Warner Random Speculation

[hearthesilence]

WB on DVD

Warner Bros. is the new Criterion Collection. How the DVD label cleaned up its act (and its digital transfers).
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Monday, Feb. 28, 2005, at 3:02 PM PT

Here's looking at a great new picture on DVDs
People don't pay much attention to the name of the studio on a DVD. (Nobody I know says, for instance, "Let's go rent a Paramount movie tonight.") The single exception, of course, is the Criterion Collection, which has marketed itself as a boutique brand, touted—and deservedly so—for its classic catalog, fastidious transfers, and superb commentaries, booklets, and other "special features."

Now it's time to take note of another logo that almost guarantees high quality—Warner Home Video. At least since 2002, the video division of Warner Bros. has released one great-looking DVD after another. I know of no other label, in fact, whose output has been more consistently spectacular.

Last year, its two-disc DVD of Casablanca was a revelation—more luminous than any print probably since the film's 1941 première. More recently, its box sets of film noir and gangster movies (including The Asphalt Jungle; Murder, My Sweet; Out of the Past, White Heat; and The Public Enemy) have been marvels of clarity. Its restorations of Technicolor classics—Singin' in the Rain, Meet Me in St. Louis, The Band Wagon, and Gone With the Wind—are breathtakingly lush and detailed: Look at the texture of clothing, the ripples of a curtain, the glistening steel of a railroad car—they're practically 3D. I saw The Band Wagon in a restored 35mm print not long ago, at Film Forum in New York, and this DVD suffers hardly at all by comparison. Modern films as well, like Warner's new two-disc "special edition" of Scorsese's Goodfellas, are saturated with rich, natural colors. (If you disagree, you need to calibrate your television or buy a new one.)

Nearly a decade into the DVD era, most studios have figured out how to do at least decent digital mastering. Few major-label DVDs these days look bad. What puts Warner Home Video a notch or two (or three) above the rest? I talked with George Feltenstein, senior vice president for Warner's classic catalog, and Ned Price, VP for technical mastering, as well as a few outside industry specialists. Here's what I found out.

First, the condition of Warner's film library is in relatively good shape. As a result of media meltdowns and mergers over the past half-century, Warner Bros. owns not only all the films made under its own studio logo but also all RKO titles and all MGM films made before 1986. (For details, click here.) In the 1960s, long before film preservation became a popular cause, MGM was one of two Hollywood studios—the other was Disney—that decided to preserve all its films. They spent millions of dollars to repair, properly store, and in some cases meticulously restore original negatives, black-and-white nitrates, or duplicate copies. As for Warner Bros.' own black-and-white classics, original nitrates were long ago donated to the Library of Congress or UCLA, which stored them in temperature-controlled rooms and left them, ever since, untouched. To the extent possible, Warner DVDs have been mastered from the original negatives, preventing degradation in detail, sharpness, color, and contrast.

Then there's Warner's work with Technicolor. Even with careful preservation, color negatives fade over time. But Technicolor negatives can look as good as new after decades. This is because Technicolor films consisted of three black-and-white negatives, which ran simultaneously through a special camera. Light hit each film strip through a prism filter. Afterward, each film strip was coated with a dye, and the three strips were then aligned, on top of one another, to form a coherent color image. It was a complex, costly process, which lasted only from 1935-54. (For a succinct detailed elaboration, click here.) The point is that black-and-white negatives don't fade. If the Technicolor black-and-white negatives have been stored well, and if some lab can replicate the Technicolor dye-processing, it should be possible to create a fresh print with perfect color.

This is why the DVDs of Gone With the Wind, The Band Wagon, Meet Me in St. Louis, and so forth look so stunning. They've been mastered from the original Technicolor three-strip negatives. In some ways, these DVDs have finer color and detail than even the original film prints. In the old days, it was difficult to align those three strips perfectly. The task became still harder years later, when the films were reissued (or turned into earlier DVD transfers), because the negatives had stretched or shrunk over time. If you need all three strips to get the right color, and you can't line the strips up precisely, then the colors and the sharpness are going to be a bit off. However, with digital technology, the three strips can be aligned with absolute precision. This process isn't unique to Warner—other studios made Technicolor films, too—but Warners is the first to go back to the three-strip negatives and realign them precisely as a systematic policy.

