Studio Canal / Kinowelt / Optimum

[peerpee]

Yup, DON'T LOOK NOW is a complete mess also. Haven't seen RAN, but will get it. I want to make a dirty stink list.

Three from one label, very big films too. Terrible – especially when the bulk of the reviewing world gives them raves. It'll just keep happening...

[manicsounds]

Another on the Studio Canal / Hammer mishappenings, but some people claim that there are problems with the audio track of the recently released "Rasputin" disc sounds worse than before. The old Anchor Bay DVD's dolby digital mono track sounds fuller, yet the new Blu-ray's PCM mono track sounds tinny and metallic with no depth or clarity.

By the way, Peerpee, why all of a sudden revive a 1-year-old comment by Pro-B who doesn't post here anymore? Did you happen to watch the disc recently?

[bigP]

Three from one label, very big films too. Terrible – especially when the bulk of the reviewing world gives them raves. It'll just keep happening...

It might be worth calling attention again to SC's lazy work with The Third Man (particularly with the rub that Criterion's nice looking release was essentially shoved aside to make way for something far inferior).

[perkizitore]

Cat O'nine tails and Conversation Piece suffer from the same 'watermarking' effect that plagues Don't look now.

[peerpee]

re: DON'T LOOK NOW Blu-ray mess. StudioCanal will point to this:



There's undoubtedly a big story behind this one.

[MichaelB]

The reviews of Ran were so bad that I ended up buying the DVD.

[peerpee]

By the way, Peerpee, why all of a sudden revive a 1-year-old comment by Pro-B who doesn't post here anymore? Did you happen to watch the disc recently?

I knew the 'restoration' was a stinker, but hadn't realised it received such glowing reviews. I watched it again recently and have been researching all reviews it received – completely dumbfounded.

I explained in my first post: "Not meaning to be overdramatic, but the rave reviews everywhere (except DVDBeaver) amount to one of the most wildly aberrant and damaging examples of dressing up a dog's dinner in the history of disc reviews."

[manicsounds]

re: DON'T LOOK NOW Blu-ray mess. StudioCanal will point to this:



There's undoubtedly a big story behind this one.

Maybe the case like the Friedkin/French Connection debacle? Where he saw the restored version and signed off on it, but the disc that came out was NOT the same thing he signed off on...

[peerpee]

Yup, it's got to be the same sort of thing.

[tenia]

Be careful : supervised / approved restoration doesn't mean supervised / approved encoding and all.
Remember Le samourai : beautiful new prints in the theaters, awful "aquarelle style" BR.

[MichaelB]

Yes, Roeg may well have sat in on the telecine and the picture restoration, but what happened after that is anybody's guess. And of course as someone who grew up with film - i.e. the celluloid 35mm medium - he may be completely uninterested in the Blu-ray medium, and might have assumed (reasonably) that what he saw projected or on a huge monitor at the facilities house would be broadly similar to what people would see at home. Or he might not have a Blu-ray player and was only sent a DVD screener for final approval. Who knows?

[peerpee]

I'm going to find out.

[Drucker]

He's making a list he's checking it twice!

[triodelover]

By the way, Peerpee, why all of a sudden revive a 1-year-old comment by Pro-B who doesn't post here anymore? Did you happen to watch the disc recently?

I knew the 'restoration' was a stinker, but hadn't realised it received such glowing reviews. I watched it again recently and have been researching all reviews it received – completely dumbfounded.

Nick, I'm not trying to put the cat amongst the pigeons (well, perhaps a tad ), but I wonder if you think the discussion here has any merit. Scroll down to the poster "adamhopelies" and go forward, including the exchanges between Svet and David Hare. I find particular interest in the claims of those who attended the restoration showing in London with Scorsese in attendance that the BD reflects what was seen there.

I own the disk and, while I wouldn't go as far as Svet on the positive side, neither do I think it's an unwatchable POS. It's far better than any SD version I've seen. It surely doesn't deserve to be in the company of Don't Look Now or Pathé's execrable Le Samouraï. The use of DNR is heavy handed in spots, but it's not uniform through the film. In motion it has more to recommend it that one might glean from static screen caps. As David said in his post then, the color palette and depth are quite good. Just my 2p. YMMV.

[peerpee]

re: PEEPING TOM. I'm not sure what Scorsese and Thelma signed off (a Digital Intermediate?), I'm not sure whether Scorsese was happy only with the DI and the DCP, or how they relate to the finished Blu-ray.... but what exists on the finished Blu-ray in motion is an abortion of digital processes. It's highly digital and does not resemble film.

