" Start with a 60p source and then decimate it to 30p (easy to do in Vegas). This gives you the identical media, but at two frame rates. "

oldsmoke just said that cutting 60p to 30p throws away every other frame, no combining.

which means that if you were shooting 28mbps 60p, you just threw away 14mbps of that by decimating the framerate to 30p in vegas... not a good idea.

there are very few 60p delivery options in this world, so if you know that 30p is what you are delivering, that's what you should be shooting.

@OSV
The only place where you can deliver 30p is the Internet and that has change to 60p. If you shoot in 30p but need to deliver to multiple formats then you are out of luck. The beauty of shooting 60p is that you can convert to anything below without loosing anything.

When you render 60p to 30p you don't lose a thing because you will still render at a given bitrate and not half. If you tell Vegas to render 60p to 30p at 50Mbps then it will be exactly that. Converting 60p that was shot at 50Mbps converted to AVCHD 60i will still look stunning.

"It well may but only because it wasn't shot in 4K or higher and nor was the set designed for higher resolution. But I am certain that if you would shoot "The Wizard of Oz" with todays technologies, it would look great in 4K."

Actually it was shot on 35mm film, the most common movie versions of which have an effective resolution of about 4000ppi. In a standard 18x24mm frame this equates to about 2834x2126 pixels. So, "The Wizard of Oz" was shot and viewed on a medium beyond HD, much closer to 4K than 2K.

@Chineworks
And for what kind of viewing device was it designed for?

35mm projector onto large theater screen, of course.

Early color film emulsion will not resolve 2k, especially a print from a master.

I was about to say something similar.

I also would imagine that the whole coloring and non linear editing process in those days would have degraded quality compared to the original acquisition material. So even if it was acquired at a very high resolution even by todays standards, the final product would not be of the same quality... correct me if I am wrong.
Movie sets from those days would not hold up for todays viewing equipment. Similar as studios hat to change sets and makeup to make it suitable for HD. Hence a movie from those "good old days" will not have the same effect anymore when watched on higher resolution TVs or cinemas.

Same with my D8 tapes. They looked great on my oh so fantastic 27" Sony tube but the first time I saw it on my very first HDTV, a 40" Samsung, I was shocked. So shocked that I run and bought a Sony FX7. I actually had to wait a year or so because the FX-1 was out of my price range at the time.

You might halve the data rate in going from 60p to 30p, but you are not halving the information. In an extreme case, if you are looking at a static scene (or a photo) each frame will be identical and no information would be lost. To lose half the information, each frame would have to be unrelated, and therefore unwatchable (or meaningless).

When I was browsing for my next TV, a store had an 80 inch TV displaying a static scene. It was superb! From about a metre away it looked like a real scene through a window. I glanced at the price and walked on.

Early color film emulsion will not resolve 2k, especially a print from a master.

So even if it was acquired at a very high resolution even by todays standards, the final product would not be of the same quality... correct me if I am wrong.Actually, "The Wizard of Oz" was shot entirely on black & white stock, including all the color scenes.

What?

Yes, the color was shot using the new three-strip Technicolor process:

Technicolor Oz

This technology uses three cameras, recording R, G, & B (or something like that) onto three different B&W negatives. These are later combined to produce the theatrical prints. Those negatives were, fortunately, preserved and are used to transfer the film to new technology.

Because the movie is so iconic, each time a new digital technology emerges, the technicians go to great lengths to extract more and more information from the three negatives. Averaging across three sources can also be used to improve resolution, and they can also get better and better color.

I remember what this film looked like in the 1950s on my parents' B&W TV; I remember the first time I saw it on a color TV; I remember the VHS transfer; I was then blown away when I rented it on laserdisc; and was completely floored when I saw the new transfer for DVD.

However, a few years ago, they did it all over again, this time in 3D for Blu-Ray. This one I haven't seen, but it must be something else. All the reviews are 5 out of 5. Here's one of them:

Wizard of Oz: 70th Anniversary

Finally, please note: even though the restoration team had every technical trick at their disposal (3D from a 1939 2D film!!), they chose to keep it at 24 fps when they easily could have converted it to 48 fps (Hobbit film rate) or higher. IMHO, a very good choice.

they chose to keep it at 24 fps when they easily could have converted it to 48 fps (Hobbit film rate)

The Wizard of Oz isn't an action movie with lots of motion and a bit of blur is easier forgiven. So why bother to convert it to 48fps if the gain is so little at so much extra cost. I think it was more a business decision then an artistic one.

With the money they spent on 3D, motion estimation would have incrementally cost somewhere between zero and nothing. I can do a pretty good job, in a few hours, on my computer. Compared to restoration, colorization, and 3D, and CGI, this is not very labor intensive. (BTW, they could have also used CGI to "fix" all those crummy 1939 special effects, but they didn't.)

So it was most definitely an artistic decision. The only business decision involved was, I'm sure, the realization that audiences would have been horrified at the "reality" (as it has been called here) injected into a film that is a total fantasy.

If you spend any time at the AVS Forum, you will find that the interpolation function on modern TV sets is universally despised.

I would still argue that there is a difference between interpolating a lower frame rate to achieve a higher one and actually having shot at a higher frame rate. Hmmm... I got to try this and up the frame rate of my 4K at 30p to 60p.

But why did they bother to remaster such a classic master piece? If is by the many in this forum they should have left it as it is because it so much better then anything "modern" like 4K or 60p.

Probably for similar reasons that George Lucas updated Star Wars for the DVD production, which was that if he had had the new technical tools 20 years earlier he would have used them.

Seems to me that most of the remastering used in this case was not to improve on the original picture, but to bring to modern audiences as much fidelity of the original as possible. On the other hand, it sounds like they did do a lot of work improving the audio, and i wholly approve of this. Audio recording in 1939 was much more primitive than the state of film at the time.

But why did they bother to remaster such a classic master piece?Simple answer: they remastered it.

They did not "improve" it.

All they did was get the best quality possible. The difference between this and what George Lucas did is that during restoration, you simply try to get the final result to be as close as possible to what a viewer would have seen on opening night in 1939 at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, where I presume they had a virgin print, and the best equipment available. By contrast, when Lucas added new scenes and CGI to Star Wars, he created stuff that wasn't there before.

Having said that, it is definitely true that they did violate the spirit of restoration (my profession) by creating the 3D effect, but I'm sure that the vast majority of people who bought or rented that DVD didn't bother with it (although I have absolutely no facts to back up that claim).

I got the 70th Anniversary remastered Blu-ray of the Wizard of Oz (not the 3D version) and it was spectacular. I've seen the movie at least once a year since I was a kid and I saw stuff in the movie I had never seen before, it was almost like seeing it for the first time.

They scanned the original three-strip Technicolor camera negatives at 8k-12bit. The proprietary Ultra-Resolution process was used for compositing the separate yellow, cyan and magenta layers for unprecedented registration and sharpness.

These enhancements combine to produce the biggest improvement of all -- a major revelation of _texture_. The "feltiness" of many costumes is obvious. The freckles and blemishes on Dorothy's face. The burlap of the Scarecrow's face is now plainly visible, particularly in the close-up where he misstates the Pythagorean Theorem. And the Lion's costume is a thick pile of fur you want to reach out and touch. You can see every last strand of hair.

I can't wait for the 4k version and then the 8k version.

John,

Thanks for sharing that. I sure would have loved to have been on that restoration team.