Another thing that makes the recent batch of Warner DVDs look so good: high-speed digital scanning. When a film is turned into a DVD, the first step is to scan each frame digitally and to store the data on a hard drive. The more times a frame is scanned, the more coherent is the resulting picture. Many DVD studios now scan films at "high-definition"—or 1,080 lines. Warners is one of just a few that scan at 2,000 lines (or, in the parlance, "2K scanning"). Soon, beginning with a Wizard of Oz reissue later this year, it will start releasing Technicolor DVDs scanned at 4,000 lines ("4K scanning"). This is a significant number. Engineers estimate that if you digitally reproduced all the information on a frame of 35mm film, you'd need about 4,000 lines of data. In other words, at least theoretically (and for more on this caveat, click here), 4K scanning captures everything that's on a film.

Finally, the new Warner DVDs tend to come in the form of two-disc sets—one disc for the movie, a second disc for the special features. (Gone With the Wind has four discs: two for the movie, two for special features.) This isn't just a packaging gimmick. Digital video, like digital audio, consists of a series of 0's and 1's, run through complex compressors, processors, and converters. You can only fit so many 0's and 1's—so many bytes and bits—on an optical disc. The more you load the disc with special features, the less space you have for the movie—or, more to the point, the fewer bits you can devote to each frame of a movie. The higher number of bits that go into an image, the better the image looks. So, the best way to present the movie is to put nothing on the disc except the movie. (Columbia TriStar started this practice with its SuperBit DVDs. A few other studios, not just Warners, have picked up on the idea.) A Web site called dvdbeaver.com has measured that the latest multi-disc Gone With the Wind has 55 percent more bits per second than a single-disc DVD that Warner released a few years ago.

But the true measure—besides whether the movie is good—is how good the movie looks. You can see the difference in the new Warner DVDs, and it isn't subtle.

Fred Kaplan, Slate's "War Stories" columnist, also writes about DVDs for the Perfect Vision and other publications.
Photograph of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman from Casablanca © Bettman/Corbis.

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Footnotes/links
1. Warner Bros. has benefited more than most from a half-century of media mergers. In 1956, the WB library was sold to PRM Inc., which became Associated Artists Productions, which, in 1958, sold the assets to United Artists. MGM bought United Artists (and hence the Warner library) in 1981. Turner Broadcasting bought the rights to MGM films made up until 1986. Finally, in the late '90s, Time-Warner bought Turner, which brought the Warner library home—and the classic MGMs, too. When UA held the rights, it donated pre-1949 Warner Bros. nitrates to the Library of Congress and post-1951 negatives to UCLA's film library. RKO is a more complicated story. When that studio was sold in 1957, its holdings were scattered. To make DVDs of such RKO classics as Citizen Kane (a superb transfer, even though the original negative was burned in a warehouse fire), Bringing Up Baby (coming out next month), and a series of Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers films (five later this year, five next year), Warner executives have hunted down elements from as many as seven archives, in the United States and Europe, piecing together the best-preserved pieces from each to form the best-looking master.

I should note that other DVD companies—most notably the Criterion Collection but also Columbia, MGM, Paramount, Universal, and several more—also spend huge sums to track down elements for many DVD projects.

2. Technicolor, An Explanation by D. Fletcher

I'll bet you all didn't know that Technicolor films were shot on black and white film.

Sorry beforehand for the lecture.

Though Kodak color film existed in the 30s, its clarity and contrast weren't up to the rigorous demands of large dimension projection, a necessity for movies. Enter Herbert Kalmus, and his invented technology, Technicolor.

A Technicolor camera is a simple 35mm camera with a very odd modification -- behind the lens is a prism splitting the white light three ways, into red, green and blue light. Inside the camera are inserted three black and white nitrate film stocks, two back to back and one on the side, with a small mirror reflecting the light to the side film. Each strip of film recorded one color of a color picture, and the recording is on fade-proof black and white nitrate stock film.

The 3 strips are developed, and made into positives, called matrices. Each of these looks like a complete black and white film, but when examined closely, they look odd (because they only contain one color out of the total). The matrices are bathed in gelatin, and then when the silver is washed away, the gelatin adheres to the surface of the film at the exact saturation level of the color -- presumably the darker the color, the more density of gelatin. And then each of the matrices is dyed one of three colors, the substractive colors yellow (for the blue record), magenta (for the green record) and cyan (for the red record). After dyeing, the matrices are pressed one at a time into prints, a process called dye-sublimation printing, at a registration precision of 1/10,000 an inch.

The original 3-strip Technicolor movies have a color palette and beauty far surpassing chemical color processes which came later (in the 50s), and they will never fade. However, because a single print requires 3 separate negatives, other problems arose over time. Each of the negatives, made of plastic celluloid, began to shrink and crack, and of course, each would shrink and crack differently from the others. When re-printed, registration of the 3 colors becomes a problem -- magenta and yellow "halos" around objects could be seen, from mis-registration.


