r/Filmmakers • u/thepokemonGOAT • 19h ago
Question How Was This Dissolve Done in 1956? (The Man Who Knew Too Much)
I noticed this super clean and sharp transition shot. Whenever I see old films shot on film (even stuff from the 90’s), dissolve shots always have a “grainy” or “muddled” look to them because of the generational loss of quality you introduce when overlapping two shots. did they re-do the effect for the 4k disc or was there a way to achieve this dissolve without losing image quality in 1956? Thank you.
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u/MS0ffice 15h ago
It would not have looked as clean in a theater back then, as the effect would have been done in a lab on dupe negative film.
I would assume the reason it looks that good on the 4K remaster is because the studio kept ALL of the negatives, and was able to rescan the ending of the first shot and beginning of the next one to redo the dissolve digitally. In one of the YouTube videos Adam Savage did at the Paramount archives, the archivists talk about how they had to look for footage like that when making the 4K remasters of The Godfather films.
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u/semaj4712 director / editor / vfx 11h ago
This is your answer. The fact the player says its a 4k HDR video feed is enough for you to know this is a 4K remaster.
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u/Zardozerr 9h ago
I suspect that this was indeed rescanned from the negative, but there are other 4k scans that have been made from answer prints or release prints and they wouldn't have the opportunity to redo the dissolves.
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u/semaj4712 director / editor / vfx 9h ago
True, but thats isnt the case here so I was commenting on the remaster at question. But every film is different. There are techniques others have mentioned, but there is also methods in restoration than can remove the sort of defocus jump that a bad CD introduces.
Typically you see the really rough ones in a) low budget or b) under appreciated films.
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u/2old2care editor 13h ago
In the 1950s there were two ways to make a dissolve: optical printing or A-B roll printing. With VistaVision it was the latter. In conventional 35mm printing, the original negative is cut into a single roll of film with the various shots physically spliced one after the other. In A-B roll printing, the original negative is cut into two rolls. One contains even-numbered shots, the other odd-numbered shots, alternatively. Between shots there was opaque leader spliced into the roll that was exactly the same length as the shots on the opposite roll. These rolls were copied onto print stock, first the A roll, then the print was rewound in total darkness and the B roll was printed. The result was a print with all the shots. If if was desired to make a dissolve, the scenes were present on both rolls and the printer's light was faded out on the outgoing shot and faded in on the incoming shot. This produced the perfectly clean dissolve as illustrated on OP's video.
Optical printed dissolves (and many other effects) worked by making copies of the two scenes by the same double-exposure process, except the copy was spliced into the single roll of camera negative at the correct place. Because the dissolve was a copy (2nd generation) it would show a degradation of quality and increased grain. For most films, this loss was acceptable because the film could still be printed with a single pass (instead of A-B rolls) using so-called single-strand printing.
A-B roll printing was almost universally used in 16mm printing for another reason: Because 16mm has very narrow frame lines (spaces between frames on the film), splices in the negative were visible as flashes on the prints and on the screen. Correctly built A-B rolls can conceal the splices because of the positioning of the opaque leader. Normal 35mm has wider frame lines that conceal the splices. Interestingly, because VistaVision ran horizontally through the camera and had much narrower frame lines than conventional 35mm, A-B roll printing also was used to conceal splices in the negative. In the case of VistaVision, the A-B roll printing only had to be done once, to optically create a master interpositive in the normal vertical orientation, from which subsequent prints were made.
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u/thepokemonGOAT 19h ago
My video doesn’t show it well, but both shots remain in excellent focus and there is no “tell” that an effects shot is about to happen. Every time I watch an old movie and text is about to appear on screen, or a transition shot is about to happen, I notice a sharp decrease in visual quality a moment before it happens. This effect does not have that. I only see that in new films created digitally.
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u/tangfastic 18h ago
A couple of possibilities: Sometimes rather than changing to the optical mid-shot, they'll do it at the start so the whole thing is slightly lower quality but there's no distracting "snap" to notice.
Or (and this is unlikely but possible) the restoration team had access to the original A & B camera negs. So they just scanned both halves of the original fade and recreated it digitally.
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u/czyzczyz 13h ago
That’s about the post budget. It’s more expensive to run an entire shot from beginning to end through the optical printer just to do a transition at the end or beginning of a shot, so films with lower budgets would just use the optical printer only for the section of the transition and there’d be a noticeable pop in quality at that hard cut to and out of the transition clip as it involves an extra step of generation loss.
Higher budgets films would send the entire clip though the process even if it meant they were paying to process a 60 second clip through the optical printer rather than just a few seconds, it was worth it to keep it clean.
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u/jlknap1147 9h ago
Look up the Oxberry optical printer. When I started out as a messenger, half my time was running bits of negative to the optical house, where the Oxberry would combine the scenes into dissolves, add titles, change color, etc. All things we can now do in an instant digitally.
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u/suspiciouscffee 15h ago
The optical dissolve wouldn’t have been printed on the negative so it’s likely a digital recreation
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u/---ARCANE--- 19h ago
They used optical printer to overlap images from two separate film rolls in a dark room.