to justify if it makes business sense to invest the money to do such a restoration. We continue...

[kungfusamurai]

Thanks for that information Venomsfan.

I would have though GH's archive was quite vast, not as vast as Shaw, but vast enough for a company like Fortune Star or Joy Sales to have invested in remastering all their titles a la Celestial? I would have thought the Hui brother comedy films, in addition to the kung fu titles, would have been enough incentive to try to make these films look nice. I take it that GH didn't produce much in the musical department.

Is there a GH DVD out there of a kung fu film released during the mid to late 70s or 80s that had the full remastering treatment? I can only think of a title like Magnificent Butcher that looked pretty good when it was on the Fox DVD (I didn't buy the HK DVD). I think the youtube clip was sourced from the Fortune Star release. But I don't know if it was actually cleaned up or if they just lucked out in finding a good print.

4tffrgh_8Po

KFS

[The Dragon]

Well all one needs to do is look at the Bruce Lee remasters, HKL's Dreadnaught, Duel To The Death, The Hand of Death, and specificly the Hapkido discs. They look very good on par with Celestial. The Fortune Star discs do show those imaging problems KFS speaks of, but for some reason not so much with the HKL releases I have.

[VenomsFan]

if they remaster the same process as celestial today, there is no question the films would look as good as these new shaws. wait till the blu ray bruce dvds come out.

it's all about the technology advancements now, that weren't available when fortune star, hkl did it. hkl looks better than fortune star and it's just that they had improvements with capturing, and compression that were far superior to the fortune star releases years before.

as for the magnificent butcher clip. they lucked out on a good print. you can see where the film could look richer. take that film today - throw in the celestial process - and you would have a totally different looking, superior film, imo.

it is as The Dragon said earlier, that it is.

[gorhama]

I knew more knowlegible members would help answer that question.

It would be totally awesome for Celestial to clean up GH library as well. We can only hope!! Fortune Star isn't horrible, but it may also be with the distributor as well and anything they can do to help the image quality.

Also thanks for the info VenomsFan. I had seen that video a while ago but it's really cool to see the process again.

[Killer Meteor]

I'm personally a little put off by the Celestial restorations - they don't look like film to me, but fancy video. But to be fair, maybe that's just Shaws studio style

[WuxiaFan]

I think the Celestial SB DVDs from IVL/Deltamac[Taiwain] are just beautiful. I'm very happy with them and they look incredible on my system.

I also really like Joy Sales/Fortune Star's Legendary Collection label. I bought a lot of these dics (mostly Angela Mao's films) and the transfer is awesome. There's faults here and there, but overall I highly recommend those versions.

[silver hermit]

fortunestar does do remasters and they look just as good as celestials. they are mostly sold in boxsets and feature mostly jackie chan and sammo hung there is also a remastered donnie yen yuen woo ping set too.
the legendary collection are unremastered.
i think there is a lot of confusion surrounding the word remastered.
a true remaster is taking the origonal negatives and making a new master. the new master is then used to produce TV and dvd prints.
origonal masters are they way they were mastered when they were first released. what the legendary collection put out.
IVL=remastered
legendary collection=origonal master
enter the dragon 25th aniversary ed.=remaster

the origonal masters might be more true to how the films looked when they came out origonaly on theatrical release. thats why some people prefer them to the new remasters. both are acceptable to me (just personal preference) the major difference is origonal masters are analogue and todays remasters are digital. you and use computers to enhance the digital transfers way more than you can the analogue.

the biggest joke is when someone claims to remaster a 3rd gen vhs source. how is that? that claim is so ridiculous you have to wonder if they are idiots or they take fans for idiots? maybe they beleive their own hype or over estimate their own abilities? who knows only those that make those shady claims.

[Stuntman Jules]

I personally agree that the Celestial remasters are a bit much and don't look enough like film. The digital recoloring is very "pastel" especially on the IVL HK DVDs that boost up the red levels a lot.

I also absolutely despise the digital alterations made to the films. Whenever a film goes into slow motion they digitally "redo" the effect to make it look like a crappy 90s music video and the digitally redone credit sequences on all the films are ghastly and kill the nostalgia of the old low-fi credit sequences in Hong Kong films in those days. In retrospect, I wish they had just cleaned the prints and done some digital dirt and scratch removal instead of the full scale remastering. You know, made them look presentable (which, admittedly, many of Shaws' library wasn't) but also kept them looking like 70s Hong Kong films.

I like Fortune Star's transfers better, since they are cleaner and of higher visual quality than the previous versions but also aren't overhauled to the point that they look like they were shot on HD video. They're a great middle ground.

Really, one of the biggest, most regrettable problems with Greater Chinese cinema is the print-quality and lack of film archiving for so many years. If Shaw and Golden Harvest had just filed a negative away every time they released a film like studios in America and Japan did/do, we wouldn't have this problem in the first place.

[VenomsFan]

I knew more knowlegible members would help answer that question... Also thanks for the info VenomsFan. I had seen that video a while ago but it's really cool to see the process again.

you are welcome, gorhama. one thing i DO like about the celestial remasters is that they remove the damaged frames - you know the cuts at the beginning and end of each take that have a white fuzzy line on the end of it. there's a lot of little things they take care of from the source print.

fortune star doesn't go into as much detail, but they have nice film to digital to dvd transfer. that they do.

good discussion!