Very cool! Here are some of my favourite Eastern European films, in case anyone wants recommendations.
Poland:
Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie (1965) !!!!
Sanatorium pod klepsydrą (1973) !!!!
Ziemia obiecana (1975) !!!!
Osobisty pamiętnik grzesznika przez niego samego spisany (1986)
Pociąg (1959)
Pokolenie (1955)
Kanal (1957) !!!!
Popiół i diament (1958)
Czechoslovakia:
Holubice (1960) !!!!
Ostře sledované vlaky (1966)
Marketa Lazarova (1967) !!!!
Obrazy starého sveta (1972)
Spalovač mrtvol (1969) !!!!
Slnko v sieti (1962)
Zlaté kapradí (1963)
Údolí včel (1968)
Hungary:
Csillagosok, katonák (1967)
A Pál utcai fiúk (1968)
A tanú (1969) !!!!
Kárhozat (1988)
Két félidő a pokolban (1961)
Az ötödik pecsét (1976)
Szegénylegények (1966)
Szindbád (1971)
Szürkület (1990) !!!!
NOTE: the films with !!!! next to them are my absolute favourites and if you don't have time to watch all of these films, I implore you to at least watch these.
Sadly no Yuri Norstein. I know he's an animator, but I figured he's famous enough to be on there. A couple of years ago there was a new 2K transfer of all of his (released) films too.
I agree. Hope I didn't sound snobby about "2K only" scans. I know that the smaller film sizes don't hold up well to greater than 2K scans. It could also be a limit of that's the only scanner that was available to them.
Except the grain becomes the size of your face, but yeah, other than that, nothing wrong with it =)
Seriously, it depends on the method of scanning. There's so many people that do 8mm projection to a camera rather than scanning. It is the most affordable in transfer prices, but affords the least flexibility. Maybe projecting to a camera recording in a RAW format might up that flexibility, but who's going to do that?
Film chains like a Spirit would have a limit on how much it could blow up the image before becoming a digital scale. Some of the larger archival scanners that offer features like triple flash scans have a scanner that also has a certain resolution where the small size of the 8mm frame would again need digital scaling to fill frame. 16mm gates allow for compensation of that frame size, but I've never even heard of an 8mm gate for the higher end scanning equipment.
This has always been the limitations as I've understood them. Plus, the grain does get much more pronounced with the higher res scanning, so I was only partially joking at the start. Granted, it has been about 10 years since I was personally heavy into handling film, so maybe something has been released? What are you familiar with that allows "no real issue" with higher res scanning?
Starting with a higher-res scan and then resizing to a smaller resolution might still result in better quality.
I'm not sure if this is a fair comparison, but years ago a DVD review site took the Blu-Ray release of Lord of the Rings, ripped and processed it to DVD size, and compared the output to the original DVDs (which used to be considered one of the best quality DVD releases when they came out). The quality difference was huge.
Starting larger than the target delivery has always been a known thing. Hell, they used to shoot 35mm for SD. Down scaling in and of itself is a way of reducing noise, as the noise averages out in the scaling process. Of course an HD image scaled down to an SD will look better than a DVD compressed from an SD source. Even if the SD was from a DigiBeta master, an HD captured from a HDCamSR or straight from a digital file format will just have so much more detail and information. The bit depths alone in HD sources can make a difference. The HD format allows for so much more information. Why this is surprising is the real surprise to me. Not from you as much as the people attempting the actual test. Sounds like something the readers of doom9 might have done for the clout.
We don't necessarily know what the original digital transfer method + processing pipeline was for the DVDs. Comparing them to the Blu-Ray releases lets us make better informed guesses.
You can find some Russian ones on YouTube, like the original “Solaris” — which I highly recommend. It is from the early 70s. No George Clooney or Steven Soderbergh.
Just to be clear: I appreciate you sharing the source (and yes, I already have an account on 35mm.online, thanks to HN[0], and I already know by heart every Tarkovskij film).
Also, I'm not the biggest fan of copyright either.
What left me a bit sour about that website is not even that they are asking money but really just how they are pretending to be a legitimate business.
Instead, I'm more inclined to donate to people who make an effort to share rare and interesting content, for its own sake, like https://rarefilmm.com
Does the DMCA even apply here? The movies in question are from counties that have local copyright laws (reminder that DMCA is an American thing with reciprocal agreements with a bunch of countries including the whole of the EU), decades old and in some cases in the public domain.
DMCA doesn't apply outside of USA but the core copyright conditions are the same pretty much everywhere, with the only one in Europe who isn't a full member of the treaties being Kosovo due to differing opinions about recognizing it as an independent state.
"Decades old" is far from being sufficient to become unburdened by copyright. Works with joint authorship (as movies almost universally are) generally become public domain upon 70 years of death of its last remaining author - e.g. for movies you have to wait until the principal director, the author of the screenplay, the author of the dialogue and the composer of music all die, and then 70 years after that, so it's wouldn't be even surprising to have even the very oldest surviving movie of some country be still under copyright if one of them survived WW2.
Determining status of copyrights and ownership for movies produced under soviet block communist governments is going to open up thorny legal questions.
Who would even own the copyright? The government? The director? Are they public domain? What's the continuity of the copyright?
They probably don't have enough commercial value to fight over.
Now if Ye used a sample of a soundtrack without authorization in a hit song, there's suddenly real money involved. Lawyers and artists would come out of the woodwork and start filing claims.
https://easterneuropeanmovies.com/
Searchable by decade and by country