I know there is already a thread  on this exact topic, but it only has 2 posts and it's 3 years old so I thought I would make my own. Also, I couldn't log in to my old account, so I made a new one just so there's no confusion.

Like many of you I am not happy with how the Diamond Edition looks. So I have found an IB tech print of Cinderella in absolutely stunning condition. I agree of course that it would be much better for Disney to do a good restoration from the original negative or interpositive, but while they don't my mission is to create the best possible version from prints. Prints are not ideal for scanning obviously, and finding prints of this age in excellent condition is difficult and rare. While it would be better if would could scan lab material, IB technicolor prints are the closest to a negative that exists in a print.

So you can get an idea of the condition, I had the first few minutes scanned as a test (sorry it wouldn't embed so it's a link):

 

The preview is heavily compressed, so don't worry about the grain being gone it'll be there once it's encoded properly. IB tech prints are not that grainy anyway, compared to Kodak prints and others. Also the 4K files are high dynamic range so don't worry about the contrast or colors, that will be corrected.

Here are some screenshots:

            

After this is scanned I have the opportunity to scan multiple other Disney animations - I think I'll do Sleeping Beauty after this, and the print should be in the same condition as this one. At the moment though I'm really short on funding, so please consider making a donation towards this. The cost of scanning this print is only about $600 excluding hard drive costs (and I'm in desperate need of hard drives at the moment). Please see the ot.com thread  for the state of donations and the list of donors.

Great transfer.

I have to nitpick on the Buena Vista titles instead of RKO......do RKO prints only exist nitrate, or are there some with safety stock?


As for other Disney movies, I want all of the Renaissance films (especially "The Lion King", "Aladdin" and "Beauty and the Beast") to have a nice HD/4K transfer. I am getting sick of the CGI Logo plastering the 1990 logo (which I was glad that Bambi FINALLY got it's RKO logo on this year's Blu-ray I wish you could transfer that too).


There are MANY Disney movies I want to see in IB Technicolor, with the original distributor's logo if possible (RKO for Snow White to Peter Pan/Music Land and Buena Vista for Lady and the Tramp onwards).

Based on the MPAA rating screen at the start, this is from the 1973 reissue.

I once saw a print of the 1982 reissue on eBay. The film was cropped into a non-anamorphic "scope" format and had the early-1980s Buena Vista logo at the front.

Great transfer.

I have to nitpick on the Buena Vista titles instead of RKO......do RKO prints only exist nitrate, or are there some with safety stock?

For 35mm I don't know, but they definitely exist on Acetate (safety film) in 16mm. Very few collectors have nitrate films, obviously, and most I'm sure would choose an acetate print over nitrate if they had the choice. So finding nitrate in private hands would be a lot harder, and arranging scanning would also be harder as transporting the print would be difficult (it would be easier to find a Kinetta  and bring that to them!)

Anyway, regardless of whether we might find a RKO print sometime, it's still better to scan a Buena Vista print that we know is in excellent condition while the opportunity exists.

As for other Disney movies, I want all of the Renaissance films (especially "The Lion King", "Aladdin" and "Beauty and the Beast") to have a nice HD/4K transfer. I am getting sick of the CGI Logo plastering the 1990 logo (which I was glad that Bambi FINALLY got it's RKO logo on this year's Blu-ray I wish you could transfer that too).

There are MANY Disney movies I want to see in IB Technicolor, with the original distributor's logo if possible (RKO for Snow White to Peter Pan/Music Land and Buena Vista for Lady and the Tramp onwards).

Yeah me too. I can arrange to get an IB tech print in the correct aspect ratio of LATT scanned, that should offer an improvement over the existing LPP scan released on Myspleen. But I need funding/donations, scanning costs a lot of money!

I once saw a print of the 1982 reissue on eBay. The film was cropped into a non-anamorphic "scope" format and had the early-1980s Buena Vista logo at the front.