Interestingly, Scorsese references the first Friedkin FRENCH CONNECTION Blu as if to say "it's crazy, anything's possible!" – but that's a Blu-ray which has since proved to be entirely faulty and has been replaced.

Dr Svet disses Beaver's compressed caps but when you consider the actual Blu-ray *in motion* it's far more damning. You can't pore over grabs (uncompressed or compressed) and appreciate just how much the digital processes are detrimentally affecting the image *in motion*.

I'd like to know what Scorsese and Thelma think of the finished Blu-ray, and I'd like to know whether Dr Svet still stands by his 2 year old rave.

[triodelover]

Between my post above and this one I watched the BD again. It's definitely problematic and the closer one gets the worse it appears. It had been at least a year since I'd since before the last post. Now I'm less enthusiastic but I'll still watch it. I still think while flawed it's not unwatchable and we're not likely to get anything better anytime soon.

As far as Scorsese goes, from comments I've read he seems to value getting the color palette and depth correct, even at the price of a loss of grain. He referenced The Adventures of Robin Hood in this respect and, while noting the loss of grain, seemed genuinely pleased with the results specifically because of the color restoration. Just a thought. (Although the Scorsese/Schoonmaker-supervised resto of Blimp managed to achieve these goals without sacrificing the grain or film-like appearance - three-strip Techni vs Eastmancolor, though.)

[whaleallright]

Maybe the case like the Friedkin/French Connection debacle? Where he saw the restored version and signed off on it, but the disc that came out was NOT the same thing he signed off on...

This isn't what happened. Friedkin signed off on a version that was essentially identical to the one released on the first Blu-Ray. In fact, those responsible for the Blu-Ray tried to talk him out of it, but he insisted that "This is how I always wanted it to look." After everyone (including Owen Roizman) ripped that disc to shreds, Friedkin did an about-face, claimed he was appalled by the transfer, and blamed it on the mastering.

Directors, especially decades down the line, aren't always the best judges of their own material. Their memories are often hazy, their aesthetic judgment faltering.... This doesn't mean we should abandon efforts to get directors to approve material, only that their approval doesn't necessarily guarantee that the digital transfer is going to be tip-top. Note how many "director-approved" Blu-Rays have been revised according to the teal-and-orange color scheme of present-day action films.

With Technicolor, you often have an issue where people remember bold colors "popping off the screen." But in many eras, including much of the 1940s, color prints tended to be more subdued (following the dictates of Natalie Kalmus of Technicolor). So the same color that seemed to "pop" in one decade may seem underwhelming in that regard a few decades later. For a Technicolor film to impress a contemporary viewer with its bold, super-saturated color, chances are you'd have to increase the lustre and saturation beyond what you would have seen in an original print. I think everybody is subject to such biases--it's the nature of memory. So when Scorsese says a new restoration impresses him just as the film did back in [x] year, that isn't necessarily a statement about how the film actually appeared in an earlier decade, but about the effect it had on Martin Scorsese, spectator. An example of this is the Gang's All Here fiasco. The original DVD version actually had (relatively subdued) colors that most closely matched existing original materials, but people felt it was not bold enough; so the folks at Fox went back to the drawing board and created a new master that, while not an accurate representation of the actual color values of the original prints, impressed contemporary viewers in a similar way.

So the question becomes: do you try to comply with the original colors or with the audience's subjective experience of those original colors--or rather, with contemporary audiences' notions of what the film should look like based on the impression it seemed to leave on original spectators? The logic of the latter can be extended into absurdity--what if audiences of the 2070s (presuming the planet is still supporting human civilization) are only truly impressed with a neon-orange color scheme? But as with the Gang's All Here situation, studios will receive flak if their transfers don't conform with contemporary ideas about what "Technicolor" should mean.

[manicsounds]

This isn't what happened. Friedkin signed off on a version that was essentially identical to the one released on the first Blu-Ray. In fact, those responsible for the Blu-Ray tried to talk him out of it, but he insisted that "This is how I always wanted it to look." After everyone (including Owen Roizman) ripped that disc to shreds, Friedkin did an about-face, claimed he was appalled by the transfer, and blamed it on the mastering.

