Night Of The Living Dead (1968): 3 different prints at Archive.org

Archive.org has three different prints of George Romero's fantastic zombie movie, Night of the Living Dead.

1. Raw untouched video master - how the film has been seen on late night TV and PD video's and DVDs for years.

2. A remastered version of the film presented in HD.

3. Rare international widescreen theatrical release print presented 16:9 enhanced.

Night Of The Living Dead (1968)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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http://six-weeks-of-halloween.blogspot.com/ kernunrex

Very cool, but… gah… the widescreen print should be eradicated. That ain’t the shape George shot it for, so all you’re doing is chopping off the top and bottom of the image to fit new TVs. At least the colorized atrocity isn’t being preserved there.
- http://twitter.com/bradbelltv Brad Bell
  
  You are correct. I just compared the 16×9 version with the “remastered HD” version – which I also doubt, incidentally is HD. It’s not. It’s 1024×744. However, it looks like a much better copy and it’s the largest version.
  
  The 16×9 version (1024×576) is overexposed, scratched and dirty.
  
  The one called “Original Video” is 640×480. It is also overexposed, scratched and dirty, but in a different way from the 16×9 version.
  
  Advice: download the “Remastered HD” version which is 1.8GB. From the initial images it looks like a marvellous print. It’s so clean you can’t tell whether it’s playing or not.
http://twitter.com/rvitelli Romeo Vitelli

It’s a shame that film is in the public domain now due to some legal mixup. It was one of the most profitable horror movies of all time
- https://plus.google.com/104067355242126774300/posts?hl=en Dennis Smith
  
  Shame? Films have to wait way too long before being made PD, and the studios are doing everything that they can to make it longer. This is not acceptable.
  - Donald Petersen
    
    Yeah, shame. A couple dozen distributors have sold that movie on video, DVD, and Blu-Ray over the years without paying Romero a nickel. NOTLD essentially entered the public domain when its original title was changed from Night of the Flesh Eaters to Night of the Living Dead and the distributor neglected to include the copyright notice in the new title card.
    
    Oops.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Of course, George Romero might have tried making some new films that weren’t just rehashes of NOTLD.
      - Donald Petersen
        
        Aw, come now. He did try. Creepshow, Martin, Knight Riders, The Dark Half.
        
        Weird how rarely he got out of Pittsburgh, though.
Allan Hughes

It would be good if the uploader had given some provenance to the HD version, did they get a full HD telecine made from negative/print or have they ripped from one of the many extant Blu-Ray Discs?