Godzilla 2000 Trailer 35mm print

[Servanov]

A few months ago I was searching on eBay, and searched for "Godzilla 35mm". Surprisingly, a trailer for Godzilla 200 actually showed up, for only $12! I bought it in a heartbeat, and about a week later it showed up in the mail. I don't have a 35mm projector, so I can't view it, but I was able to take some captures with a DSLR up against a light source. The print was listed as "unused" and from what I've seen, there's not very many scratches at all. If you want I can post a link to a zip file with captures, as well.

[goji1986]

A few months ago I was searching on eBay, and searched for "Godzilla 35mm". Surprisingly, a trailer for Godzilla 200 actually showed up, for only $12! I bought it in a heartbeat, and about a week later it showed up in the mail. I don't have a 35mm projector, so I can't view it, but I was able to take some captures with a DSLR up against a light source. The print was listed as "unused" and from what I've seen, there's not very many scratches at all. If you want I can post a link to a zip file with captures, as well.

It's actually thanks to your heads up in another thread that I got a print as well! Looking forward to your pics...how did you do the DSLR capture?

[omgitsgodzilla]

From what I understand, that's more or less how Star Wars fans have been doing their own transfers of film prints of the original trilogy, though they rig up some additional equipment to make the process more efficient and maintain consistent results.

[Servanov]

My rig is basically just a lightbox used for tracing and art purposes, and I put the film up against the lightbox, take a DLSR on macro focus and snap it. It's not a rig for capturing frames in a sequence. I couldn't capture the whole trailer. It's only a manual process as of now.

[MortalClaptrap]

A few months ago I was searching on eBay, and searched for "Godzilla 35mm". Surprisingly, a trailer for Godzilla 200 actually showed up, for only $12! I bought it in a heartbeat, and about a week later it showed up in the mail. I don't have a 35mm projector, so I can't view it, but I was able to take some captures with a DSLR up against a light source. The print was listed as "unused" and from what I've seen, there's not very many scratches at all. If you want I can post a link to a zip file with captures, as well.

Link?

[Servanov]

Link to the eBay page where I bought it or link to the zip file? The eBay page is long gone by now, and no one really replied to the post I made, so I never bothered to make one. I can, though.

[G-MAN]

Yes do a capture if you can. I'm interested to see how it turns out

[Servanov]

Here is the link to the .zip file. It is 131 or so megabytes, and has about 30 stills from the print. They're all in 4k, which is why the file size is so big.

http://www.filedropper.com/godzilla2000 ... rintstills

[omgitsgodzilla]

Very interesting! It would be great to see the whole thing properly scanned and preserved.

I find it interesting that while the detail on the print isn't exactly breathtaking, the color is mostly pretty decent, except for the Toho logo, which looks utterly wretched. It looks a little discolored in the Blu-ray transfer, but I don't think it's that bad.

[Servanov]

Yeah, trailers on film for movies never tend to be very high quality. A print of the actual movie would be much higher quality. Since the trailer is a multiple generation element, it will in turn be lower quality. Just look up any 35mm trailer scans on YouTube, they're never anything very breathtaking in terms of quality. On this trailer, I noticed, that the opticals (titles, text, opening preview rating) are actually higher quality and sharper than the actual live action footage. I know the general lack of sharpness isn't on my part, because the film dirt and scratches are sharp, but the footage isn't. But anyways, most trailer prints aren't ever very good quality. If you see a Blu-Ray with a sharp, high quality trailer, it's because the studio or whoever did the Blu-Ray transfer had the access to much higher quality elements like a trailer negative or lavender print (next generation from negative), which is why a theatrical trailer print won't look that amazing. For the Toho Logo colors, I don't know what happened on that. I guess Tristar just got a bad film element for the logo. The U.S. Blu-Ray doesn't have the U.S. trailer, but on the Tristar DVD, it does and it has the same colors for the logo.

[omgitsgodzilla]

That makes sense. What I was referring to was the Toho logo that appears in the movie itself

[armoredsaint58]

ok, don't you guys think the trailers for the japanese movies remastered in hd look better then the actual movie print itself? for the toho scans that is. everytime im watching these trailers they pack in, im like "damn why do these trailers look way sharper?"

[omgitsgodzilla]

I think the general consensus is that the Toho transfers look the way they do because of noise reduction and other processing done after the initial scan; they might just not bother doing that to the trailers.

[JetrellFo]

I have a 35mm trailer for 2000 as well. It might be about time I get it scanned properly.

[Servanov]

I agree armoredsaint58, neither are particularly sharp (I only have the American blu-rays, no Japanese, so I'm speakkng for them), but yes, the trailers are much sharper. On the Kraken BR for ROG the trailer is significantly sharper and more detailed. The reason is usually just higher quality sources, but my question is why is their apparent "best film element" most likely a print that lacks sharpness. I doubt they lost their original negatives, at least for their more recent films, older films are more forgivable for loss of HQ sources. I remember on the Sony BR for Godzilla vs. MechaGodzilla II, there is a section that is a great deal sharper (start watching at about 53 minutes in and compare to the rest). To JetrellFo, that would be great because I have no way to scan mine except if I set up my DSLR to capture it, as omgitsgodzilla mentioned earlier. I can definitely capture individual frames, but that is not very efficient for scanning a whole trailer. If you can, some caps of your print would be cool, too.

Added in 3 minutes 30 seconds:
Quick update, I just received a package of a original pressbook for Godzilla: 2000. It comes with a little packet lf information about the plot, cast and crew. It also comes with a few 35mm slides of scenes from the movie, so you can expect some captures of those at around Christmas day. The reason I have to wait is because I am waiting on some macro extension tubes so I can capture the slides and even do a rescan of the trailer caps.

Added in 7 hours 10 minutes 21 seconds:
After getting a Blu-Ray drive on my computer for X-Mas, and using it to watch Blu-Rays, I can say that although still not as sharp as 35mm film can be, the Godzilla Blu-Rays improve significantly in sharpness. I guess a large flatscreen TV actually ISN'T good for improving quality of HD movies.