Why does "A Christmas Story" look like crap?

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Marshallarts

Well-known member
Also other films such as "Caddy Shack". The image looks terrible. Was it the film stock? Is it a bad transfer? And if so why hasn't anybody created a good one yet since these are obviously big sellers.

In all our efforts to create a beautiful image these examples show that gone horribly wrong. And i'm wondering how it got that way.
 
Film stocks have gotten better and better over the years. There was a period in the 70's and early 80's where there were particularly bad batches of color stocks that had a tendency to deteriorate pretty quickly. Also, some films might have been stored poorly and the original negatives in bad shape, so the transfers have to be made from second generation copies. This happens more often then you think, even for relatively recent films. Article about it here--

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117976828.html?categoryid=13&cs=1
 
Marshallarts said:
why hasn't anybody created a good one yet since these are obviously big sellers.
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Well, if they're big sellers already then there isn't really any motivation.
I have some special edition version of Christmas Story here, and I don't particularly remember it looking bad...I'll have to pop it back in and refresh my memory.
 
Yes and no

Crap you are seeing on tv is blown up, cropped, panned and looking generally horrible

I've seen plenty of old school films that have been digitally mastered on DVD and they look amazing.
 
Crap you are seeing on tv is blown up, cropped, panned and looking generally horrible
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Factor this when you're watching a pan 'n' scan film:

35mm film is a 4:3 format, 24 x 18mm.

When they went to sound they cropped off some off the side, and to keep the aspect ratio the same they cropped some off the top and bottom too, so you really have a starting point of around 22 x 17mm. But that's still 4x3.

So to get widescreen 1.85:1, they just crop the top and bottom off. Seriously. So now you're down to around 22 x 12mm.

Then, if they go to a 4x3 pan 'n' scan version for TV, they cut off the sides. So your 22 x 12mm gets chopped to the central 16x12mm.

That means that the film is a 4:3 frame to begin with, and the TV is a 4:3 frame size, but along the way you end up viewing less than 44% of the original film frame!
 
There's still tons of film resolution; you're talking about 16x12mm, which is around 2.5 times as large as a 16mm frame size.

I'm not saying that this is the reason something looks bad on TV, I was just going on a side rant about how the frames get sliced and diced and chopped to the point that you're seeing less than half of the original frame size...
 
I wouldn't exactly say having a really awful looking film is original.

I think if you saw a screen shot (sorry, can't provide) you'd know what i'm talking about.

It's like the dynamic range has been crunched. There's an ugly brown hue to the thing. The shadows have virtually no detail. It looks terrible. As if there was some mystery stock that a few unlucky people choose to print on.

This definitely isn't a stylistic decision regardless of the look they're going for. I've seen 16mm that blows it away. Especially Caddy Shack. Take a look.


EDIT:
So I just saw a bit of Christmas Story in a preview and it looked fine this time around..... Makes me wonder if in fact there was a new scan done. Not sure what changed, and perhaps the other channel it was on (don't remember which one) was broadcasting incorrectly or something.

I still say the quality of Caddy Shack is very poor.
 
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TheComo said:
There original.
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Where original? Do you mean they're original?

I'm not trying to be an English teacher here, but we're getting so sloppy with our English that it's getting annoying.

translate: I'm not trying 2 b and English teacher here but were getting so sloppy with are English that its getting annoying.
 
Marshallarts said:
It's like the dynamic range has been crunched. There's an ugly brown hue to the thing. The shadows have virtually no detail. It looks terrible. As if there was some mystery stock that a few unlucky people choose to print on.
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Many 70's films have this look, that ugly brown hue. Dynamic range on film has gotten much better over the years. I read recently a DP who has worked since the 60's said that, in the old days, you had to really work to light a scene and even get an exposure on the negative. Now, he said, films have so much dynamic range and latitude of stops any moron can light. This is also why many films from the 50's and 60's use such hot, hard sources, because they had to. It wasn't until stocks got faster that people could light in a more naturalistic way. This is generalizing. Many films from earlier eras had fantastic cinematography, but there was less to work with back then and many lesser films show these limitations.
 
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Blaine said:
Where original? Do you mean they're original?


translate: I'm not trying 2 b and English teacher here but were getting so sloppy with are English that its getting annoying.
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Funny:thumbsup:

We had this conversation a few weeks ago. Different words have different meanings for a reason....because they mean something different. Using the right one helps.

My copy of Caddyshack looks fine.

I have noticed a lot of digital artifacts on FX lately with movies like X-men.
 
Barry_Green said:
I'm not saying that this is the reason something looks bad on TV, I was just going on a side rant about how the frames get sliced and diced and chopped to the point that you're seeing less than half of the original frame size...
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I can't watch cropped stuff. It drives me Crazy. But i recently learned about Open-Matte. I guess its when they shoot the 4:3 frame like you said and use the full frame for TV/Video. And they crop off the top and bottom for theatres.

One example is New York Stories. Scorsese's piece is soooooo awesome but i always hated watching it because i thought i was only seeing half of the frame. Turns out I was seeing more than the whole frame. So i just blow it up on the widescreen TV so the top and bottom get cropped and bada-bing: i see what Marty wants me to see. They should do all films like that. Or even better, forget about full-screen DVD's altogether. What a stupid idea that was.
 
D/I is the biggest advance in filmmaking during our lifetime, assuring much higher and consistent quality than what could be achieved with conventional film-to-film post production techniques. Now, 6k scans for 4k D/I will become more and more common, assuring even more consistency in the projected product. Digital projection is the next major step forward for "lossless" distribution.

It wasn't uncommon to have optical printers housed in less than clean-room conditions and timers weren't exactly working on cutting edge equipment.

Also, film stocks like the 5254 (and 1974's pre-Vision 5247) negative and 7271 internegative and 5381 print weren't exactly low on grain. Lots of light was required on those 50 and 100 speed stocks and, even when properly exposed, they didn't perform particularly well in high-key conditions because the latitude wasn't there.

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What was really awful, on a lot of movies I remember seeing on tv when I was a kid, is the way they'd cheap out by only uncompressing the 'important' bits of anamorphic films - so every so often you'd get an anamorphically compressed tall-'n'-skinny shot, sandwiched in between the uncompressed (and then cropped) shots.
 
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