Reservoir Dogs (1992): Tarantino's 35mm Print Reconstruction

[pipefan413]

@pipefan413
I am looking everywhere to see what differences could make a look into Laserdisc-releases of Reservoir Dogs. Since I have no Player nor the discs yet, you might be able to tell me or show me the differences? I signed in today, so it seemed I cannot pm you right now for this issue.

You clearly haven't read the forum rules so you're not exactly off to a good start. If you had, you'd know exactly why you can't PM me. And please don't take this as an invitation to do so now,  I strongly suggest you read the rules instead. Also, this thread is not about Reservoir Dogs LaserDiscs, it's about @The Aluminum Falcon's project based primarily on another source, so this isn't a relevant question to ask here.

I don't exactly know what you're asking but I have both LaserDisc transfers and they both have problems, but different ones. The fullscreen one is somewhat open matte, but there's still some cropping off the sides, and the sound is pretty good but there are quite a lot of missing frames at one point. The widescreen one isn't open matte and is closer to the theatrical presentation visually but the sound is off balance, with the right channel abruptly dropping significantly around an hour into the film and never recovering again. Beyond that, I don't know what you want to know, but this is not the place to ask regardless.

[freedomland]

@pipefan413 I wasn't looking for trouble with my first post, and thanks for clarification. About the LaserDiscs: I was thinking that it would be easier to ask you directly. Anyways, I didn't wanted to interrupt @Aluminum Falcon's thread here, I appreciate his contributions.
But just for transparency: It would have been in no competition, when not more enlightening, if you could have extended @The Aluminum Falcon's scene comparison in post #28 with your two ripped LaserDiscs although it seems out of context.

[pipefan413]

@pipefan413 I wasn't looking for trouble with my first post, and thanks for clarification. About the LaserDiscs: I was thinking that it would be easier to ask you directly, but I let it go with you. Anyways, I didn't wanted to interrupt @Aluminum Falcon's thread here, I appreciate his contributions.
But just for transparency: It would have been in no competition, when not more enlightening, if you could have extended @The Aluminum Falcon's scene comparison in post #28 with your two ripped LaserDiscs although it seems out of context. But never mind and thank you folks for the out of synced Audio.

That's a whole lotta attitude there for someone who is objectively in the wrong...

It seems to me like you wanted a specific piece of information that you didn't actually ask for, wanted it so badly in fact that you joined a forum just to ask that question and completely ignored the fact that the forum (as forums do) has a set of rules you need to abide by, skipped straight to asking (quite clumsily) for what you wanted, then spat the dummy out when I tried to help while pointing out that you hadn't followed protocol. And what, now you're being sarcastic?

You say "extend the scene comparisons" as if that's something that would take 30 seconds. It absolutely wouldn't. I'd have to dig through multiple drives full of files to find huge raw video captures, write script to turn the videos from 50 fields per second into 24/1.001 frames per second and then line up the resulting frames with each other in AviSynth (bearing in mind they don't line up at all because of different missing frames in different releases as I already mentioned in my response), try to find the specific frames that suit you for the sake of comparison, export them, attach them to the previously shared images (presumably if I'm "extending" them?), upload them, share them in a reply. I can probably think of a couple of hundred things I'd rather do with the time that would take. But I guess you didn't consider any of that, you just wanted what you wanted and decided to ask for it rather than reading the rules that would have informed you that this ain't how this works.

I could have just said "read the rules" and left it there, but I did actually attempt to help at the same time. Serves me right, I suppose.

[freedomland]

Those responses kinda negative towards forum-newbies, but I got it and didn't wanted to offend you. I asked directly in the first place what I wanted, don't accuse me of having not so, please. And your post does not serve any justice to this thread anymore as you accused me of doing the same, too. But wow, haven't this kind of conversation in...actually, never had it. I won't response to you anymore, when this sort of language is going around. Anyways: thanks again for your specific contributory work for Falcon's releases.

[PDB]

Let’s pump the brakes here.

I think you have to understand freedomland that we are not anti-newbie but when you start off with the statement that I can’t PM, thats a signal to regular users that you didn’t read the rules and want something off the bat without the intention of being a regular member. That could be wrong but it is how it looks. The rules stop newbies from PM-ing to spare regular members from getting constant PMs.

