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Are we surprised? He packed up his toys and left this forum years ago after not liking even mild pushback

domino harvey wrote: Tue Mar 09, 2021 8:06 pm Are we surprised? He packed up his toys and left this forum years ago after not liking even mild pushback

Meaning you banned him

Edit: For the record, I wasn't around at the time. Just came across that conversation a while ago while searching for something else.

Ha I forgot about that, mea culpa! I may have been thinking of Harry Lime, but now I don’t trust my memory!

I'm sure Domino's ban happened a few minutes before Mr Insider would've stormed out of the building

Does anyone know who Mr Insider may be? Regardless, Kino really ought to get someone else to spread the word.

Didn't we determine that it was an open, rotating position, the only qualification for which is the inability to be wrong?

FrauBlucher wrote:The KL Insider has put a moratorium on everything except release info and sales announcements on the bluray.com forum. He's gotten a little beaten up over there by a few about misrepresenting what kind of restorations have been done to some titles. It's a shame

It seems now more and more clearer Alfredo Garcia isn't sourced from the Arrow 4k master but the older TT master, so I guess this explains that, which is some way is the only possibility left when such an appalling choice of communication can only put you in a corner once it's clear you were, as originally suspected, wrong.

To think it'd be so much easier for those representatives if they were just, you know, calm and polite in their communication just like almost every other label...

In the meantime though, blu-ray.com has seemingly expectedly deleted some posts (including some from KLI).

The Kino thread on HTF is constantly peppered with reminders from the mods begging people not to ask about possible releases. Kino really needs an "Insider" without such a thin skin. Just ignore the questions if they bother you so damn much.

With Insider gone, there's only conjecture.

A man who works for KL just watched Riding Shotgun (De Toth, 1954), one of the better Scott vehicles not directed by Boetticher. He thought it was "really good."

Edit: His dad loves Randolph Scott

Years and years of poor tact from the Kino rep(s) never ceases to amaze me. It takes no extra effort to be polite in providing feedback. Even a simple "We believe we received the 4K file from MGM, but we'll reconfirm and return with a response once we do" would be acceptable as a start. But instead they double down in their insistence that no error could have occurred, even though the DVD/BD era of home video has had errors on various titles for 25 years now. With how little companies are willing to pay for quality control these days it's a miracle this doesn't happen even more. It's one of the secondary benefits of streaming for the studios - if something has an error on the file they can just update the server when the correct version is tracked down; if something has a spelling error or a credit error on the description they can just update the text file rather than having to correct printed packaging.

More OOP based on previously being in the "While Supplies Last" sale and now no longer appearing on the website:

Defiance (1980)

I seem to recall at one point a year or so back, Mister Lime/Kino Insider posted on the blu-ray-dot-com thread, announcing (not asking or suggesting) that the thread was now only for announcements and general questions and that all complaints or criticisms should be posted elsewhere on the forum.

First of all, he didn't even create the thread.

Secondly, it's not his forum to make such a decision.

What a presumptuous ass. Sadly, the mods over there are so sycophantic and desperate for "the scoop" from an "insider" (PR flunky) that they have a record of siding with the guy over almost every regular poster to the threads, despite his proven lies and lack of technical understanding when it comes to the various complaints.

Maybe they should lay off this PR guy and hire another (or at least one) QC person.

I guess they wouldn't want to miss out on all that insider info. I'm still bummed this site didn't get the inside scoop on Kino releasing the Jetsons Movie because domino banned the guy.

Damn shame.

Blu-ray.com cherishes insiders to death, but on the other hand, they had no problem banning insiders who legitimately criticized some of their reviewers, so I guess there are things KLI could do to get ban (or at least suspended).

He might not be that far away since he already started defending himself by spinning the blame on reviewers (though not blu-ray.com's).

I never was surprised by how quickly he got banned from here, since I believe that's how quickly he'd get ban from most boards who aren't craving the presence of an insider and are treating them pretty much like a regular member.

Edit : predictably, the blu-ray.com KL thread is now closed (temporarily, I suppose).
Edit 2 : caps are up on caps-a-holic now. The color differences between the TT Encore disc and the Kino disc are gone, and the Kino disc now looks exactly like the TT Encore (but with a new encode). I guess that's the time to save those definitive KLI posts about how they "have both masters and are pretty sure they know how to do the difference".

I don't know how important posting on movie forums may be to his job, but it doesn't reflect well on the company. I can only guess that his employers don't follow his posts - if they do, it's surprising he hasn't been fired.

I guess that's the big question, but it's been going on for so long on several boards, so it's hard not to think KL is OK at least a bit with this person reprensenting them online in such a fashion.


On a different note, as mentioned on the blu-ray.com thread, the Digital Bits review of the Kino disc now looks quite untrustworthy.