Hard-matted for Widescreen. That affects mostly US 1980's reissues from what I've seen. We can get Kodak SP or LPP in the correct aspect ratio of some of the classics, but IB tech would still be better of course. Even the latter titles like BATB, Aladdin, and Lion King both exist in open and hard matted prints (not that it matters since they're widescreen films).

Just some more shameless promotion: I'm in desperate need of funding. I'm working on getting a number of Disney prints scanned, this is only the start. I have access to some time-limited material I want to get transferred if I can raise the funds. I've spent well over $3,000 of my own money recently on my projects, which is why I desperately need some donations. 🙂 If you're interested in helping out please please send me a message. I expect to get the first reels of Cindy scanned this coming week and will put up further samples on my Vimeo account once they are. Titanic was scanned by the same scanner if you're interested in comparing the quality of the scan.

 

Feel free to ask questions by the way.

Here is a quick update on the project.

Reel3 preview with comparison to Bluray:

 

Now that we have scanned most of the print I can say that although it is in excellent condition overall, there are some damaged sections that can only be repaired using a second source. Therefore I will make an early-access version available from this print to donors only, and later (maybe years later) when I get the second print scanned I can make a wider release available.

Here is a quick update on the project.

Reel3 preview with comparison to Bluray:

 

Now that we have scanned most of the print I can say that although it is in excellent condition overall, there are some damaged sections that can only be repaired using a second source. Therefore I will make an early-access version available from this print to donors only, and later (maybe years later) when I get the second print scanned I can make a wider release available.

Nice. This might be a useless fact, but I should point out that according to the Walt Disney Archives, that the title character's ball gown is a light pale blue, NOT silver as some fans debated. A color like this:

https://img-cdn.shopgate...=resize&fillc=FFFFFF 

Just want you to know that in case you do some color restorations for that scene.

Here is a quick update on the project.

Reel3 preview with comparison to Bluray:

 

Now that we have scanned most of the print I can say that although it is in excellent condition overall, there are some damaged sections that can only be repaired using a second source. Therefore I will make an early-access version available from this print to donors only, and later (maybe years later) when I get the second print scanned I can make a wider release available.

Note how on the Blu-Ray, in some frames, they erased the line for the Fairy Godmother's chin.



And somehow, one of her eyebrows is inexplicably missing...

Nice. This might be a useless fact, but I should point out that according to the Walt Disney Archives, that the title character's ball gown is a light pale blue, NOT silver as some fans debated. A color like this:

https://img-cdn.shopgate...=resize&fillc=FFFFFF 

Just want you to know that in case you do some color restorations for that scene.

When it comes time to do the second print we can send it to a lab that will deliver a projection-accurate LUT. Or, I can arrange to get my print  projected and check the colours for myself. Either way we can arrive at accurate colours.

The colours on the previews are not accurate, they're outputted from After Effects from the "raw" DNG files.

Once this print is scanned I'll be moving on to Lady and the Tramp on IB technicolor. And I have several other Disney animations to get through, this is just the start. And that's why it might be a while before we can scan the other print - realistically it might happen this time next year or this time in 2019, but it's really hard to say. Either way I don't feel we can make a public release to the standards I would be happy with until the second print gets scanned. For the "early release" though there's still plenty of opportunity for people to donate to this if they're interested! And it will help get me to the next scanning project (Lady and the Tramp, and after that probably Sleeping Beauty), I expect to get about 6-8 Disney classics scanned by the end of this year. The Italian-dubbed BATB should be scanned in Europe this month.

More previews:

 

 

Hope you guys enjoy! You can see the 16mm has some colour issues, it's not my scan and I'm very thankful to the person who provided it for comparison ... and I can also use it to potentially fill in some missing frames. In any case it looks to have been in great condition too, there's some dye wondering at the end of the 16mm Reel 3 so check it out!

Just a question: was the 16mm print also IB Tech?

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From the look of it I would think so. It has a sharp image, detailed in the dark areas, and a fine grain. I do wonder why the scan has a red bias though... it's probably a limitation with the scanning equipment rather than a shift in the print.

