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Originally Posted by keirarts  From the sounds of things though this one is genuinely not arrows fault as they bought it fully restored. ZFE was their own restoration so should have been spotted but this was not in house. |
Just to be strictly accurate, the ZFE error was caused by a mistimed bit of seamless branching at the authoring stage - the restored master that James White signed off on was perfect from the start. Obviously, it should have been spotted in QC regardless, but it was an encoding rather than a restoration issue.
And
Shivers is, as you say, down to the supplied master, which was accepted in good faith. In retrospect, it could have been checked against a DVD, but it seemed reasonable to assume that a very recent restoration supervised by the film's director would be exactly as he intended. This may still be the case, of course: we don't currently know if it was intentional on Cronenberg's part, a reluctant but deliberate omission due to the condition of existing materials (this was apparently a bit of a restoration challenge since the original negative vanished years ago), or simply an oversight.
But one upshot of this is that this morning I personally checked Arrow's HD master of
Rabid against a NTSC DVD, and the timing of both was identical - even by the 90th minute there was no slippage at all: cuts and lip-sync still matched perfectly. So you can completely relax about that one.
As for the look of the
Shivers transfer, to me it pretty much perfectly matched my memories of seeing it in 35mm. This is, inescapably, a very low-budget film ($179,000) shot by an extremely inexperienced director (Cronenberg had never worked with a professional crew before), whose original camera negative has long since vanished. In other words, it never stood a chance of being Blu-ray demonstration material, but if you watch it in motion the new transfer's virtues are pretty obvious. And the framing and grading are to Cronenberg's own specifications.