#121
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Interesting point, but I look at it the opposite way with black-and-white silent movies evoking the horror films of German Expressionism! Despite being a fan of both, I'm more Nosferatu than Chaplin!
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#123
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I suppose not, but he was a hell of a filmmaker and actor. As much as I love horror films, I truly believe that City Lights is one of the 10 best films ever made. As much as I like it, I couldn't say the same thing about The Beyond!
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#124
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But yes, Chaplin was a genius for his time (and for any time for that matter). |
#125
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The wrong prints were the ones showing it in black and white. Quote:
- "Introduction by Catriona MacColl (0:57) - "Voices From The Beyond" (23:40) That makes a huge difference in the A/V department. |
#126
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Quote:
The Grindhouse encode used (more?) vertical filtering, too - that's basically the opposite of EE, and tends to blur the image spatially, but leaves motion largely unaffected. Applying this means there's less grain, and less grain means you can encode at a lower bitrate without obvious compression artifacts. Virtually all DVD encodes use this sort of filtering to some degree, though, so I'm not singling out Grindhouse for it, just stating what it looks like they used to squeeze the bitrate down a bit. The difference between the AB transfer and the Grindhouse transfer is 6.53 Mbps versus 5.77 Mbps. Neither are anywhere close to DVD's maximum bitrate (9.8 Mb), and both transfers would have looked even better with a higher bitrate and moved more of the bonus features to a second disc... but hey, if I had a nickel for every time I've had to say that! So while the lower bitrate was certainly a factor in the Grindhouse disc being softer, compression's much more involved than that. I'm not trying to argue with you on the subject, it's just one I deal with on a pretty regular basis, and it just drives me nuts when I see transfers of films I love using tricks like EE or vertical filtering when all they really have to do is kick up the stinkin' bitrate... As for all of the hooplah concerning the transfer: Quote:
I'd be curious if Mr. Salvati would be as enthused with his transfer of THE BEYOND as much now as he was over a decade ago. Technology improves, after all, and it's entirely possible that some aspects of the Grindhouse transfer were a compromise for the SDTV's which would have been the norm at the time. Think of it this way; Sam Raimi approved both the Elite DVD transfer and the Anchor Bay Blu-ray transfer for THE EVIL DEAD (Caps-A-Holic comparison), which look quite a bit different in terms of overall contrast and color timing. Was Raimi "wrong" back in 1999? Is he "wrong" now? Or was the Elite transfer simply the best the film could look using now antiquated technology, while the Blu-ray is the best the film can look using contemporary techniques? My vote goes for each being a perfectly valid presentation for the era and the format they were made on - but those formats change pretty dramatically over the space of just a decade. The best thing to do would be to get Mr. Salvati involved and have him go over the HD materials, since there's probably a world of difference between what a post house could do today and what they would have done back in 2000... but, I can already imagine a multitude of reasons why that may not happen. So unless he does get involved, at least there's no reason to assume the Grindhouse materials aren't at least reasonably close to how the film "should" look... |
#127
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I also deal with the subject on a regular basis... daily. I just said about the compression artifacts without going deeper into the technical stuff because many folks are not into that. Quote:
I´ll not talk about The Evil Dead because every time the movie gets released (lost count) it has something of a different look/twikering. I still haven´t buy the Blue-Ray and the only version I have is the Ultimate Edition from Anchor Bay R1 and I´m pretty happy with it for the meantime. And let´s not star about Star Wars... |
#128
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But I figured, well, why not mention it? We're in the "Technical" discussion, right? Quote:
Grindhouse is a really dedicated studio, and I always love seeing how much care they put into their titles... too bad their Cannibal Holocaust transfer was way beneath their usual standard. Quote:
I just figured The Evil Dead (or Alien, or Dawn of the Dead, or Halloween, or half a dozen other great films I could think of...) would be a decent way to remind people that just because we have an "approved" transfer made 10, 15 or 20 years ago doesn't mean the transfer can't still be improved upon. Salvati's the final word on The Beyond, but he hasn't had a chance to say anything in 11 years. As such I don't doubt that the Italian materials were a bit wonky, but I'm also not yet willing to say "The film has to look like the Grindhouse transfer, or it's WRONG!!", either. |
#129
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And don't forget Nosferatu was originally tinted with different colours.
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#130
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Was that before or after he became a mod on Cult Labs?
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