I might be crazy but I think the 35mm print looks a little faded..the 16mm print in that first comparison looks like it has some okay saturated colors. (Maybe this is just a result of the 16mm getting redder over time?) But hey, what do I know, other than that this print looks excellent. I have to wonder, will this be released in some form, or is this just a personal pet project?

I might be crazy but I think the 35mm print looks a little faded..the 16mm print in that first comparison looks like it has some okay saturated colors. (Maybe this is just a result of the 16mm getting redder over time?) But hey, what do I know, other than that this print looks excellent. I have to wonder, will this be released in some form, or is this just a personal pet project?

The earlier Disney animations look nothing like Aladdin and Lion King. I have seen Aladdin, Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Lady and the Tramp, Alice in Wonderland, and a couple of others projected from film quite recently and I can tell you there's a huge difference between the CAPS Disney films and the earlier true Disney Classics. Aladdin and Lion King are very colourful with bright vibrant saturated colours... BATB is less so because it's a darker film, and all the older Classics are just nothing at all like them. BATB is darker on film than any home release, but that was rather necessary with Laserdisc, VHS, and DVD since dark details on those formats got wiped even more so than on cinematic print film itself.

Anyway, yes there'll be a free release hopefully by the year's end either on Myspleen or something similar. Sorry what I should have said was that the Myspleen release will have to wait until I can get the second print scanned, but there will be a free release eventually. I need a second scan to patch up problem areas like you see here . Donors will be given an imperfect early version by early 2018 depending how long it takes me to get through the other films with the scanner. There are many more films to do - LATT and Sleeping Beauty from the same source that should be in similar excellent condition to Cinderella. If interested in donating shoot me a message!

i figured it would've been more saturated considering technicolor's usually pretty bright and i've seen an ib tech print of song of the south that has some superb colors, but i guess cinderella's just a movie with duller colors.

i figured it would've been more saturated considering technicolor's usually pretty bright and i've seen an ib tech print of song of the south that has some superb colors, but i guess cinderella's just a movie with duller colors.

Actually this discussion comes up a lot! The picture will not look dull when you watch it in a darkened cinema. But when watching at home in a brightly-lit room it will, and for this reason the convention with digital conversions is to pump up the saturation. For the Bluray comparison I actually gave it a 10% saturation boost... but that's mostly because I couldn't be bothered finding the black level that didn't erase the dark details (which in itself will boost the saturation a bit). That said I think it needs a bit of a boost for release, but I wouldn't pump it all the way up to the levels in Aladdin. You can actually see from the trailer that there is a difference between BATB and Aladdin:

 

The ballroom scene is probably the most colourful scene of the whole movie, whereas Aladdin has lots of really bright colourful scenes (same with Lion King). Keep in mid of course that the trailer isn't representative of how a print will necessarily look, however the comparisons between the films should be valid.

Here's the ballroom scene from the trailer (probably the most colourful scene in the whole film):



And a comparison from Aladdin... this is one of Aladdin's "less colourful" scenes:



Belle:



Jasmine:



And then there's other things like Aladdin has bright blues and orange/reds in the "dark"/night scenes like this:



Whereas there's nothing like that in Cinderella or any other of the older classics, and it has lots and lots of really bright/colourful scenes like this:



And only Lion King matches that.

The big difference between film and colour printing is that there's no black... with CMYK printing you can produce an image made using Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black colour inks. If the colours fade over time the image will become less saturated. However that isn't the case with film which only has CMY layers and no black, meaning that no matter how much the film fades, once you set your black level and your white level you have the correct saturation as the colour can't fade separate to the luminance.

Thanks go to hombredesilla for his donation - first from the IAD forum! You can see the donation ledger on the ot.com thread . :)

Here is a preview of Reel 2:

 

Unfortunately it's missing a short scene, so I patched it from a 2nd 35mm scan. The second scan is not quite the same quality as someone else made it, but see if you can tell where it is been patched? 😛 The unedited clip is here .

I've amended the incorrect/earlier information I posted here .

And as someone on OT asked the answer is yes that clip is really missing on the R2 we have scanned so far, it's an example of why I need a second scan. That's the worst splice though in the whole print.