186-188 Histoire(s) du cinéma and other works

[andyli]

The two subtitle tracks on the Madman DVD are for 1. voice-over and on-screen texts 2. picture/clip annotation, respectively. This is a bit awkward since the voice narration and on-screen texts often collide and leave the latter displayed all too briefly. Radiance might keep this format with some optimization, or lump on-screen texts and picture/clip annotation together in their second track, who knows?

A side note. Back in the heyday of DVD and its interactive functionality, the Japanese had created a 5-disc box of HDC that sort of became a holy grail item for the local market. They went out of their way to recruit a scholar who created "annotation screens" that explains all the referenced films/music/literature, make them searchable, and offer a branching option for viewers to click through icons in the subtitle track and break from the main feature in order to view any annotation screen. Pretty cool. A shame the concept was not carried over into any subsequent releases from the rest of the world.

[MichaelB]

The two subtitle tracks on the Madman DVD are for 1. voice-over and on-screen texts 2. picture/clip annotation, respectively. This is a bit awkward since the voice narration and on-screen texts often collide and leave the latter displayed all too briefly.

The basic technical problem with effectively displaying two sets of subtitles at the same time, as some have been calling for, is that quite aside from the readability issue there’s also what may be an insuperable timing challenge - because even if the subtitle graphics have been rendered to give the appearance of two discrete tracks, the player will only be able to regard them as one set, and therefore each graphic has to have the same fixed timing applied.

Which is fine if both sets of subtitles are in lockstep throughout, but if they’re not—and in this instance I don’t see how they can be—all sorts of compromises have to be made, with a QC nightmare scenario in prospect as well.

I had to wrestle with this dilemma when overseeing Indicator’s The Pillow Book, where I was supplied with a textless master and therefore had to create two sets of subtitles: the ones that were an actual part of the film, and standard SDH subtitles.

We decided right from the start that we’d reinstate the calligraphic font that accompanied the theatrical and early DVD releases—happily, they originally used an absolutely bog-standard font that was easy enough to track down—and after painstakingly recreating the relevant graphics, the next challenge was how to display them, bearing in mind the presentational need for optional SDH subtitles as well.

David Mackenzie will no doubt recall various experiments with making the calligraphic subtitles optional, but we swiftly realised that we’d have to burn them in, partly because they faded in and out instead of the usual popping on and off (and the technical script even specified the length of the fades, which occasionally varied), but also because there was just no way that we could sync them up with the SDH subtitles, except if we went down the route of butting them up so tightly together that some players would display them continuously.

So, for instance, we could have Subtitle A with calligraphic text, Subtitle B with the same calligraphic text plus SDH, subtitle C with the same SDH, and so on. But aside from the above-mentioned authoring and QC nightmare, there was no guarantee that all players would display them as intended, and I suspect if there’d been brief “flickers” between subtitles as players imposed, say, a blank frame or two between each one, this would rapidly have become intolerable to the viewer.

So burning them in was ultimately the only viable solution—but that’s not going to work with the Godard without including two full-length encodes, as you’re not going to want to make the subtitles permanent in a way that’s fine with The Pillow Book as they’re part of the intended texture of the film.

As for the SDH, that was another world of pain, because the nature of the film meant that a great many subtitles had to be repositioned somewhere other than the usual two-line arrangement at the bottom. I ended up manually editing the XML positioning file because in some cases I needed genuine pixel precision.

Here’s an example, where there’s really only one place for the subtitle to viably go! (It can’t go too close to the top or bottom for potential overscan reasons.)


(As per Indicator policy, this is a transcription rather than a translation, as no translation is provided as part of the film. But in this case this Chinese song recurs regularly, so it’s easy to recognise subsequent appearances. Naturally, me being me—i.e. a maniac—I considered the possibility of adding Chinese characters as well, but swiftly abandoned that as impractical. And besides, there was demonstrably no space!)

In this example, the optional subtitle adds speaker ID to a subtitle that was burned in:



And here, I’m trying to avoid subtitles clashing, for obvious reasons:



So I have every imaginable sympathy with anyone tackling the Godard, and hopefully this has spelled out how some dream scenarios may simply not be technically viable.

[Calvin]

Life-affirming announcement, this set!

Does anyone know if JLG/JLG has been given a fresh HD scan? If memory serves, the other 80s/90s works (Freddy Buache, Soft and Hard, 2 x 50) are all shot on standard def video.

The Cinematheque Suisse restored Freddy Buache from 35mm elements

[yoloswegmaster]

The listing makes it sound like the Adrian Martin essay isn't a new one, so I wonder if they are reprinting this.

[Calvin]

I asked regarding how it HdC would be presented in terms of resolution and frame rate and Bruno's response was that "[they] haven't encoded the films yet so best to answer once the happens and we've tested what works best - but we'll do an update here once we do know"

[Lowry_Sam]

Anyone placing Polymarket bets on how fast this will sell out? (faster or slower than Matador?)

[Finch]

I'm sorry but Polymarket can fuck off. And then fuck off some more. And when they've done that, fuck off even further.

[TechnicolorAcid]

Anyone placing Polymarket bets on how fast this will sell out? (faster or slower than Matador?)

Slower than Matador, if only because this isn’t region free and Radiance’s box sets tend to take at least a month to sell out after release

[Walter Kurtz]

I'm sorry but Polymarket can fuck off. And then fuck off some more. And when they've done that, fuck off even further.

Why don' t you tell us how you really feel?

[Lowry_Sam]

I'm sorry but Polymarket can fuck off...

I only used it as a joke, had I known it would be so triggering I would have tried something else

Slower than Matador, if only because this isn’t region free and Radiance’s box sets tend to take at least a month to sell out after release

I would think because of the title (documentary/tv) it will probably be slower, but Matador was also only for UK market & both have had an eager fanbase who have been waiting too long for a decent release.

