DVDPhreak

As most of you know, last night was not TCM's 20th anniversary, but the twenty-FIRST. Anyone know why Robert's tribute wasn't aired last year? It was shot last year during the 2014 TCM festival, and yet it was postponed a year for airing. I recall on April 14 last year, TCM marked the occasion by airing the old "Private Screening" episode with Robert being interviewed by Alec Baldwin.

It's not that people find it "acceptable"; they just DON'T CARE anymore because they know they have the means to see what they want. The problem of movies being altered for broadcast has been addressed by the existence of TCM, home videos, online video services, video on-demand, etc. that give viewers the means to watch the original movies. An issue that has been addressed long ago is called a "dead horse" and it is as good as made-up. Colorization will never be as prevalent as the other ways of altering movies because there are much fewer films that colorization could be applied to. Old movies and TV shows that are black-and-white are in a niche of a niche. Even the owner of Legend Films, which has colorized hundreds of films, has said he will not touch black-and-white shows that use artistry in their photography.

As I said already, there is, and always has been, outrage against any unauthorized attempts at modifying films from their original forms, so please stop disingenuously putting out such would-be argument that I have already shown to be invalid. Image-cropping, panning and scanning, cutting scenes for commercials, bleeping out the curse words, etc. done by typical TV stations were reasons why channels like TCM (and AMC before it) are demanded and have succeeded. So you can't say there was no outrage. Foreign dubs are usually authorized by the filmmakers for foreign markets so they don't really belong in your rationale. If you want to support colorization, please do it in a way that doesn't include making up would-be arguments. Instead, give us real, valid arguments to support it. But then again, true film lovers know (and probably you too) that there probably aren't that many.

Of course there was and is outrage. The creation of a channel like TCM, which strives not to alter a film for broadcast, was essentially the result of such outrage. If a station would show a colorized movie at all, it would probably do it IN ADDITION to cutting scenes and cropping the picture. It does nothing but butchering the film even more. I already said that it always has that pale, sepia look that affects skin tone and other things. "Far advanced over earlier stuff" is just not the ringing endorsement it needs. Notice how you stopped short of saying colorization looked as good as color photography, because you know it doesn't, and never will. Hence, it is not needed. True color photography in film has advanced leaps and bounds also, making it even more impossible for colorization to approach its quality. Today's color films give us a wide range of color schemes, from the gritty appearance of "Saving Private Ryan" to the dream-like look of Tim Burton's films. Yet colorization always gives us the same boring, pale color palette. Why are you supporting an inferior product that serves movie viewers no good at all?

That kind of second-guessing is a poor excuse to do something you have no right to do. Only the filmmakers themselves could modify their own films, just like George Lucas did to his Star Wars movies. If you colorize a public-domain film without any input from the filmmakers, you don't violate any law, but you violate the integrity of the filmmakers' work, Colorization first appeared in the 80s, and almost 3 decades have passed already. If it hasn't succeeded in 3 decades, another 25 years probably won't make a difference.

I just renamed myself to DVDPhreak, which is the same name I use at the Blu-ray.com forum. I made a thread there also on the subject of whether TCM shows true HD or not.

And I bet most don't care if it was. True fans of the show, or any show, will always want to watch them in their original form. I sure hope people here don't get us confused, given our similar user names, since I consider colorization an absolute abomination.

I have since revised my opinion, as per my previous post. The "Out of the Past" broadcast in fact looked the SAME as SD.

