The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice

Discuss releases by the BFI and the films on them.

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EddieLarkin
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Re: The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice

#26 Post by EddieLarkin » Fri May 15, 2020 11:17 am

I think that is the best way to describe it, that hiss removal is essentially the sonic equivalent of DNR. Hiss is a natural part of the soundtrack that was always present, and to remove it only leads to detriments to other parts of the soundtrack. Sadly unlike DNR there has been no real backlash against its use.

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Michael Kerpan
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Re: The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice

#27 Post by Michael Kerpan » Fri May 15, 2020 11:24 am

Shochiku's first foray into destructive aural meddling was its DVD release of There Was a Father. It sounded horrifyingly bad compared to the previous HK DVD.

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tenia
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Re: The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice

#28 Post by tenia » Fri May 15, 2020 11:46 am

EddieLarkin wrote:I think that is the best way to describe it, that hiss removal is essentially the sonic equivalent of DNR. Hiss is a natural part of the soundtrack that was always present, and to remove it only leads to detriments to other parts of the soundtrack. Sadly unlike DNR there has been no real backlash against its use.
Sound has always been some kind of "parent pauvre" compared to picture. There is low frequency roll off on most big-budget BDs, there has been Disney's awful EQs going on for years now, but older movies high frequencies removal has probably been going on for even longer than that and yeah, pretty much nobody cares (except Moshrom ! lol).
Gaumont used to get filtered so consistently their movies I originally thought that must be how old French movies are supposed to sound !

But it's sadly not just hiss that is removed : what is done here is extremely akin technically to DNR because both are high frequencies removals. If you look at spectrums of thosr movies, the same way you won't see any very small elements on DNRed pictures, you won't find any HF in the sound spectrums. But it's sometimes so agressive... you won't find any mediums either !
I've seen movies filtered down to 3kHz and anything above entirely removed.

But encode this losslessly and pretty much everyone is happy.

One of the tell-tale to me on this double standard has always been blu-ray.com's tendency to give high scores on AQ in a much less varying way than PQ. That's actually why I started trusting more Chris' reviews on that, because 5/5 AQs clearly weren't what I was hearing.

Hopefully, some feedbacks got through, since French movies are now less filtered and it seems we can get this kind of unrestored tracks in some cases. But too many of those seem to simply be thrown into a very agressive low-pass filter and be done with.

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MichaelB
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Re: The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice

#29 Post by MichaelB » Fri May 15, 2020 12:01 pm

Rayon Vert wrote:
Fri May 15, 2020 9:06 am
The Flavour of Green Beaver Over Rice would have made more sense.
Or The Flavour of Green Tea Over Beaver, although I daresay people could get banned in less broadminded places for even suggesting such a thing.
EddieLarkin wrote:
Fri May 15, 2020 11:17 am
I think that is the best way to describe it, that hiss removal is essentially the sonic equivalent of DNR. Hiss is a natural part of the soundtrack that was always present, and to remove it only leads to detriments to other parts of the soundtrack. Sadly unlike DNR there has been no real backlash against its use.
I've removed crackle from feature film soundtracks (for instance, if they were clearly from an optical print source: it's usually easy enough to tell by ear), but I wouldn't touch hiss.

Extras are a different matter, because some of the archival recordings I have to deal with (which were never intended for commercial release, and whose clarity relies heavily on the microphone technique of whoever was being interviewed onstage, which is sometimes poor) have so much hiss that it actively muffles the rest of the content, and iZotope RX7 can sometimes do an extraordinary job of clarifying things. But in situations like that you're more interested in what's being said than in strict audio fidelity - and in any case you wouldn't have the hiss in a live situation.
tenia wrote:
Fri May 15, 2020 11:46 am
One of the tell-tale to me on this double standard has always been blu-ray.com's tendency to give high scores on AQ in a much less varying way than PQ. That's actually why I started trusting more Chris' reviews on that, because 5/5 AQs clearly weren't what I was hearing.
Blu-ray.com once absurdly overrated the AQ of one of my projects, as the sound was a total bodge job assembled from multiple sources. I did the best I could, but it was a classic silk purse/sow's ear situation. Obviously, I'm not about to complain (or indeed name the title), but when the producer of the release thinks that the reviewer is being absurdly generous, what does that tell you? Although I suspect it was a similar case of trompe l'oreille to the one that persuaded Svet Atanasov that the landscape photography in Indicator's Age of Consent looked different in each version, whereas in fact he was watching precisely the same video encode second time round thanks to seamless branching. But I suspect that this was caused by the sharp quality difference in the two soundtracks fooling his brain into thinking that the picture was similarly compromised. With this situation, it's reversed: the picture was superb - an original-neg restoration - but the sound was pretty terrible.

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DeprongMori
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Re: The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice

#30 Post by DeprongMori » Fri May 15, 2020 4:28 pm

On the issue of “audio quality in the extras” problem, I recently listened to a Q&A on an Indicator release which was prefaced with a text of profuse apologies for the audio quality, especially for the barely audible audience questions. My question is: Would adding closed captions to those moments be a solution to that problem? The questions were generally discernible if you turned the volume up and strained to hear it. Wouldn’t it be useful to solve that problem in the source by using CC for all viewers at once rather than distributing the problem, or are there technical or legal barriers to doing so?

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L.A.
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Re: The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice

#31 Post by L.A. » Mon Jun 08, 2020 5:00 am


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tenia
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Re: The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice

#32 Post by tenia » Mon Jun 08, 2020 11:39 am

I hope the positive consensus towards the unrestored track will create a bigger focus for labels to think about licencing older tracks for japanese movies whose soundtracks have been so poorly handled during restoration. It's a direct and clear comparison about how destructive the recent work has been, so I hope it'll raise awareness about this (also amongst reviewers).

nitin
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Re: The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice

#33 Post by nitin » Tue Jun 09, 2020 8:29 am

Love the optimism!

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tenia
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Re: The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice

#34 Post by tenia » Tue Jun 09, 2020 10:37 am

At the very least, I'm a bit optimistic because the BFI listened to what was suggested (licence the older track), managed to do it seemingly without too much problem and so far, all the reviews I read are pointing out how superior the unrestored track is. So I suppose with someone like Moshrom monitoring the problematic tracks, people who can reach out to labels who have announced this kind of releases might allow for such unrestored tracks to be included and at some point, the related labels will cover this as part of their materials' verification.

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MichaelB
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Re: The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice

#35 Post by MichaelB » Tue Jun 09, 2020 4:55 pm

I’m not in a position to name the as yet unannounced title, but an upcoming Indicator release will feature multiple soundtracks of varying ages, due to considerable controversy about which one sounds “better”.

(Basically, the audio equivalent of what we did with Dragonwyck.)

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