Scene fade out/in transition color

I've noticed this a lot in older, color movies and I've often wondered why this is so.

Many times when a scene fades into another, it seems that when the fade begins, the color becomes different, maybe more muted, then when the fade is complete, the color almost jumps and becomes more saturated. It's almost as if you can tell the fade was spliced in, but even if it was, why the difference in color during the transition?

 

It was necessary to make a new piece of film from two other elements to get that dissolve back in the day, so it was at least one generation down from the rest of the film. Shows how quickly making a copy of a bit of film could degrade the quality.

Obviously film emulsions and technology improved to the point they were almost imperceptible. Now, of course, all that post work is done digitally.

dan c

 

Well, this is not reassembling old prints with negative. Truth is, that fades were made on optical printer. So, in that times, they made an intermediate positive from negative and a projection positive from intermediate. Then they made fades on printer onto another negative, which was then spliced to a master negative. So there was automaticaly two generation loss.
Intermediates and positive prints have a tendention to loss some colors and details too, so if you saw a movie back then in movie theatre, those transitions and fades weren't so different as other scenes. But now, when using digital technology and scanning original negatives, or in many cases, scanning new intermediate positives made from negatives, it is really "beating the eyes". The biggest problem is to match color of the rest, stabilizing and dust busting those transitions and fades, because it is time consuming. In early years of digitalizing those movies, those transitions were left as they were and only "clean negative" was dust busted, stabilized and color graded.

 

Thanks, gents. All good info. Yes, it's quite jarring. I find myself paying close attention to the dissolves in older movies just to see how bad/good they are. It's a shame that they're not cleaned up somehow, especially on the higher priced "remastered" editions.

 

how about giving us some examples of the bad fades? Given the technical discussion of this thread, I don't think it would be considered a threadcrap on these films.

 

Okay, one example, only pictures
http://dvdfreak.bloudil.cz/freak.php?p=janosik63/1&dz=0#sfu
scroll little down to "Notes" and there you can see it.

 

I've gone to that website and looked into that Notes area. Isn't the implication that there were two different prints when the DVD was made? It didn't sound like it's how the original film ended up. Maybe it did, but that site seem to imply the DVD version suffered from 2 different prints.

 

The reviewer is mistaken, because there was only one print of the movie and it was new intermediate positive made from original negative. I know more about it, because I work in the post-production studio, which restores movies provided by Slovak Film Institute.
Btw, this film wasn't restored by our studio, it was done by another one, we just scanned film reels and provided 2K dpx files. That other studio had no experience with dust busting and color grading and they just skipped those transitions. Pretty lame work, but it was done in 2001.

 

Watch any Star Trek Original Series episode (1966-69). That's the most obvious example in my video library.

 

In lab terms, it's a cut-in optical (as explained by several people above). Because the dissolve or fade requires going down two generations (interpositive -> internegative), and the film stock is completely different from the virgin camera negative stock into which it's spliced, it has completely different shading, color, grain, and sharpness characteristics.

We try very, very hard in digital mastering to meticulously match these transitions so that the "bump" on the splice isn't too visible, but the knobs only go so far. Often, the color-matching is non-linear, meaning the picture is brighter on the left than it is on the right, or it's purple at the top but greenish at the bottom, so trying to get the images to match 100% is almost impossible with very old films. It got better in the 1980s, but I'd say anything earlier than that is difficult. And the stuff from the 1950s and 1960s can be really awful.

Compounding this is that the lab technicians from that era tried to color-time the transitions, and their optical printers sometimes malfunctioned, resulting in the change happening on the top half of the frame first (what I call a 1-perf mislight). Sometimes, two perfs are bad, so the top half of the picture is one color, and the bottom half is another color. To fix this, we have to resort to power windows, gradiated filter effects, and all kinds of nonsense. We use a digital still of the last "good" frame as a reference, but sometimes, all we can do is just put a bandaid on the problem and say "this is the best we can do."

 

Fox and MGM has some of the worst fading issues when it comes to dupe opticals in their films from 1953 thru early 1970’s….then CRI started to pop-up and got worse on many cases.Every studio has this issue, yet Paramount, some WB and Universal titles were formatted auto-select or a & b roll cut, so the dissolves and faded were performed using the original negative (without generation loss) in an optical printer. Even today there’s no problem with recreating them digitally---

 

Some of the 3-strip Fox Technicolor negatives did survive. But since Fox always owned DeLuxe (since 1919), that was pretty much always their main lab. Fox is actually one of the better-organized studios in terms of keeping track of their negatives and other materials, and they've spent quite a bit of money sprucing things up over the years.

