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THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR recolored

rsortor

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Greetings everyone!

My favorite movie, THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR recently was released in a limited-edition blu-ray in China.  This film never had a decent transfer to DVD, most of them being letterboxed standard 4:3 frame.  A French release was 16:9 but had no English subtitles and the transfer was again, sub-par.  No DVD had the stereo audio except a German release that I have not acquired.  While the new blu-ray was a BIG improvement on every other presentation, the transfer is much too bright, colors are hued greenish, English subtitles are sloppy and the audio tracks (Mandarin and Cantonese) are mono down-mixes.  My Special Project for this film:  Color/exposure correction, synching the stereo Cantonese audio from the Laserdisc, new subs placed as low as possible (mostly within the lower matte)  and fixing a few digital anomalies like this annoying little spot mask that appears in a few shots near the center top of the frame:

HDqKahn.jpg

U0lzY6f.jpg


I'm using the Tai Seng laserdisc for the stereo audio.  I'll compare some frames from that LD with the blu and my color correction. 
LD below:
l45BeCR.jpg

Raw blu-ray rip:
nGb0zs0.jpg

My color timing:  (I haven't done the subtitles yet)
yMUH3FG.jpg


While color timing my fan-fix of this transfer, I'm constantly in awe of the craftsmanship on display in this film.  Even though THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR was the huge prestige film from Hong Kong in 1993, lavished with a much higher budget than typical productions, it was still made for a fraction of what ordinary Hollywood features were afforded.  I'm speculating here but it seems like this blu-ray transfer received no color correction at all!   I also have to wonder if the release prints themselves were photo-chemically timed to lean toward the cyan for that bluish pallette so common in HK films of the early '90s.  If there were blue gels on the lights or blue camera filters, I wouldn't see so much natural color that's coming out from this HD transfer in many scenes.  I'm grateful that the exposure is too bright, otherwise, if it weren't bright enough, the blacks would be crushed.  As it is, I've only noticed one shot that had the brightness blown out and it was a quickie during the climactic transformation flashbacks.  Another culprit for the varying levels within scenes is that doggone atmospheric  smoke on-set that had to be a major annoyance for the cinematographer!  The smoke would diffuse the light to varying degrees.  It seems to have dissipated during a single scene's shots & set-ups.  It was probably impossible to maintain any kind of lighting continuity with that crap wafting around.  Anyway, here are some more before & after pics:

pmjd2Ag.jpg

EA8rlIF.jpg

bDFyK1p.jpg

aNUstdW.jpg

LAT8SPQ.jpg



This was the worst offender, a shot that clearly was run through an optical printer to get the freeze-frame and fade out. 

uDSAb93.jpg

h36vh7D.jpg


For the record, I've edited four features and countless shorts, trailers, show reels and featurettes over the past three years, including a huge restoration job on an old movie so this is a walk in the park! Luckily, I don't have any paying gigs at the moment so nothing held me back from ripping this blu and diving in!  I've done a couple of fan-edits in the past but they never really went anywhere beyond my home theater.  This time, it's a big deal because THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR is long overdue for a proper HD presentation.  The film has a lot of fans world-wide and the blu-ray was limited to a measly 500 copies!
 

Vultural

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Bride With White Hair is also one of my favorite films.
Classic from the late Hong Kong peak.
Look forward to this.
 

DigModiFicaTion

DᴉმWoqᴉԷᴉcɑꓕᴉou
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Read the title of your thread and love the pun of it  :)
 

Hubunkey

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I loved this movie and just got the Blu-ray of it and agree the color is off. Looking forward to this
 

rsortor

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It's done!  Subtitles took quite a while because I did all 689 of 'em myself one at a time.    With one exception, they're placed under the frame within the lower matte, single lines.   Another thing I noticed was that the Blu-ray transfer seemed to be a bit squished horizontally, so I transformed the image vertically.  The aspect ratio is probably closer to 2.15:1 but nothing got cropped from the Blu transfer.  I also raised the image a few pixels to accommodate the subtitles, a la' the old Tai Seng laserdisc.
raw Blu-ray:
DpLQ75D.jpg

My fan-fix:
eSYWTIx.jpg

I opted to burn them in this way for various reasons.  .srt files weren't easy to work with.  The old translation needed to be clarified and condensed.  Part of HK movies' charm is with the sometimes fractured subtitles, but this film has an elegance that calls for a little more discretion with the dialog. My old VHS (a dub of the Mandarin laserdisc) was telecined from a theatrical print with totally unique subtitles that I referenced as well as disc sources.  A handful of lines were altered going on intuition alone.  ..maybe a little artistic license? :)  A pet peeve of mine is when a movie has too many subtitles.  When familiar names are called out, or something gets repeated a lot ("Honey!  Honey!"  "Master!" etc.) the audience is smart enough to know what's what.  So I tried to minimize the sheer amount of subtitles as much as I felt comfortable with.  Also, I opted not to include subtitles for the lyrics of Leslie Cheung's end title song.  The same translation appears on every disc that includes subs for it and to me, they seem awkward.  I even looked at the French DVD and was ready to enter the French into a translator, but they did not sub the song.  Internet searches returned zero results for a different translation of the lyrics.  I found two different titles for it though!  "The White-Haired Beauty" and " Red Cheek, White Hair."  
Until a better transfer comes along, (which may be never! ..I dare say. After all, this one took over a decade since blu-ray's inception!) this is the best representation of BWWH we're gonna get, (I'm still absolutely thrilled & delighted that it finally got an HD release!) so I was compelled to do my utmost to improve the flawed transfer as much as possible.
 

Vultural

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rsortor said:
. . .  A pet peeve of mine is when a movie has too many subtitles.  When familiar names are called out, or something gets repeated a lot ("Honey!  Honey!"  "Master!" etc.) the audience is smart enough to know what's what.  So I tried to minimize the sheer amount of subtitles as much as I felt comfortable with . . . 

Man, I hear that.  Too many translations get botched by being over literal.
I used to streamline subs for J-Dramas as alternatives.
With the demise of D-Addicts, I seldom bother now.

Still waiting for this.
Have you sent to Dom?
 

TV's Frink

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Vultural said:
Have you sent to Dom?

The changes being made are not significant enough to qualify for submission as a fanedit.
 
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