Go to a random project post and you will see a person saying those same words; I can’t PM, great project and I’d love to have it. It frustrates long-time users.

I and others generally ignore these kinds of posts but since pipe was @ he probably was extra frustrated. Just understand that for next time you post please.

[pipefan413]

@PDB Thank you for explaining very clearly and succinctly what I evidently failed to with my admittedly rather irritated and (resultantly) unkind replies. Amongst other things, it rather rubbed me the wrong way to have somebody asking a vague question about "differences" without specifying what sort of differences, then acting like the meaning was obvious and I'm being unfair by pointing out that it wasn't. But I wasn't after a fight previously and I'm still not.

Hilariously enough, for what it's worth, this has actually put me in the mood to watch this film again relatively soon, and to do that in the way I want I'd have to finally get around to syncing the bit-perfect LD captures (primarily fullscreen, with at least one patch from the widescreen) to TAF's main "35 mm" styled regrade project. I enjoyed watching the open matte French DVD but its colours screamed "we did this in a computer to look modern" and that's not what one wants from this film at all; TAF's regrade of it looks a hundred times better, colour-wise. So I guess I'm probably going to (somewhat) prioritise resyncing this to both versions of TAF's project, which I'll probably do almost entirely from scratch instead of working off what I did for the French DVD, because my capture and resync workflow has very significantly improved since then and I actually have a pretty reasonable idea of what the hell I'm doing now. Having said that, I at least documented my work with enough of a trail of breadcrumbs that I can unpick some of it, and I think I'm still going to reintegrate that patch from the widescreen version in pretty much the exact same way as before (sample for sample) because it still sounds totally seamless to my ears. I may do another full cap of the fullscreen LD just to be absolutely sure I'm working from a solid base because there was an irritating inconsistency with A/V sync in my captures back when I did the LD to DVD resync that was caused by a stupid driver problem that I've since "fixed" by rolling back to really old drivers that actually work properly.

I mentioned that it'd be really cool to reapply TAF's colours to the French DVD from source if there's a LUT sitting somewhere in the dark corners of some hard drive, because I found some conversion/encoding issues in the "open matte" project that may have come from upscaling, slightly wonky field-matching, or perhaps a little of both, but those issues do not seem to exist on the DVD itself and I have two copies of the damn thing here to work with. I don't want to try to rebuild the regrade TAF did from scratch if that can be avoided though, firstly it's not really my place to do so (it's TAF's work and it's good work) and secondly I'm a complete amateur with colour work and I really like TAF's results with the colours (I'm convinced anything I attempted would be crap by comparison). It's just that I'm really picky with artefacty things and I suspect plenty others on this forum are even pickier than I am!

Depending on how well TAF's "open matte" video lines up to the actual French DVD source it was based on, I might just hack the start off my existing resync for that one and call it a day, but I'm definitely going to do a whole new resync for the HD master with TAF's colours applied since I think it looks pretty much the best I've ever seen this film look.

[freedomland]

Quote myself: "But never mind and thank you folks for the out of synced Audio." Actually, I meant thanking @pipefan413 for fixing the audio problem.
@PDB
I totally understand you, things run out of rail here. This was not my intention and yes, I did not read the rules beforehand, while I was excited to hear that @pipefan413 did the job I wanted to do for archival and preservationist reasons. And no, I want to stay here regularly, when it is still ok.

[The Aluminum Falcon]

Well, after all this time, I'm going to revisit this one! Stay tuned for updates.

The 4K disc has great detail but terrible TERRIBLE color.

[zoidberg]

Are we talking similar colour to the previous blu ray?

[The Aluminum Falcon]

@zoidberg pretty much the same overly pinkish, overly bright color as the Blu-Ray. I have a suspicion that they literally used it as a reference and nothing else. It's bizarre when Tarantino is pretty open about showing his 35mm print that looks entirely different.

Same thing happened with Before Sunrise (another 1990s movie). They just color referenced a bad, magenta-pushed CRT reference despite doing a new image harvest.