I just saw "Laura" and it was shown in SD on both channels. So the source clearly was SD. I also own the Blu-ray edition of "Laura" so I was able to make another comparison here. Notice the 480p picture, which is what an SD image would look. And it looks very close to the supposedly HD broadcast of "Laura" (notice the details on Betsy's uniform and the flowers, which are sharpest on the Blu-ray but have the same lack of sharpness on the other two). I did another comparison for "Out of the Past" and it shows the same thing: the 480p image is the same as the TCM "HD" broadcast. This is pretty definitive proof that TCM doesn't really show movies in HD. It probably never has. Some people, like the starter of this thread, have claimed they really had seen HD. I once went 15 rounds with someone on another site who swore up and down he really had seen true HD on TCM, which I strongly disagreed. I will keep watching TCM and keep making comparisons like the ones above. Since seeing is believing, only such comparisons are able to show definitively whether an image is HD or not. The next potential HD showing will be "The Great Race" on 12/19. My earlier post shows other future showings. If all of these showings produce the same findings as the ones above, the case will finally be closed. I've experienced first-hand how easy it is to mistake an SD broadcast as HD. In an earlier post, I actually believed the broadcast was in HD, albeit in a low-quality HD. Only when I looked really closely did I find out that it was SD after all. All the people who claimed they had seen HD broadcasts were probably similarly tricked into thinking so.

If you see the original video rather than a blurry Youtube copy of it, you may be able to see that it just doesn't hold up to close examination. Here are screenshots of the colorized "It's a Wonderful Life" that show that colorization is just doomed to fail because it can never duplicate all the nuances of true color photography. A colorized image seems to always have that "sepia-ish" look that affects skin tone the most and always ruin your immersion of the movie.

They may or may not look sharper, depending on what source material TCM uses for the broadcast. If the source is a blurry SD image, you will see the same blurry SD image on both the HD and SD channel. For you to see an HD image, TCM has to use an HD source. And my belief is that it has never used true HD sources. It uses sources that seem look better than SD sources, but doesn't really look like HD, i.e. somewhere in between. The screenshot comparison in my earlier post seems to bear that out. TCM's so-called HD image is still quite a distance way from how a Blu-ray looks in true HD, but it does look better than SD.

And wherever butchering process takes you closer to how a movie would've looked had whatever butchering method been used. Got it. Of course, colorization doesn't really show accurate color photography. Colorization always gives the actors that "sickly" skin complexion and overall "pale" color palettes, nowhere near what the movie would've looked had it been really shot in some of the advanced color systems of the days.

"Angel Face" was not shot in widescreen, so TCM was correct in showing the black bars on the left and right.

A very bad comparison. HD takes you CLOSER THAN EVER to what a movie originally looked in a theater. Colorization doesn't.

HD channels are always shown widescreen, and SD channels are always shown narrow-screen. When something is broadcast in HD, it doesn't mean the actual program content is really in HD. SD content can be shown in HD also, in a process known as upconversion. This is how TCM HD channel shows all its movies, as far as I know. Did you see "Out of the Past" on Tuesday night? It might look HD to many, but as my screenshot comparison in my last post shows, it really wasn't HD. What I said in my very first post in this thread still remains true: I have yet to see TCM broadcast an old movie in true, true, true HD.

On closer examination, tonight's broadcast may not be true HD after all. In order to see true HD picture, the video SOURCE has to be in true HD as well. Click here for another comparison. The first picture is the 1080p Blu-ray shown earlier. The second one is the 720p version of the same image, which I created by downsizing the 1080p image. The two shots may look identical on your small computer monitor, but on a large TV screen you would see the difference. The third shot is from tonight's broadcast, which you can plainly see is not even close in quality to the 720p shot. In order to be HD, a picture has to be at least 720p. Therefore, I have to conclude that the underlying video source simply doesn't have enough detail to look HD, and some sort of upconversion was used to broadcast it in 720p.

Upon further examination, tonight's broadcast may not even be 720p. I downconverted my Blu-ray screenshot to 720p resolution and it STILL looks much better than tonight's broadcast. Later, I will bring out another set of comparison to better illustrate this. (Moments later...) On closer examination, tonight's broadcast may not be true HD after all. In order to see true HD picture, the video SOURCE has to be in true HD as well. Click here for another comparison. The first picture is the 1080p Blu-ray shown earlier. The second one is the 720p version of the same image, which I created by downsizing the 1080p image. The two shots may look identical on your small computer monitor, but on a large TV screen you would see the difference. The third shot is from tonight's broadcast, which you can plainly see is not even close in quality to the 720p shot. In order to be HD, a picture has to be at least 720p. Therefore, I have to conclude that the underlying video source simply doesn't have enough detail to look HD, and some sort of upconversion was used to broadcast it in 720p.

