Taxi Driver 35th Anniversary edition - Page 2

I tend to agree but I'm not sure how much influence these guys have on the absolute final product that ends up on the shelves. Disc authoring, compression, packaging art, etc. I would think they would have some say.

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When Warner restores a title, they do really great work and they've put out more classic film on BD than anyone else, to my knowledge. It's the encoding to disc part of the process where they often come up short (though their classic titles seem to get better treatment there as well).

Greetings,

Watching it now. It looks great..

Regards,

I honestly don't know how Sony could have done any better with this release...so psyched for release day.

At 13$ unbeatable price performance ratio. Insane.
Hoping for a 4K release in time.

I just saw that it was only $13 at Amazon

This is one of those films that I've only seen in bits and pieces...
Think I'm gonna pre-order this.

This + Tron on the same day!!!

Great to hear Ralph. Is your review ready ?

Art

I am sure the release looks great I do hope they are nearing 30Mbps though and I hope those 1080p extras are not taking too much space. A bit sad we don't get to see the real bloody color. I hope it's not as frickin brown as it used to be though. And come on they could in fact do some digital work if they wanted to. All that talk is complete bull. Martin must want it that way. But I did hear the scene is slightly different and more realistic than what we are used to. Not sure if someone can confirm that?

While digital color correction is pretty amazing stuff, you can't bring back color that was already drained through an optical process. It'd be like taking a color photo in photoshop, lowering the saturation until it was black and white, saving it, opening the now b/w photo and then boosting the saturation - the original color's not going to come back because the information has already been lost.

Greetings,

It went live back on March 25th Art. Here is the link:

AVSForum Review - Taxi Driver

Regards,

Thanks ! Looks like a winner. I have to say your technical reviews are some of the best available. Keep up the great work !!

Art

Greetings,

Thanks Art..

Regards,

It's a terrific package, but -- as I mention in my review at -- I don't know where Sony got the notion that the Criterion review was recorded in 1986. Thanks to their press release, this has now propagated across the Web.

'What this one has that makes it essential is the excellent, long-unavailable commentary by Scorsese (with some interpolations from Schrader) that was recorded for the old Criterion laserdisc. Oddly, in the press release, the onscreen menu, and the packaging, it's referred as being from 1986. Given that the Criterion LD of the film was released in 1991, it makes sense that the track was recorded way later than that. More to the point, if one actually listens, it's abundantly clear that the date is wrong. The director makes repeated references to Last Temptation of Christ and GoodFellas as finished projects. He refers to actor/stuntman Vic Magnotta (who died in 1987) as having died a few years ago. '

Hmmmm, you may not know Photoshop as well as I do. It's true that color once "drained" cannot be brought back via adding saturation.

However ANY color can be simply added at any saturation point, brightness and contrast in ANY area of the image along with many other filter effects if one simply chooses. There's no excuse for lower color levels during the last part of the film unless the person working on it simply wanted to leave it that way.

I am sure the release looks great I do hope they are nearing 30Mbps though and I hope those 1080p extras are not taking too much space. A bit sad we don't get to see the real bloody color. I hope it's not as frickin brown as it used to be though.

I saw this in its original release and I don't believe the last scene was ever highly saturated. I think Scorcese had to bring down the red to get it past the censors; really red blood can apparently cause adverse reactions in some viewers in the audience.

I heard years ago that Hitchcock filmed Psycho in B&W at least partly because he knew red blood in the shower scene would cause problems with the Hays Office.

Have you actually SEEN the BD/HDTV comparisons (or watched the Collector's Edition DVD)? They did exactly what you suggest, and the results are just as unpleasant to look at.

Taxi Driver's finale has always been screwed up thanks to the compromise Scorcese made to secure an "R" rating. After Deep Throat came out in 1972 with a self-imposed "X" rating, it was quickly associated almost solely with pornography, which made theater owners and advertisers nervous that they'd get in trouble for exhibiting potentially obscene X-rated material. Even the major studios started to avoid it, despite "legitimate" award-winning films like Midnight Cowboy and A Clockwork Orange having been released with an "X" in the years prior.

Scorcese was under contract to produce an R-rated film, but he refused to cut Travis' breakdown. Instead he came up with the compromise of desaturated the film using optical filters which turned the bright blood reds into a muddy brown. That desaturated dupe-negative was cut back into the original negative, effectively replacing the original footage as it was shot with what we have on the Blu-ray (and every release of the film from 1976 onward). Scorcese mentions on the Collector's Edition DVD that the original, fully saturated negative has never been found, so as far as everyone involved knows the footage no longer exists.

I'm not a graphic designer or a printer by trade, but I know this much: No level of digital tinkering can ever truly bring it back to the way the footage looked before it was processed. If you think you can produce a couple screencaps that aren't completely screwed up using Photoshop or any similar software, please do so - I'd love to see them. Having spent a short time with them I've found that the only way to restore flesh tones to anything resembling the rest of the movie is to boost the hell out of the gamma and contrast, and that leads to all sorts of different unpleasant problems.

