A user on SWTF discovered a weird teal blob on a few frames of a wipe between scenes at around the 28m mark. It is there on all home releases checked so far (DVD, HDTV, blu-ray, UHD) with only the widescreen VHS releases (possibly Finland, Sweden and Spain only) not checked (although with claimed same release day for VHS and DVD I assume the VHS widescreen would have it too): However, it is not there on the original 35mm: Yeah, not exactly the world's biggest difference haha. But it does show that all of the home versions all derived from the same altered master. I wonder if that also explains why the UHD, despite being wide gamut color capable, clips certain wide gamut intense forms of teal and blue-green to the same REC709 more limited gamut of the DVD (and HDTV/blu-ray)? The 35mm has way, way more intensely rich teals/cyans/turquoise/crazy green-blues in spots than the UHD even though the UHD should be capable of showing those deeply saturated colors. It almost looks like it could have been some sort of teal enhancer power window thing that they forget to get rid of entirely for the upper left of the the new scene being transitioned to??
Close up, so what the what is this blue blob haha?? How, why did it end up in all post- 35mm theatrical release versions (and perhaps, although probably not, the digital theatrical version):
As someone else pointed out elsewhere, of course this sort of thing is common enough with normal productions. There are often more than one IN and IP and thus different chain paths can make different prints have different mistakes/defects/etc. But here we had an initial digital master and we have a "clean" 35mm and a "dirty" digital set of releases. Anyway, it seems that for AOTC they digitally printed out an original negative (ON) straight from a digital master (I guess pre-color timed to how it and the print stock would react?) and then struck the release prints from that. So release prints for AOTC went through less stages than normal no OCN->IP->IN->RP. Just digital master->ON->RP. Maybe they made more than one of these direct 1st gen digitally printed ON to produce release prints from. Whatever, that doesn't matter since the print in question doesn't have the weird thing. But what did they produce the DVD/HDTV/blu-ray/UHD from? If they just directly used the initial digital master and that had no blue blob then how the heck did it get into the chain? But maybe they did not do that? Did they really go and print out a new ON and then scan it back in and then use that scan as the final true digital master? If so, I guess a blue thingy could've fallen in the way for a few frames when they printed out the ON for the digital theatrical release (which would've been produced almost two weeks later than the one(s) for the 35mm prints). And maybe the way it was printed made the ONs have virtually no grain so it wouldn't show up much at all in the digital releases after it had been scanned back in? But do you really think they would have bothered to go digital master->directly digitally printed ON->final digital master produced from scanning back in the ON rather than just go digital master directly? If they wanted it a touch more filmic why then DNR all the home releases up? Why have the grain basically not noticeable I think even in the digital theatrical version? So what would have been the point of going DM->ON->TDM? Maybe to give the digital theatrical a more print film set of colors and contrast? Then why seem to go to a more digital set of colors and contrast for the digital home releases?