[domino harvey]

I doubt this sells out for a while, late period Godard is not as popular as some of us on this forum make it seem. I recall Arrow took forever to sell through their Dziga Vertov boxes, though those are admittedly much more obtuse then these films

[Finch]

I only used it as a joke, had I known it would be so triggering I would have tried something else !

You're good, LS, I just have huge issues with a company allowing betting on things like whether the US can successfully retrieve the pilot that got shot down over Iran or whether he was still alive. Back to Matador and LEs!

[ryannichols7]

I doubt this sells out for a while, late period Godard is not as popular as some of us on this forum make it seem. I recall Arrow took forever to sell through their Dziga Vertov boxes, though those are admittedly much more obtuse then these films

I think it'll sell out at an OK rate, Godard's name is big and it has the Sight and Sound hype. Rozier is apparently selling pretty well so I could see this not making it to the end of the year

[Lowry_Sam]

I think that because it's focus is a tv series on film and stacked with extras, it'll be more popular than most of Godard's other post-1970 works. And unlike much of his later work, it also has an IMDb rating over 7/10 & no known prospects of a Region A release at the moment, which should make it at least more attractive than the Bunuel set.

[Matt]

I think I have maybe one Godard film in my collection (Vivre sa vie), and I'm seriously considering buying it.

[Calvin]

From the Discord:

TRANSFER NOTES

Histoire(s) du cinéma and Lettre à Freddy Buache originated on PAL video.
They were adjusted to 59.94fps for worldwide compatibility.

Soft and Hard and 2 X 50 Years of French Cinema originated on PAL video.
They were adjusted to 23.98fps for worldwide compatibility.

JLG/JLG, autoportrait de décembre originated on 35mm film and was delivered to Radiance as a High-Definition transfer.

Moments choisis des histoire(s) du cinéma originated on PAL video which was recorded to film, then scanned in High Definition. It was delivered to Radiance as a High-Definition transfer.

Scénarios and Exposé du film annonce du film “Scénario” were both recorded in High Definition and delivered to Radiance as High-Definition transfers. Subtitles for both films were finalised and approved by Mitra Farahani of Ecran Noir Productions.

The alternative subtitle track (the ‘image track’), which identifies some of the visual references in Histoire(s) du cinéma, was created by Felicity Chaplin, Scholarly Teaching Fellow in French Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, for the 2010 Australian DVD release of Histoire(s) du cinéma via Madman Entertainment.

[Zot!]

So we're getting new? subs for the audio...and the old Madman secondary track for secondary information. That seems fine. While I don't love the speed adjustment for authenticity reasons (though I'm sure it has regularly screened like this), the incrementally slower speed might inadvertently make reading all this onscreen text easier. I guess if somebody is really dedicated they can hold on to the AE or Madman for a native PAL version that remains true to source.

With all the extras this remains a great package.

[denti alligator]

The speed adjustment seems odd for a region-locked release. The secondary information should be made easily accessible in the booklet for reference. That would be an ideal alternative to the (impossible) doubled subs.

[Zot!]

The speed adjustment seems odd for a region-locked release.

That's why I remarked on it. Making a point that it was "adjusted to 59.94fps for worldwide compatibility" when the disc is artificially made not to be is just silly. I would assume this is the master they were given to work with, but come to think of it they should have been able to re-conform the video back to 25fps. Most likely a case of a zero production budget release. Whatever...I'm feeling a little deflated.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

That's why I remarked on it. Making a point that it was "adjusted to 59.94fps for worldwide compatibility" when the disc is artificially made not to be is just silly. I would assume this is the master they were given to work with, but come to think of it they should have been able to re-conform the video back to 25fps.

If I'm interpreting the specs correctly, Soft and Hard and 2x50 Years were probably de-interlaced from 50i to 25p and then slowed down to 23.98p, meaning in theory they could be sped back up to 25p. But it sounds like Histoire(s) and Lettre à Freddy Bauche were converted from 50i to 59.94i, in which case there would be no speed change, but there would be interpolated fields that might make it impossible to recover the original 50i information (though that would've already been lost by upscaling to 1080i, which I assume has also been done).

[Zot!]

That's why I remarked on it. Making a point that it was "adjusted to 59.94fps for worldwide compatibility" when the disc is artificially made not to be is just silly. I would assume this is the master they were given to work with, but come to think of it they should have been able to re-conform the video back to 25fps.

If I'm interpreting the specs correctly, Soft and Hard and 2x50 Years were probably de-interlaced from 50i to 25p and then slowed down to 23.98p, meaning in theory they could be sped back up to 25p. But it sounds like Histoire(s) and Lettre à Freddy Bauche were converted from 50i to 59.94i, in which case there would be no speed change, but there would be interpolated fields that might make it impossible to recover the original 50i information (though that would've already been lost by upscaling to 1080i, which I assume has also been done).

I think you're right, I wasn't reading the specs properly...they've managed to conform PAL sourced video two different ways for the various films...neither intervention necessary for a disc region-locked to PAL-land.....ugh.

[nitin]

they can probably see a whole bunch of pre-order sales to the US regardless of the region locking

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

I think the objection here is that the region-free players used by such buyers would also be capable of converting 50i content. But what's most likely going on is that the remasters don't even exist in 50i because the rightsholders figured licensors in historically PAL territories like Europe can use 23.98p/59.94i masters, whereas licensors in historically NTSC territories like the U.S. and Japan can't use 50i masters because many of the TVs sold there don't support it and many players (possibly most) won't do the standards conversion needed in such cases. The obvious downside of this one-size-fits-all approach is that customers who are capable of playing back a more authentic 50i encode don't have the opportunity to do so.