Bring Home the Hollywood Classics in HD
Posted On Monday, January 5, 2009 at di 9:09 AM by Andri
Thanks to hi-def formats and painstaking restorations by Hollywood craftsmen, home theaters can now re-create the visual and aural glory of 35 mm film. (Photograph by Dan Saelinger)
The results were striking, with one slight hitch: “Because of the nature of the lighting, the green felt of the pool tables kept going blue,” recalls film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, a longtime Scorsese collaborator. “There was nothing we could do about it, because we wanted to make sure the skin tones were right, and the overall look of the film was right; so we let it go.”
Last summer, Schoonmaker was at New York’s Technicolor Creative Services staring at those blue pool tables again. When the film was first made, there was no fix for the problem, but thanks to digital technology, she could now correct it easily. “All we had to do was open digital windows on the pool tables and fill them in with green, without affecting the rest of the shot,” Schoonmaker explains. Why was a multiple-Oscar-winning editor concerned with color correction on a 20-year-old movie? Because, like many classics from Hollywood’s archives, The Color of Money is about to be reborn.
everybody knows, is green. The color of pool table felt in Martin Scorsese’s 1986 movie is ... blue? Wait a sec—rewind. That’s not quite right, is it? Actually, it’s wrong. The blue pool tables in
HOME THEATER, THE NEW THEATER
The movie industry is at a technological turning point. The era of high-definition video, which has already transformed the broadcast and cable television industry, is just starting to make its impact felt in Hollywood. After a six-year format war, Sony’s Blu-ray hi-def disc emerged last year as the winner over rival Toshiba’s HD-DVD, paving the way for studios to jump onboard and release a library of beloved movies in HD. Some consumer skepticism is understandable. Didn’t we all just upgrade from VHS to DVDs a few years ago? The mass-market appeal of HD discs is still unproven—at around $20 to $30, Blu-ray discs are expensive and, although the prices of players are falling, they are only beginning to break the $200 mark. Yet if the sales of HDTV sets are any indicator (47 percent of American households now own one), there is considerable consumer interest in hi-def, especially among those who love movies and home theater. And the term home theater has never been more apt—HD source material for movies is currently available at resolutions up to 1920 x 1080 pixels (known as 1080p), six times the resolution of DVDs. Now a homeowner with a quality screen and audio setup can not only approximate the feeling of a movie theater, he can arguably improve upon it. After all, the home-theater environment is calibrated by and optimized for the guy on the couch who owns it. No long lines, bad seats, awkward viewing angles or sticky floors. And if anybody talks during the movie, it’s probably you.
The results were striking, with one slight hitch: “Because of the nature of the lighting, the green felt of the pool tables kept going blue,” recalls film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, a longtime Scorsese collaborator. “There was nothing we could do about it, because we wanted to make sure the skin tones were right, and the overall look of the film was right; so we let it go.”
Last summer, Schoonmaker was at New York’s Technicolor Creative Services staring at those blue pool tables again. When the film was first made, there was no fix for the problem, but thanks to digital technology, she could now correct it easily. “All we had to do was open digital windows on the pool tables and fill them in with green, without affecting the rest of the shot,” Schoonmaker explains. Why was a multiple-Oscar-winning editor concerned with color correction on a 20-year-old movie? Because, like many classics from Hollywood’s archives, The Color of Money is about to be reborn.
everybody knows, is green. The color of pool table felt in Martin Scorsese’s 1986 movie is ... blue? Wait a sec—rewind. That’s not quite right, is it? Actually, it’s wrong. The blue pool tables in
HOME THEATER, THE NEW THEATER
;)
The movie industry is at a technological turning point. The era of high-definition video, which has already transformed the broadcast and cable television industry, is just starting to make its impact felt in Hollywood. After a six-year format war, Sony’s Blu-ray hi-def disc emerged last year as the winner over rival Toshiba’s HD-DVD, paving the way for studios to jump onboard and release a library of beloved movies in HD. Some consumer skepticism is understandable. Didn’t we all just upgrade from VHS to DVDs a few years ago? The mass-market appeal of HD discs is still unproven—at around $20 to $30, Blu-ray discs are expensive and, although the prices of players are falling, they are only beginning to break the $200 mark. Yet if the sales of HDTV sets are any indicator (47 percent of American households now own one), there is considerable consumer interest in hi-def, especially among those who love movies and home theater. And the term home theater has never been more apt—HD source material for movies is currently available at resolutions up to 1920 x 1080 pixels (known as 1080p), six times the resolution of DVDs. Now a homeowner with a quality screen and audio setup can not only approximate the feeling of a movie theater, he can arguably improve upon it. After all, the home-theater environment is calibrated by and optimized for the guy on the couch who owns it. No long lines, bad seats, awkward viewing angles or sticky floors. And if anybody talks during the movie, it’s probably you.