I'm actually proud of Sony for simply leaving the footage exactly how it is, rather than trying (and failing) to present the footage as it "could have been" were it not for the MPAA throwing a fit in the first place. It may not look good, but those wonky colors are a part of the film's history, and without the original, unprocessed negatives available I'd certainly rather they preserve what exists without enhancing it beyond recognition.

What are you guys arguing about? The darkness of the last scene of the movie? The blood not looking blood-colored? I'm not a photoshop expert (I mostly just use it to make silly images, like in my April Fool's thread), but I did this in photoshop in less than 10 seconds, using only 3 tools (fade correction, minor color grading, adding SLIGHT saturation):

Original:



Mine:



Keep in mind, I'm basically a photoshop amateur. I'm sure that if the professional people who did this restoration gave it a go, they could come up with an amazing tweak for that scene that nobody would have ever questioned. Either way, whatever. If I knew what the original footage looked like, I could probably come extremely close to recreating it. I took a guess with my image. I am happy that they left it alone, though. My whole point was... I don't know, that it probably could be fixed by professionals to look like the original footage, whatever that looked like!

If this is not what you were arguing about (I only skimmed the thread), then uhh... Never mind me.

P.S. I kind of like my image. I don't think I would have minded if the people who restored this movie made the last scene look like that - assuming that's how the original footage looked. I hate when director's visions get ruined because of the MPAA.

S-C-A-R-Y- stuff!

Amazon came though; will watch this later.
Thanks for all the help on this thread.

I think this 'brighter' version illustrates all of the problems in the negative I've been talking about. I promise this isn't an attempted slight against your ten-second shoop skills, Mike - I'm just calling this as I see it.

DeNiro's skin looks yellow, as if he's jaundiced. The blood is a rusty brown - not the bright, punchy red anyone who watches 70s action and horror films will associate with period fake blood. DeNiro now "pops" out of the background where on the original his mohawk faded away more naturally. All of these problems are in the Sony BD transfer, too, but it's less noticeable because the footage is presented as it exists; dark and desaturated, without any artificial saturation or gamma boosting.

Sony chose to keep it as it was and not trade one set of problems for another. If they had boosted the final scene (as they did for DVD) I wouldn't be furious, but Sony's tech team and Martin Scorcese both felt that presenting the footage as it actually exists was the way to go.

Geez... I'm not even a real big fan of the film, but all this talk makes me want to trash my CE DVD for the BD. Wonder if it'll still be nice and cheap tomorrow...

HAH! I wouldn't go that far. Wasn't that scene of the movie intentionally darkened and desaturated just so it would not get an X rating? Doesn't that mean that it was originally brighter and more colorful? Wouldn't it have been more brighter and colorful if not for fear of an X rating? So what's so scary about it?

lol no offense taken, but to be fair, the colors could have easily been tweaked - I just happened to not try to. I could definitely fix the colors if I wanted, and make his skin more "natural." I simply brightened it up and made it a little more saturated. Had my image been given the same color grading as the rest of the movie, it would probably fit right in.

EDIT: Re-check my photoshopped image. Now, I slightly tweaked the color in his skin tone and boosted the red blood. Arguably, it's an improvement on my first image. Now, the colors are slightly more consistent with the rest of the movie, and the blood looks like blood. And just to re-iterate, I am a complete amateur. If the people who restored the movie used the same exact color grading on a brightened image, it would fit right in and nobody would have been the wiser. People here would have been like, "Wow! Now you can see what's going on in the last scene! They really did a good job restoring it to how Scorsese originally wanted it!" Hahahaha. And yes, I didn't make his skin color exactly like it was during the rest of the movie, but only because I lack the patience to actually figure out how to do it in photoshop. I was just doing a quick and dirty example to show that his skin color and the blood color could easily be toyed with, had they wanted to. And yes, I am happy they left it alone and didn't try. If I knew how to take the Army Green color grade from the backgrounds throughout most of the movie, and apply it only to the background from the bottom image, I could really make my pic look like it would belong in the movie. But alas, my photoshop skillz are n00bish.

Well Mike, I'll give credit where credit's due; that's the best "I don't really give a f***" color-correction I've ever seen. I can think of a half-dozen studios you probably should be working for already.

I guess it's inevitable that some people are disappointed in the way the finale looks. The pure technical side of this particular footage is so warped and distorted beyond the norm that I guess this all comes down to personal taste. It's never looked good, and it could have looked "more natural" (though perhaps not seamless) if that's really what the director wanted in 2011... but he didn't. He chose to present Taxi Driver's controversial final reel just as it was in 1976, warts and all, and preserved the bizarre integrity of the dupe-neg's distorted colors and black levels. You can pump it up into something it's not, but the distorted gamma just screams "digital" in a way that leaving it as it is doesn't. But that could just be me...