Enter computers and the 21st Century. Warner Brothers has patented a digital technology called "Ultra-Resolution" which basically involved scanning in each negative separately, digitally correcting shrinkage, and re-compositing the files digitally, and then outputting onto DVD (or whatever digital file).

So far, only 4 films have benefitted from this, the first being Singin' in the Rain (1952), and the others The Adventures of Robin Hood (1937), Meet Me In St. Louis (1944), and the piece de resistance Gone With The Wind (1939). The first three were done with a resolution of 2K, meaning 2000 vertical lines, plenty for high-definition digital presentation, and not quite up to the 35mm original film quality. But the latter was done at 4K, a far better resolution, and it will probably be re-output to negative celluloid. Currently in Ultra-Resolution production, The Wizard of Oz (1939).

I recommend all these films highly, not least because of their splendid and eternal worlds of ravishing color.

3. At the moment (and until high-definition DVDs come along), all DVDs are made with just 480 horizontal lines per frame, just like standard-television broadcasts. If the digital master is made from a high-definition scanning or a 2K or 4K scan, it has to be remastered at 480 lines (a process called "down-rezing," to indicate a reduction of resolution) before it can be transferred to DVD. Once high-definition DVDs start coming out (later this year), you will be able to see HD-scanned DVDs as they were meant to look (at least if you have a high-definition television set). A Japanese lab has designed a TV monitor that displays 4,000 lines, but it will be many years before such a product can be manufactured and priced for even the high end of the mass market. Still, the higher the resolution (i.e., the higher number of lines) of the original source, the better the disc will look even if it's ultimately processed at a lower resolution. An analogy: A photograph shot by a Nikon looks better than one taken by a Kodak disposable camera, even if they are printed on cheap paper in a mass-circulation magazine.

[viciousliar]

"This is why the DVDs of Gone With the Wind, The Band Wagon, Meet Me in St. Louis, and so forth look so stunning. They've been mastered from the original Technicolor three-strip negatives. In some ways, these DVDs have finer color and detail than even the original film prints. In the old days, it was difficult to align those three strips perfectly. The task became still harder years later, when the films were reissued (or turned into earlier DVD transfers), because the negatives had stretched or shrunk over time. If you need all three strips to get the right color, and you can't line the strips up precisely, then the colors and the sharpness are going to be a bit off. However, with digital technology, the three strips can be aligned with absolute precision. This process isn't unique to Warner—other studios made Technicolor films, too—but Warners is the first to go back to the three-strip negatives and realign them precisely as a systematic policy." END OF QUOTE


It's a well known fact that the original 3-strip Technicolor negatives of Singin' in the Rain no longer exist(they were destroyed in a fire if memory serves). Thus it has always baffled me that this title was chosen as the first to undergo the Ultra Resolution process - something that actually disqualifies its entry by default according to WB's own definition of this process. What gives?

By the way, this article is most illuminating - thanks for posting.

[hearthesilence]

I think you can e-mail him through Slate. Not sure how he'd take it, though, but well, he's got to stay on top of these things.

[milk114]

I don't know that any of this is new but it's interesting none the less, especially the idea of Vincent Sherman audio commmentaries recorded for dvds that'll probably not be out for a few years. I'm not sure what humors me more, that the Onion AV Club has been doing some of the best interviews I've read in a long time, or that DVD producers are getting more and more press time.

http://www.theonionavclub.com/feature/i ... issue=4111

[Ashirg]

Vincent Sherman, who directed Mr. Skeffington with Bette Davis and The Damned Don't Cry with Joan Crawford. He came in to do commentary tracks for those, because they'll be coming out at some point in the near future.

Nice!

[sherlockjr]

Now that there's Noir Classics II in the works, it's logical that the Classic Comedies Collection will necessitate a followup as well. Just curious what movies folks think could be included. (Is the classic Holiday available for Warners, or does someone else hold the rights?)

[alandau]

Columbia (Sony) holds the rights to Holiday 1938. It has been released in the UK R2.

[justeleblanc]

Does Warner really have that many comedies?

[Anonymous]

I went through a list of Thirties and even Forties comedies I would love to see on DVD, but the only two that Warner owns are Bachelor Mother and Ninotchka. Most of the rest are Universal, sadly.

