Post
by Ben » September 30th, 2011, 2:03 pm
I should say though, George, that often this talk of a "restoration" is very much now a marketing term.
Used to be a time when film restoration actually meant that, but nowadays its banded around much too much, especially in cases like Star Wars, where the film hasn't really been degraded or restored but just very well remastered. All of that talk of how the original Star Wars had degraded over time is baloney: Lucasfilm has a very good inventory and preservation system in place and you can bet the original negs or interpositives are in the best shape ever.
What these companies often do (and I know, since I've put together a few "before and after" comparisons for various presentations) is show a print of an old film and then compare that to their "new" restoration.
Now, imagine Star Wars comes out in '77. The prints get a lot of wear and tear and, not being show prints and only being distribution prints, are not produced on the best stock. The idea is to show 'em and bin 'em. Over time and many special one-off screenings, those prints degrade, but note that the negs are never touched.
When it comes to putting them out again, the same old worn print is wheeled out as an example of how bad Star Wars has degraded. Of course it has: it's a regular distribution print, run a million times and then some over 30 years!
Now, compare that to the original neg, safetly kept nice and safe for 30 years. Yep...looks almost brand new! With good video mastering and better quality transfer tools, that neg or interpoz will come out like a movie made last week. Each time something like Star Wars comes out again, they pull this off, but there is no comparison: it's just an excuse to say there's a new, better version, but really it's just good remastering.
Then they say "hey, look how great it looks now!", but really it's always looked that great: it's just better transfer tools bringing the best out of the imahe and home video formats allowing us to see more detail than before.
As for Song Of The South, Disney has routinely kept this film preserved and remastered. In the 1990s, while working on another project with Disney, I was able to get a copy of their 1995 video restoration of SOTS, made for a possible LaserDisc issue and international television syndication. While not as good as going back to the neg (it was a show print, I believe, given a paintbox dustbuster touch-up like the 1993 Snow White) it has good colors and a solid image.
Obviously now, they're going through the library and making sure everything is updated and preserved in digital HD. I expect many more titles than we're aware of have already been "restored" in HD video, but it's not real restoration, it's just going back to the original elements (for real this time) and creating new, hi-def video masters, usually in 4K or 8K.
It doesn't mean that any of these will be released, but they're there for if and when they could be. It's just forward thinking on Disney's part, since they don't want their past works to be lost forever due to a lack of foresight, and a supposed appraisal of a film now may change in a few years. They can easily release SOTS to a big audience if handled in the right way anyway...but at least this news gives hope that it hasn't been left forgotten to fade away forever.