If you ask me, the Columbia Pictures film elements looked worse. I think they went through about 30 years of neglect, until Sony took over at the end of the 1980s. They do their best today, but most of the damage was done in the 1960s and 1970s, when very few execs cared about film preservation.

Nowadays, when one layer of emulsion has faded (like the cyan record), making everything magenta, it's possible to recreate the faded layer digitally and fix a lot of this. Heck, as long as even one of the dye layers is intact, they can do quite a bit in the digital realm. It just takes time and money.

I agree with Jayson above that the CRIs were awful, especially when we were forced in the 1980s to use them for certain home video transfers. I used to call them "Color Really Icky," because that's what it looked like. It was all so that the studio could save a few thousand dollars per feature and avoid making a good interpositive, the way color films have been done for more than half a century.

 

Years ago I had many arguments,if you will, with Bart Pierce about where their sound and film elements were and having to tell him that a stereo track was at RCA in L.A. and negetives in a salt mine. This had to do with the Planet of the Apes movies and the laserdisc transfers that were very poorly done by them in the early 90s. You know your stuff my friend, take care, John M.

 

Bart Pierce! There's a name from the distant past. I did a lot of transfers for laserdisc for him and Rick Montez, Sr. back in the old days. Great guy, very dedicated, great sense of humor. And Montez was the one of the best execs I ever dealt with -- knew tons of movie trivia backwards and forwards, a die hard movie buff in the best sense of the word.

I did most of the Rogers & Hammerstein musicals and a bunch of B-titles, at least 100 features and a dozen TV series spread out over 15 years. I did do Beneath the Planet of the Apes in the early 1990s, and we did our best with it. The tools of that era were very primitive compared to what we can do today. But I gotta say, there's nothing I mastered in the 1980s or 1990s that I couldn't do much better right now, especially in HD and with the digital toolsets we have now.

 

If you'd like to see a good (bad?) example of this, check out the color episodes of "The Adventures of Superman" on DVD.

You can always tell when an optical is coming up as the film suddenly gets really grainy and washed out.

After the fade/transition, the poor-quality image will stick around until the next shot (sometimes quite awhile).

 

Thats something and im happy to meet you and write. Beneath was a print Bart said was from Spain or something. Myself and two or three others were writing and calling Mister Pierce and Lewis Lagone in NY here about the poor sound and film elements. They made a big deal about Chace sound and how the Apes films were going to be great. Not to close this thread but I complained to him that _How come HBO/Cinemax could have perfect elements of both sound and picture of the Apes (at the same time 1991)and other films and Fox cant do it. I had a couple of heated but polite talks with him but I got the impression that if you say the sky is blue they will say its red and its tough on you, thats the best we can do. He put my name in his rolodex next to Roddy Mcdowall(alphabetically) he said alittle condecendingly like I was another Trekkie sort of speak but we all were just fustrated because we all saw on cable, like I said great elements and after a while I sort of grew up and said forget about it you cant win. I went to NYU and NYIT for film and was going to be a cinematographer and had some training and like most of us here, we know what good is and what is not so that was the end of my time with him. They were going to fly me out to L.A. with my betamax just to show them but they wanted me to pay and I knew then I was getting carried away. Im 50 now and I dont take it as serious anymore. Take care, John M..

 

No, we did Beneath from an IP. The pan/scan was agonizing, that much I can remember, and the primitive opticals from that era were pretty miserable. But almost nothing was ever transferred from print; those are much too dark and dense for telecine (or modern-day scanning), plus they're an extra couple of generations down. The IP is just one generation away from the original cut camera negative, so that's a better choice.

Most of the HBO/Cinemax transfers were done for Fox by various post houses, and they typically used the same master tape for everything. HBO stopped doing their own transfers a long time ago, because it just got too expensive, plus the studios wanted to control everything. I think my transfer of Beneath was maybe done around 1993-1994, if I remember correctly. Chace did do the audio, and they were the best (and still are) at new stereo & surround mixes.

 

I want to thankyou for taking up your time with what are basically irrelavent questions now. You know your shi* and its nice to converse with someone who was their. If I mention this at the Apes website you would get inundated with questions, I wouldnt do that.
Did you know that Blackmagic-Design IVC is doing a full restoration of POTA 68 from 35mm elements and removing all the crud thats on a first generation negitive or positive(not sure) and its ready for blu-ray in the summer to coincide with the new Apes film. I only hope that they would do all the Apes films but I doubt that.
Take care and thankyou again, John M.