hmm!!18x12 cm


screen shots captured..20.5 cmx13.0 cm!

go fishing lol

Thanks to Arsh here are shots of new coloured DVD by Eros;

















Ali

My appologies Arsh bhai for not posting fast enough .. been a bit busy.

I havent even had the chance to post the pirate dvd shots and negative of MEA I received from Rana Saab yet

These screen shots look OK to me, from squished picture or not point of view. I don't see any squish picture or stretched picture in these shots.

These screen caps are a lot better than the film print I saw in theatre. Theatrical picture was much worst, from PQ point of view, as well as, it was squished and distorted for the recently colored portion (80% of the film).

Measuring from my current PC screen is not a good indicator but, the frames printed (my PC printer does show a circle a perfect circle) show 4:3 OK screen caps of which Film frame is 1.52:1.
Theatrical AR of the new colored version is 1.78:1 which masked/ cut off top and bottom of the picture. EROS DVD seems to have put these cut off Top and bottom back into the picture. (In theatre I noticed cut off top/ bottom where as these screen caps don't show that). MEA restorers had stated that DVD will have the theayrical cut off portions back into the DVD picture.

EROS seems to have done some things right.
In this comment I'm assuming that there is no squished/ stretched picture in the newly colored portion and the old colored portion of the film. Just like this frame:

Yes!! indeed, it seems like theatric print was stretched and cropped further to make it look like real WS!

Picture looks very proportionate may be a tad stretched!

If original shemaroo was 4:3 then this has been modified!

No one commited OAR MEA was filmed and then how it was reformat as color.

There is bonus disc of around 3 hours too!

cover is classy!

but for a true 4:3 OAR or WS formated to standard, we should not have black bars top and bottom?

I think where MEA shines is sound, comparative to old one!

My God! Madhubala was so innocently beautiful!! unbelievable!

Now we have to see, how Shemaroo version comes out?

Not quite.

If OAR, or the picture to be presented, is 1.5:1 then a 4:3 DVD will have black bars at top and/ or bottom. If the same 1.5:1 picture is to be on an anamorphic (1.78:1) DVD then it'll have black bars on the sides.

That are ifs rana! But what is OAR of ORIG and Modified?

Ok Guys i found some info on this. The OAR is 4:3 - they actually cropped it !

http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader- ... 05463.html


What was your role in the resurrection of MEA in color?

We did the color balancing for the film, after it was digitally colorized by Indian Academy for Arts and Animation (IAAA). It’s a crucial process because when you do coloring frame by frame, flickers start to happen. So we did the entire color balancing of the film and made it more balanced to suit the film exposure.


We also did the formatting of the aspect ratio of the film, as originally the film was shot on the full screen format as against the current trend where we shoot in Cinemascope (Anamorphic). Thus, we formatted the entire film to suit the Cinemascope screen and then exposed it back on the negative.

How did you do this format change from full screen to Cinemascope? By compressing the frames or by trimming them? Did you loose out on any information in the frame?

We didn’t compress the film (it would lead to distortion). It was more like keeping the necessary information and let go the information that really doesn’t matter.

Like the Headroom?

Its not about just the headroom, it’s the overall framing that has to be judged and taken a call on. You definitely loose some information, but that’s negligible, only 5 - 10%.


How did the project come to you?

When the film was colorized, they did several tests with many companies in the industry and finally they liked the results given by us and we ended up doing the entire film. Before taking up the project we did a lot of tests for them to see what all we could achieve, because we really wanted to be sure whether we would be able to handle it or not.

As it was artificially colorized, was it very difficult to do the color balancing?

It was definitely difficult. It took almost 4 months only on color balancing and then exposing on the negative. As the colors were digitally generated, they had a lot of variation and contrast. So, it was a tedious job to balance those colors frame by frame.

There are a few portions in the film which are originally shot in the EASTMAN color. Do they match easily with the artificially generated colors?

Definitely they can’t match 100% because the colorization is a computer generated process, wherein you scan the frame and then color it artificially. But I think there are no jerks to the human eye. We have done more than a decent job.

Kindly explain the process in a lay man’s language.

Once we receive the colorized frame, we have to break them into sequences, depending on one sequence where the color balances, it should be standardized the way the whole sequence would look. So once we line up that whole sequence, we design a color that suits the whole sequence using the color that has already been done on the film. Then we balance it. When we use the term “balance”, it basically means removing the jitters and flickers that appear in between frames.

So basically it is a very straight forward color correction process in which we add or remove the contrast to the image to basically suit the Cinema format.

And when you formatted the film into Cinemascope, did you cut it manually?

No, its not done manually but you have to do certain tests by exposing it to the negative in order to know how its going to look in the projection.

Restoration / Colorization has already been happening in Hollywood for the video format. How was it different to do it for the first time for the 35mm format / Theatrical release?

When you are working on video resolution, its very less information / data, that you have to work on. But when you are working on 35mm, the frames are very large in size and resolution is much higher. thus the process for celluloid is much more time consuming and lengthier as opposed to video.

Some people have taken this Restoration / colorization as an infringement of the original work while others have taken it as an enhancement. What is your take on it?

I don’t think its infringement. Mr.K.Asif had a dream to make his film in color, which has been fulfilled now.

So, by no means this new dvd could have untampered OAR authoring



so, this was best eros could do, that crop from sides and try to refit in 4:3 frame!

Yeah it looks like MEA went through a horrid sex change - cropped and re-cropped !

Anyone willing to post comparision shots with the Shemaroo version (OAR version) ??

I dont know how to make it bigger!

i never saw the eros logo on the screen shots so does this mean that they finally let it go? arsh was it in the movie?

what was in the movie? this screen shot? yes!