It looks like 720p, so technically it is HD. But 720p is a lower-resolution version of HD (the higher resolution for broadcast is 1080i), and it looks nowhere close to the Blu-ray, which is in 1080p. Click here for the screenshot comparison. Click open the first screenshot, then press the right arrow key on your keyboard. The first shot is from the Blu-ray edition of "Out of the Past, which I own, followed by a corresponding shot of tonight's broadcast, followed by an SD broadcast from 2009. As they clearly show, TCM HD broadcasts are much improved over SD, but still a distance away from Blu-ray. But then again, very few networks show movies in the highest quality of 1080i because (1) It requires higher bandwidth to show the higher resolution, and (2) studios want you to pay for the Blu-rays or online videos (from Netflix, Vudu, etc.) with true HD picture.

I've just seen tonight's "Out of the Past" HD broadcast. Yes, it was in HD, but it looked like 720p, which is a lower-resolution version of HD (the higher resolution is 1080i). It looked nowhere close to the Blu-ray. Click here for the screenshot comparison. Click open the first screenshot, then press the right arrow key on your keyboard. The first shot is from the Blu-ray, followed by tonight's broadcast, followed by an SD broadcast from 2009. As they clearly show, TCM HD broadcasts are much improved over SD, but still a distance away from Blu-ray. But then again, very few networks show movies in the highest quality of 1080i because (1) It requires higher bandwidth to show the higher resolution, and (2) studios want you to pay for the Blu-rays or online videos (from Netflix, Vudu, etc.) with true HD picture.

It still depends on whether Disney would allow TCM to show it, because any release of this film, even on late night TV, would make headlines; you just know it would, because it is one of the least seen films ever. Disney is too afraid to controversialize its brand name, as we know. To Disney's credit, sometimes it acknowledges its past sins, albeit minimally. On the Fantasia DVD (the old one from 2000), there is this text info that acknowledges the racially-insensitive characters in the Beethoven segment. This info was also mentioned on the audio commentary of the Blu-ray edition a few years later.

"Pulp Fiction" is not non-linear enough, though. I'm thinking of a more extensive shuffling of the timeline -- the 2001 film, "Memento", for instance, which also deals with the illusive nature of truth. If the linear timeline is A to Z, then "Memento" goes like this: Z, A, Y, B, X, C, W, D, V, E, U, F, T, G, ..... , with the climax occurring around M and N, in the MIDDLE of the story. This is truly a memorably and creatively told story indeed. The chronology in "Kane" is something like: F, A, G, B, H, C, I, D, J, E, K "Pulp Fiction" has a simpler non-linearity: D, B, F, A, C, E

Sky-high prices mean these discs are essentially unavailable to most people, that's my point. Hence, this TCM-Disney deal is good news for many people.

TCM would probably show "Song of the South" also. If TCM can show "Birth of a Nation" and all the other non-PC stuff such as 30s musicals with minstrel numbers, etc., then it probably wouldn't mind showing "Song of the South". Disney sees itself as too much of a family-oriented business to release the film on its own. But having it shown on TCM is probably OK. Of course, I want to see "Song of the South" for its historical significance (both positive and negative), not because I enjoy seeing distorted portrayal of slavery.

Those are from third-party sellers who had bought them when they were still in print. As I said, Disney stopped making these discs long ago. They used to cost only $30 when they first came out. Now, some of them, like "Mickey Mouse in Black and White Volume 1", have sky-high prices.

Just want to be technically correct: TV networks don't show 1080p. They show "1080i", a slightly less good-looking version of 1080. 1080p picture is only available on Blu-ray discs and online videos (Vudu, Netflix, etc.).