I'm fascinated by the argument that seems to go "well, MGM said that it was the Arrow transfer, therefore it definitely is", as though this was carved in stone and no rightsholder has ever previously mislabelled a file.

All I have to say to that is that today I'm going to be subtitling a couple of Three Stooges shorts manually because although Sony notionally sent me their closed caption subtitles, they turned out to be for different Stooges shorts and because of the mislabelling they can't find the correct ones.

Much in the same way The Digital Bits evidently cannot tell the difference between an old dated master and a new modern one, Kino seemingly cannot either. They obviously saw the master they used, but simply took MGM's word, just as The Digital Bits have taken Kino's word. All labels should really employ not just someone to QC, but specifically someone who has "the eye" for video quality, ensuring issues like these (and any other video related errors) are caught at the QC stage*

*i am ready and willing labels

Kino also said they had access to both the new and the older masters, so maybe the Arrow was properly labelled but Kino mixed them up on their end of things and ended sending to authoring the wrong master.

This being written, Eddie Larkin sums up quite well my biggest issue with this kind of mistakes : just like Eureka with Five Graves to Cairo, educated amateurs can spot this doesn't look like any recent 4k work, so I'd guess the labels also can (and Digital Bits too). We're now well into this technology, and there are markers to recognise if something might not be what's advertised.

And as Michael wrote, always ALWAYS double check what you're sent, especially from a studio.

Another recent example: Irreversible was originally touted as a 4K restoration, information that Powerhouse reproduced in good faith - until they spoke to Gaspar Noé directly, who said that such a thing was a technical impossibility as the master copy of the film was a 2K digital intermediate. Although it was shot on film, all post-production (special effects, stitching together dozens of shots to make them look like a handful of ultra-long takes) was digital, and conducted at 2K resolution, and the Noé-supervised 2019 restoration was therefore also in 2K.

Obviously, with evidence as rock-solid as that you have no choice but to retract your original claim (as Powerhouse immediately did, and indeed made posts across various social media platforms and sending an email to their newsletter subscribers flagging this up), and I'd hope that that's how any label would react. Or at the very least quietly change the details on all their marketing to reflect something about which there's no room for debate whatsoever.

(As far as I can see, the misapprehension originally arose because back in 2019 StudioCanal sent out a list of newly-restored titles and implied that they were all 4K - there's quite a bit of excited coverage from late that year about an upcoming 4K version of Irreversible, a rumour that spread like wildfire to the point where people were complaining that no-one was putting it out on UHD Blu-ray.)

I'm still wondering exactly when this 2k master was produced, as the available caps-a-holic comparaisons make it look like the 2020 SC BD shares the same underlying digital file than the 2017 Italian BD (color grading is a bit different but the pixels, especially the grain field, are in the exact same positions).

As for your question Michael, the recent theatrical run of Irreversible explicitly stated that the Original Cut was restored in 4k (here for instance : https://carlottafilms.com/films/irrever ... integrale/). Some websites later precised the SC release was actually sourced from a 2k master, but not all of them. Noe also stated in an interview what you wrote, ie it actually couldn't be a real 4k restoration since the digital work capped the workflow at 2k. He however stated that some movie theaters might have requested 4k DCPs and that's where the files might have been upscaled to 4k.

Yup, it was reported so widely as being a 4K restoration that there was no particularly good reason to question it - after all, why wouldn't a 2019 restoration supervised by the original filmmaker and backed by StudioCanal be in 4K?

And I suspect the answer to your question is that since the film is ultimately a 2K digital file from 2002, transfers from it are going to look more similar than otherwise, minor encoding differences aside. Certainly, the grain field will and arguably should be pretty much identical, because that's how it appears in the original and any attempt at fiddling with it will most likely end up looking worse. As Gary Tooze is fond of saying, it is what it is.

Yes I suppose that in the end, it might be that the final deliverable is a digital file, hence why any newer version will still have the same pixels in the same place. It simply felt strange to me as I'm not used at all to such cases.

EddieLarkin wrote: Wed Mar 10, 2021 9:30 am Much in the same way The Digital Bits evidently cannot tell the difference between an old dated master and a new modern one, Kino seemingly cannot either. They obviously saw the master they used, but simply took MGM's word, just as The Digital Bits have taken Kino's word. All labels should really employ not just someone to QC, but specifically someone who has "the eye" for video quality, ensuring issues like these (and any other video related errors) are caught at the QC stage*

*i am ready and willing labels

Unfortunately hiring such people is bad for the bottom line. Even the big studios are cutting as many corners as they can for QC, and the things they actually care about are often things the consumers don't give a crap about, such as the disc having the correct legal disclaimer cards.

And it cost Universal four new disc pressings for Psycho :-k