Superman The Movie (1978) UHD HDR Trailer Remastered & Reconstructed

This is a special one for me, I saw this film in the cinema on release and have watched it regularly throughout the years. There's just something so wonderful about this movie.

The combination of a lot of elements made this very special film possible. Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, Richard Donner, and the fabulous score by John Williams all come together beautifully. It's just so full of heart. Yes, some of the effects have seen better days but it's just a little part of the whole experience. The story behind this film and Superman II is fascinating, a tale of what can happen when Directors, Producers and studios disagree.

This trailer was a little bit different though from a reconstruction point of view.

The film elements were simple to add...mostly, apart from a few shots. One of them doesn't exist in any version of the movie and some of the others are from the extended version which isn't available in 4K.

I decided to dial back a little of the diffusion on a couple of shots. Geoffrey Unsworth, the DoP was a magician with the moving image but when viewed in 4K HDR I felt it detracted a little bit too much sometimes, it's not all been removed though to retain the feel of the film.

I also had to spend some significant time with the Krypton shots at the beginning of the trailer. The shots with Jor-El and the elders had some rather unsubtle power windows applied to the faces in post-production. I'm not sure when this was done, probably for the initial HD release but I don't think this had been changed when going to 4K and the HDR nature of the image had made this issue even more obvious, there were a few issues here.

There's also some noise reduction applied, again HDR tends to emphasise film grain, but this has been done sympathetically and on a shot-by-shot basis.

I also had to re-grade a lot of shots and put some saturation and levels back in, there are also quite a few masks and power windows involved here, just about every shot has been regraded to some extent. This is especially true to make the most of the HDR nature, although due to the limited bit depth and chroma subsampling I was limited by what I could do.

This was made more difficult as this film was mastered at 4000 nits and I can only monitor at 1000, I can't quite stretch to a Dolby Pulsar mastering monitor at the moment!

I do think that a lot of older films aren't treated properly when it comes to making the most of HDR, this is probably down to cost. It takes time and effort to maximise each shot.

As for graphics, I tried to recreate the end Superman logo as it was a hand-drawn animation but it was taking too long, so in the end I did the best clean-up and enhance job I could.

I've also replaced something which I think is difficult to spot, so let me know if you think you see it.