2-disc autographed colour version
India Plaza http://www.indiaplaza.in/movies/interna ... a-Daur.htm
Music Yogi http://www.musicyogi.com/asp/movieDetai ... Id=MOV5154
Shemaroo http://www.shemaroo.com/overseas/Dvd_Sh ... 415&sent=2
Shemaroo (II) http://shemaroo.com/online/product.asp? ... 739&sent=1

b&w original http://www.musicyogi.com/asp/movieDetai ... Id=MOV1117

Non-anamorphic?

yup jay shemaroo! washed out colors!

Would anamorphic make this bastardized version worth watching?

Certainly not for me, I'll always stick with the B&W original. But it's just mind-boggling that they would go to the trouble of chopping away half the picture only to give it a letterboxed transfer.

Okay - I flicked through this today at a friend's house ... putting aside that this is a colourised film - it's very well done. For the most part it doesn't look garish - it has a natural look to the picture for what I saw.

The DVD is non-anamorphic (not sure why) and to be honest I also used to hate the idea of colourising films opposed to restoring them - but if this means that first the B/W print was restored and then the coloured negative is made is it really such a bad thing? At least the process involves restoring the original.

I do wish that they would also release the B/W restored version along with the coloured version.

A couple of things that I loathed - the cropping to make it widescreen ... looking at the delated scenes on the DVD I think that they trimmed scenes that looked very bad if cropped. However - this seems to be an unfortunate move that is happening with a lot of older films (for example - Disneys new Jungle Book release is cropped / matted to make it widescreen). The beginning of the films seems out of sync - oh and the DVD is non-anamorphic (Shemaroo - bad bad move).

So - I am not sure yet whether I would buy it - I do have the b/w version and out of interest I would like to see the colour version ... but I'm glad to see that the colours are not false like the MEA.

I agree with you Muz, but the new Jungle Book edition should not be called cropped because the theatrical aspect ratio of JB is 1.75 -- which is the same as on the platinum edition -- earlier editions were open matte and had less image on the left and right sides. Comparing the two frames (older 4:3 and newer 1.75) actually reveals that the newer framing is more balanced.

I'll try to hunt down more info on the same.

Admins-- this page goes into hang when trying to post replies -- probably some images are causing the problem...?

Copied the images across the zulm server, sometimes if the images are hosted externally and the file size happens to big (usually when they are compressing and saved using PNG format) can cause the server to respond slowly especially at busy times.

Ali

If I remember correctly, even the colourized Mughal-E-Azam had such backgrounds. In some screens, only the foreground recd. proper attention and perhaps there's a logical reason behind this.

BTW, is this being done by anyone else too -- say, Moser Baer?

Hi Newdeep - yes I did some more reading and you are correct about Jungle Book - in fact I was looking at some comparison screen shots where they showed the frames not looking correct once they were matted ... but in actual fact the original screenig was done using the matted image. Another thing I was thinking about was that in Hollywood colourising of films was done by the big studios with no links to the original filmakers. I would argue that this is different in the new batch of Hindi colourised films. Personally - and I've been thinking about this a lot - I would rather see a good colourised film than a shoddy re-make! I do think though - looking at Naya Daur - the colorising of MEA was not a success and a lot could be done to make it look more natural. The backgrounds in Naya Daur seem to be coloured also ... a couple of shots from a 2.5hr movie shouldn't be how this process is judged. I kind of wish I had managed to see this in the cinema now (but it wasn't playing here). How was this recived in India - was the re-release deemed a success?

I played the DVD of Aan last night just to compare this movie to the colorised version of Naya Daur. It's uncanny but they look so similar. It's a well known fact that a lot of Indian film-makes could not afford to shoot films in colour at the time they were making them. I know that Raj Kapoor wanted to film the dream sequence of Awara in colour - but resources did not allow at that time. Perhaps this could be looked at as a dream realised instead of a travesty? I could chnage my mind in a few days - just trying to look at this from another angle.

Another thing -- if at all matting is forced to create a widescreen picture (of a movie originally screened in 4:3) -- then isn't it possible that they offer the unmatted on dvd? Or does the team work only on the matted frames, thereby never having a 4:3 material in colour?