[FilmFanSea]

It is curious that Warner doesn't seem to have a great cache of unreleased comedies in its vault. Some possibilities:

Bombshell (Fleming/1933) w/ Jean Harlow
Hard to Handle (LeRoy/1933) w/ Cagney & Mary Brian
The Strawberry Blonde (Walsh/1941) w/ Cagney & Rita Hayworth
The Great Garrick (Whale/1937)
Ninotchka (Lubitsch/1939) [which would also be in the Garbo Box]
High Flyers (Cline/1937) w/ Wheeler & Woolsey
Double Harness (Cromwell/1933) w/ William Powell & Ann Harding
The Girl Said No (Wood/1930) w/ William Haines
Silver Streak (Guiol/1935) Wheeler & Woolsey
The Half Naked Truth (LaCava/1932) w/ Lee Tracy
The Show-Off (Reisner/1934) w/ Spencer Tracy
Love Crazy (Conway/1941) w/ William Powell & Myrna Loy

[justeleblanc]

I guess Paramount was the big comedies studio, Warner was the Noir/Western Studio. If I'm wrong someone correct me but I don't think Warner's actors were really known for comedies. Even the tagline for Ninotchka was "Garbo Laughs" partly as a spoof of "Garbo Speaks" and partly because she just wasn't a comedic actor, like Bogart or Cagney. Again, if I'm wrong correct me, cause I'm just guessing.

Now if only Universal, or whoever it is that owns the Paramount catalogue, could release the great comedies collection we've all been waiting for. And I don't mean in the 5 films to 2 discs collections that they did with Gary Cooper.

[Gregory]

I think Warner owns the rights to some worthwhile comedies. They may not have been produced by Warner, but they now hold the rights to the old MGM catalog and those of quite a few other studios.
Just a few from the "pre-Code" era I'd like to see Warner release:
Big Business Girl (1931)
Beauty and the Boss (1932)
Blessed Event (1932)
Ex-Lady (1933)
Havana Widows (1933)
I’ve Got Your Number (1934).

[Michael Strangeways]

As to future Comedy Collection fodder, y'all forgetting the fact Warner has the RKO catalogue...there's a lot of material there...

Vivacious Lady-George Stevens, 1938
The Mad Miss Manton-Leigh Jason, 1938
Bachelor Mother-Garson Kanin,1939
Fifth Avenue Girl-Gregory LaCava,1939
The Devil and Miss Jones-Sam Woods,1941
Once Upon a Honeymoon-Leo McCarey,1942
The Farmer's Daughter-H.C. Potter,1947
Magic Town-William Wellman, 1947

oh, and from MGM, there's Idiots Delight, Wife vs Secretary, The Canterville Ghost; and from Warner, there's Tovarich, The Bride Came C.O.D., The Man who came to Dinner, The Male Animal and George Washington Slept Here.[/b]

[emcflat]

This "Men Who Made the Movies" series is really spectacular. According to IMDB, there were 7 of these made. We already have the Minnelli, Howard Hawks (Bringing up Baby) & Cukor (Philedelphia Story.) Now, I want to see King Vidor, Raoul Walsh, William Wellman, and Alfred Hitchcock(!) (Where was this when Warner was putting together the Hitchcock Signature Collection?!?! That's what I wanna know.)

[tryavna]

For that matter, this "Men Who Made the Movies" series is really spectacular. According to IMDB, there were 7 of these made. We already have the Minnelli, Howard Hawks (Bringing up Baby) & Cukor (Philedelphia Story.) Now, I want to see King Vidor, Raoul Walsh, William Wellman, and Alfred Hitchcock(!) (Where was this when Warner was putting together the Hitchcock Signature Collection?!?! That's what I wanna know.)

There are eight if you count the one for Sam Fuller that Schickel did in the early 90s. That one can be found on Warners' recent release of The Big Red One. (My reservations about the poor handling of the audio tracks for the alternate scenes notwithstanding, this is a fine 2-disc set and the Fuller "Men Who Made the Movies" is very worthwhile.)

It's possible that Warners will release the Hitchcock episode when and if they revisit North By Northwest, as they've hinted. And it's about time that they get around to releasing a King Vidor boxset. To my way of thinking, either The Big Parade or The Crowd would make an excellent candidate for the 2-disc SE format, and Vidor's "Men Who Made the Movies" would fit in very nicely there.

[Derek Estes]

Speaking of Vidor. I remember Geo. Feltenstien mentioning that the print for The Champ looks like it was filmed yesterday, yet that film would be hard to market. I was thinking that a Vidor set would be great, and include the films mentioned and say The Fountainhead if it is not included in a Cooper set. Yet, Vidor isn't one of those directors that the General public is as familiar with as say Hitchcock, Hawks, Kazan etc. and would have a smaller built in audience, so these films might be released differently.