In this interview, Friedkin explains what went wrong

[hearthesilence]

We talked about that interview before, and again, Friedkin's story is complete bullshit. Think about it:

On the first Blu-Ray, they go in great detail about what they did to the image, both in the supplements and in the interviews Friedkin did at the time. He talked specifically about Moby Dick's look and applying that to this film by merging two images, one of which is desaturated, creating that extra grainy look drained of color. This wasn't just tweaking levels, they had to do much more.

Every point, every aesthetic choice he made was blasted by everyone, including his DP. Now we have this new version that completely does away with EVERYTHING Friedkin did to the old Blu-Ray, and considering the substantial changes he made before (desaturating the color, the extra grain), the absence of those features is indisputable in proving that they re-did it without subjecting the film to the same procedure. There's no way the image was corrected by a simple change in manufacturing or "mastering," this had to be a major overhaul.

I'm glad Friedkin saw the error of his ways, I'm glad they corrected this disc, I hope Universal does the same with Do The Right Thing. But that story in that interview is utter bullshit.

[tenia]

I have always been extremely surprised by what is now the speech of Friedkin about this 1st Blu Ray.
"Nah, I did something, and then, between what I supervised and what has been encoded, something went wrong".
But you have like pages and pages on the Internet of him saying how he wanted this specific look, but also tons of extra features on the Blu Ray itself ! about it too.

It's just plain hypocrisy.

[whaleallright]

Right, that's Friedkin's story, and he's sticking to it. Aside from all the evidence marshaled above, I have it on good personal authority that he approved a transfer that looked essentially the same as what was actually stamped onto that initial BluRay. The folks at Fox were as flustered as anyone, but I imagine would have felt a bit weird telling Friedkin he was way off base about how his "own" film should look.

David, I don't know the full print of history of The Gang's All Here, and I defer to your knowledge re. that particular film. I will argue that even given variations among studios, genres, and directors, that most Technicolor films of the 1930s and 1940s were actually more subdued than what many of us have come to expect from the word "Technicolor"--and this wasn't simply due to limitations in striking prints. I'd recommend Scott Higgins's book Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow for discussion of this. My larger point though is that sometimes home videos are mastered to meet the expectations of contemporary audiences, which are shaped not just by contemporary tastes and the qualities of prints struck decades after the original release but also by the vicissitudes of memory. Having a director's insignia on a disc, or having Martin Scorsese praise the transfer, does not get us around these problems.

This isn't necessarily tied to the Technicolor issue; I used that as an illustration of the larger phenomenon. I don't actually have a dogmatic opinion about how these variables should be weighed when preparing a new transfer of a film--the best we can hope for is that the folks overseeing the transfer and/or restoration are historically informed and possessed of good taste. There are definitely cases where a new restoration can make a film look "better," or even closer to the director and/or cinematographer's original intent, than any previous prints or transfers. Jour de fête might be an example of this.

[MichaelB]

There are definitely cases where a new restoration can make a film look "better," or even closer to the director and/or cinematographer's original intent, than any previous prints or transfers. Jour de fête might be an example of this.

Jour de fête is an excellent example, but of course in this case there is no doubt at all that Tati intended the film to be shown in colour, and that it was a matter of immense frustration to him that this was never possible during his lifetime. It's obviously a shame that the restoration couldn't have been carried out with his direct input, but I don't think anyone would disagree that the end result is far closer to what he would have wanted, even if it's impossible to be absolutely precise about his exact wishes.

[JonasEB]

Any other Blu-rays that fall into this category? I'm making lists.

It's not a Studio Canal title, but I just looked at the Gaumont A Man Escaped again and would consider it a candidate. Not sure what exactly Gaumont did to this or why they did it this way - the lighter the greyscale the better the appearance of the grain but it's mostly missing in the darker greys. Very uneven and unnatural. Lots of banding in the dark greys throughout, usually easy to ignore, but the last part of the film is VERY heavily afflicted by it, some of the worst I've ever seen (like a mass of gel or plastic is rippling over it - not at all times, by the way, but it's instantly noticeable at the beginning of one of the last couple of chapters.)

I recall the disc was delayed for several months; I wonder if Gaumont noticed the problems, discovered they couldn't do anything about it without restarting from scratch, and let it go. Perhaps that's why Criterion haven't touched it yet. They might do their own work on it (what with the Children of Paradise debacle...)

But it's still better than the DVDs and another disc I'm glad to have (like Johnny Guitar or the flawed Taiwan Blu series, particularly Dust in the Wind.)

[Calvin]

Unlike the French monstrosity, the UK cover of Forbidden Games uses the original poster and it looks great:

[TMDaines]

I wonder why this wasn't part of the Collection,