aerial

@timsoret The sad thing is that most of these print scans are still pretty cool, especially if you just treat them like grindhouse-style re-runs of your favorite film instead of the “lost true version” of the movie (debatable cases like star wars aside)

@watchingaerial He's right. Many of the most vocal "film fans" we see online these days are in full Dunning–Kruger effect. x.com/watchingaerial…

Educative minute: Film twitter, please know that all these "amateur 35mm scans" comparison are deceptive. 1. Films are made of atoms (nitrate, acetate, polyester), and unlike digital data, they are vulnerable to entropy like everything else. 2. For the same movie, not all theatrical projection prints were made with the same process. Most were poor quality with short shelf-life (6 years according to Martin Scorsese). 3. Dye compounds are unstable, decaying at different rates over time, their colors degrading, fading & shifting. Notice how most of these "35mm scans" are bluish & faded, with contrast added in post after scanning. 4. Even if you had a perfectly manufactured, flawlessly stored & maintained, and masterfully scanned film, digitalization remains an interpretation process. A projected film is pure light, and mapping a RAW capture to the displayable dynamic range of screens is a subjective process, not a perfect science. So never interpret these 35mm scans as "how a film was supposed to look". No two surviving 35mm films look the same, and none look the way they did at release. These are just films degraded by hundreds of theatrical runs & decade of chemical decay. This organic "instagram filter" evokes a certain nostalgia, but it's an illusion. There is no pristine original to go back to. Even the original negatives stored by studios require month of digital cleaning to be considered "usable". It's all a subjective process.

@LucianoMet26544 @tylergilfoster there’s a difference between being inaccurate and just being bad

@watchingaerial @tylergilfoster the 4k remaster also lies as this Terminator release demonstrates.

FOR THE BILLIONTH TIME: RELEASE PRINTS ARE GENERATIONS REMOVED FROM THE NEGATIVE AND ARE NOT USEFUL REFERENCES FOR COLOR OR DETAIL!!!

@tvaziri seeing the 35mm scan discourse return every few months with the exact same talking points is contributing to my eventual ulcer

Posting an image of a 35mm print from a film as “ground truth” for color and tone is almost always useless. Even brand new release prints can vary wildly, and prints deteriorate over time in different ways for various reasons. Plus the variables that exist when scanning a print.

@kinekovideo please god

We pray for the day that crappy, low quality fan scans like this will finally stopped being glazed endlessly 🙏

amateur 35mm scans of 25+ year-old dupes are quite possibly the worst way of illustrating the nuances of the original prints why do people always do this

gamers will see the closest anyone has come to capturing the grimy, anonymous desperation of re7 and lose their gourd because their favorite twink cop doesn't make a cameo in the trailer

@MerkDEnglish gotta chase those leads to the deadest ends

@watchingaerial Thank you for your effort because this would drive me insane

it's always incredible going through the effort to get ahold of academic texts on a film only to find out their source is another two books that both end up citing the same four articles on the first page of google.

@NCseventeen @Anti_cinefilia they can prefer whatever they want, all i'm saying is that a scanned 20 year old release dupe is not indicative of how the movie was ever intended to look. if anything, it's just an example of a bad or aged print.

@watchingaerial @Anti_cinefilia I work with a lot of film makers who much prefer 35mm scans. It's taste. This isn't about which is better how the film was presented upon release vs current upgrades. Great video but every artist has their own opinions on this subject as do cinephiles.

Silent Hill - 2006 - People were asking what's the point of scan prints that's shot digitally. Left is negative transfer Right is 35mm scan.

@NCseventeen @Anti_cinefilia i made a whole video on why this is wrong, amateur print scans are one of the least reliable indicators of the original intent of the filmmakers or distributors. youtu.be/uQwQRFLFDd8?si…

@Anti_cinefilia Yes, but home release & theatrical will vary. All I know is its intended look is as is on the print. Whether you like the updated look that's just preference. But this theatrical print is 100% its intended look upon release.

me eight seconds after getting my heart ripped out in dolby atmos

@imPatrickT i desperately need a scope frame of the cow

i got my hands on a 35mm print of TWISTER trailer 2 in scope. TWISTER was shot with 2x anamorphic lenses so the desqueeze to 2.39:1 was done optically with the projector. Here's how it looks before and after the desqueeze.

35mm scan of TWISTER.

NEW VIDEO: Why Super 8 is Impossible to Fake youtube link below:

TL;DR while it's cool to see VistaVision shot films projected in VistaVision, not only was this never the goal, but you're not missing out by seeing them in other formats. In fact, 70mm IMAX will probably give you an even better experience do to the print and sound quality.

Brady Corbet, who helped revive the VistaVision format with The Brutalist in 2024, gave a little insight into this in an interview at an IMAX screening of the film with @imPatrickT. (full vid: youtube.com/watch?v=KHHrQq…)

This is actually okay! VistaVision was never really intended to be a projection format, and that's part of why it popped off in the first place.🧵