[emcflat]

Happened to be reading Roger Ebert's review of "Pandora's Box," and found this blurb:

``Louise Brooks was way too wild in a business that was way too tame.'' So says Dr. Paolo Cherchi Usai, curator of the film collection at Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y. We see him in ``Looking for Lulu,'' an hourlong documentary, narrated by Shirley MacLaine, that Turner Classic Movies will air May 5, part of its monthlong tribute to Brooks. The cable channel will also show ``Pandora's Box,'' ``The Show-Off'' (1926) and ``God's Gift to Women'' (1935).

This sounds like the kind of content we saw in the Chaney & Keaton (and now Garbo) sets. It would also account for Pandora's Box being a "stalled ex-certainty" from Criterion. Just random speculation, of course, but it would make sense, don't you think?

[Ashirg]

I don't think so.

The documentary was available from Image until it went out of print, so it's not newly made for TCM. Show-Off is available from Blackhawk Films and Image and Pandora's Box is owned by Janus. Besides, they run month-long tributes every month, not neceserraly with DVD release...

[Godot]

Richard Schickel's 1973 "Men Who Made the Movies" documentary on Hitchcock (also called "Master of Suspense") is one of my prized possessions. I had seen the rebroadcast on PBS when I was 12 or 13, and it profoundly affected me.

For those who haven't seen it, it starts with Arbogast entering the Bates house in Psycho up through his slaying, then quick cut to AH behind a desk saying, "Some people think I'm a monster ... they really do." The next scene is Cary Grant standing alone on the road in North by Northwest, watching the approaching plane, as Cliff Robertson narrates, "A man alone: innocent, defenseless, the landscape at once familiar and strange, like the landscape of our dreams." The next hour is filled with marvelous clips, wry Hitchcock comments (and nervous fidgeting with his desk blotter) and fine thematic observations by Schickel. Some of the scenes frightened me (Torn Curtain's protracted murder, the rape/murder from Frenzy and subsequent seduction scene when the camera retreats from the upstairs flat) but I was hooked on Hitchcock and film criticism.

When I was in grad school, we would watch this in the background while playing Scrabble, imitating Hitchcock and memorizing the lines. It's not on DVD, as previously noted, but you can obtain a VHS through direct order or used copies on Half.com, Amazon, and Ebay.

[skuhn8]

Just watched Adventures of Robin Hood again. And again I viewed it with the optional Warner Night at the Movies content. Such a brilliant idea and a great way to immerse oneself in the time of release context. I love that Freddie Rich band session!

Anyway, besides Yankee Doodle Dandy (which I don't have) and Treasure of Sierra Madre (which I do have) what other Warner releases, if any, feature Night at the Movies content?

Does anyone else enjoy this stuff as much as I do?

[Ashirg]

Warner Gangsters Collection has Warner Night at the Movies for all titles.

All titles in Errol Flynn Collection also have it, but they don't have "Play All" option...

[Arcadean]

This is a great concept. I enjoyed the Warner's Night at the Movies on The Petrified Forest more than I enjoyed the actual movie. Just a very nice added bonus when they do add them.

[zedz]

. . . but why inflict those awful, awful Leonard Maltin intros on us?

[Narshty]

DVD Beaver: Griping The Light Fantastic

[viciousliar]

I, too, have noticed the ever-increasing mentions in reviews of phrases like "a bit soft-looking," "still, it looks good for a movie this old" or most annoyingly "great to have it out on DVD anyway." I have been thinking, are Warner Bros slipping? Have they become cocky after headlines like "Warner Bros is the new Criterion?" Have their financial head executives decided to become "cost effective," cashing in on their [relatively] newly-won respect and admiration for putting out superior-looking transfers of vintage films? One should never rest on one's laurels, especially since it has become an established "fact" that WB are extremely dedicated to their heritage and spare no effort and expense in making their classic films look as good as humanly possible... Most certainly their second noir box can't hold a candle to the first, just to mention one example. To be fair, there are many exceptions to the apparently ominous trend, I just miss the high-level CONSISTENCY WB's output could boast for quite a while.

Or did they simply release their very best-preserved films initially in order to build up their reputation as a serious player in the high-end of this market? I would guess the truth lies somewhere in between.

I pray to God that the Garbo and Lewton sets will match WB's "old standards"!! [-o<

PS I disagree with the writer's notion of "smoothness" being the ideal as opposed to visible grain. Take away all the grain and you'll lose quite a bit of the fine details, and in the process lose some of the apparent "depth" to the image, too.