And besides, if Scorcese had "fixed it", we'd have people who were upset about that, too.

LOL! OK, I just did my last version of it (check above). Now, I'm totally done. I just made it a tiny bit brighter, and I think doing that made De Niro's skin tone more natural (I used this image as a bit of a reference point: http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/8577/taxi15bd.png). Take a look at the image now. If the end of the movie looked like that (but more professional, obviously), would it really look bad? Meh, I think it's decent. I imagine if it were professionally done, none of us would be complaining.

But, I agree, I don't like it when movies are tinkered with after they're made. I wouldn't mind with this movie, though, only because Scorsese didn't want to darken/desaturate that scene. So, if it were brought closer to his original intent, I don't think I would have complained. I just can't help but think that the last scene stands out too much, in a bad way. But, of course, that is how it was released, so I'll respect and appreciate the decision not to toy with it. My whole point was only that it probably could be toyed with to come pretty close to the original image, prior to it being darkened and desaturated.

That shot doesn't look half bad, no arguments here.

Now try the same exact settings on Eric's cap #22 and I think you'll start to see why Scorcese and Sony didn't do it for the whole sequence.

Original:



Mine:



Now, keep in mind, this is just using the same settings. Obviously, the image isn't as good in that shot as it was in the one I first did. This shot looks so much rougher. But, had the pros at Sony individually tweaked each scene (say, used my settings from the first picture for that part, and then tweaked those settings a bit to be better for this part), it could give us a better image. But of course, this image is much rougher than the first one.

I kind of like it, compared to that darker image where you could hardly see the blood.

Still... Seems like an improvement to me, and closer to Scorsese's original vision (not as dark, not as desaturated). I'm sure Sony could have pulled this off if they wanted to, but they wanted to go for the "We didn't tinker with the image" approach, which of course, is great.

Also, I would have to use different settings to make the blood pop in this scene, and I don't really know how to do that without making the couch and the other red things too saturated. Now, if I had that expensive color grading software that lets me grade individual things in a scene, this would be another story.

If anyone has any interest at all in "this" Blu, pick it up soon.
This packaging will not last. Too intricate. Too expensive too make.
The extras in this package will be gone at retail & you'll end up paying more later.

My review:
The logo looks zoomed in & in bad shape.
When the movie starts, yellow is truer than any previous home video release.
Reds are the star tho (till the end).
Detail is good; losing information only in the backgrounds.

'Looks like a new movie' is a video saying much abused.
1st off, an older film most likely shouldn't look "new".
And then, the problem of over processing raises its ugly head.
Scrubbing away any sense an old film may have had that identified it w/the time of its original theatrical engagement.

GREAT news!
"TD" looks its age (in a good way).
"TD" looks like a 70's film shot in NYC.
And that's a good thing.

Grain varies appropriately by scene & even by shot.
Some close-ups look zoomed in; w/too large a grain structure.
While well lit close-ups (& med & long shots) show fine grain structure.

Skintones are realistic. Accordingly correct too the lighting of the scene.
The scene outside the cabby's dinner discolors the actors skintones too a muddy orange; while the red neon sign reflects true in the windows across the street.

W/the entire movie showing realistic colors, how dark should the hallway & room be in the whore's hotel?
I don't know.
I saw plenty of detail tho & plenty of blood!
IMO the photoshopped pic in this thread of the killing spree is much too bright.

I all so wish the original color was regained. And thought from previous posts that is was. The good news is there is a lamp shade on the ceiling of the tracking shot (brilliant!) that shows a brilliant red.
How the red on the lamp is richly colored, yet the blood in the room isn't I give some too the actually lighting in the room (and therefore hallway as well/there is no way that hotel would have a well lit hallway!).
[even tho we all know it was technically desaturated as well]

How can I get any $$$ for my DVD?!?!

It's a perfect transfer. The release prints for Taxi Driver never looked this good - much grainier for all the obvious reasons of not being from the camera negative.

I have one question and perhaps I'm just slow, but after the film the special features menu appears with "Trailers" highlighted. I used my right arrow button on the Samsung remote but the highlight doesn't move from "Trailers" - I tried everything and could not get it to work - anyone else have the problem or can anyone make a suggestion?

Well, I'm glad they left the colors as are, it's the way the film is, and I think Scorsese wanted to present the film in it's original state, plus I think he's said in interviews that he actually prefers the desaturated colors.

Though Chapman does not like the coloring, and wanted to restore it way back for the LD version but couldn't, so ideally it would have been nice to get a disc with two cuts.

Having said all that, they totally could have restored the colors to their original state with Scorsese's and Chapman's help if they wanted to, anyone who thinks otherwise, just look at the restoration feature on the Red Shoes Criterion release.