Most companies that release silents on BD insist on encoding them at 1080p, which supports only 24fps. This introduces judder on all movies that run at slower frame rates, as they are stretched to fit into 24fps. Sometimes, such as with 18fps, it's almost tolerable, while with 22fps, it's whiplash-inducing (every 11th frame repeats). In every case, the motion is no longer smooth and really gets on my nerves! Silents never have jerky motion when presented from a proper film print.

Before BD, silents were transferred to home video interlaced (60 fields per second), and the motion was pretty good, with 60fps working for all frame rates, and every frame held for roughly the same amount of time.

However, since these BDs are pretty much the only way to see these movies, it's become a hobby of mine to fix the frame rates. I demux the video from the BD and delete all the duplicated frames. I then take the decimated file and re-sync it to the audio. While doing this, I take the opportunity to fix mastering errors and delete frames whose repairs are egregiously bad. When there are subtitles, I retime and occasionally retranslate them, with the goal to minimize the amount of subs that flash onscreen (one intertitle equals one subtitle). I also remove all modern logos and credits, making them separate files, since you usually won't see any if you go to a screening of an archival print.

All movies are available as a 1080i BD. Many are also available as a 60fps MKV. You must provide blanks, postage, and proof of purchase. I send these via snail mail; no links. PM me for details.

I will add to this list as I complete more.

TITLES:

Alice Guy Blaché, Vol. 1 (1897-1907)
Anna Boleyn
Back Pay (1922)
Battleship Potemkin (Kino)
Birth of a Nation, The (Kino)
Birth of a Nation, The (Twilight Time)
- Supplemental shorts only for now
Black Pirate, The
Blood and Sand (1922)
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The (Eureka)
Casanova (1927)
Chaplin's Essanay Comedies 1915
Charlie Chaplin: The Mutual Comedies (1916-17)
Devil's Needle, The (1916) and Other Tales of Vice and Redemption
Doll, The
Downhill (Criterion)
End of St. Petersburg, The (1927)
Extraordinary World of Charlie Bowers, The
Fall of Babylon, The
Fantomas
- Improved PAL-NTSC conversion using the French release
Faust (Eureka)
Filibus (1915)
Fragment of an Empire (1929)
Frankenstein (1910, Library of Congress)
- Public domain. Proof of purchase not necessary.
Funeral of Valentino, The (1926)
Games of the V Olympiad, The (1912)
Golem, The (1920)
Grand Duke's Finances, The
Hands of Orlac (1924)
Holy Mountain, The (1926)
Hunchback of Notre Dame, The (1923)
Ich mochte kein Mann sein
Inhumaine, L'
Intolerance
J'accuse (1919, Flicker Alley)
Last Laugh, The
Late Mathias Pascal, The
- DVD replaces brief portions damaged in the master
- Defective BD audio replaced by DVD audio (Bonus: now seven minutes shorter!)
Lodger, The (Criterion)
Lost World, The (1925)
Loves of Pharaoh, The
- English intertitles
Michael (1924)
Money (1928)
Mother (1926)
Mother and the Law, The
Mountain-Cat, The
Mude Tod, Der (Eureka)
Napoleon
- Finale also available as 4K UHD MKV
Nibelungen, Die (Kino)
Nosferatu (1922)
- FWMS version with original German intertitles
- FWMS version with Kino's English intertitles
- Photoplay version
Old Ironsides
Oyster Princess, The
Page of Madness, A
Phantom
Portrait of a Young Man
Schloss Vogelod
Sheik, The (Eureka)
Sherlock Jr. (1924)
Spanish Dancer, The (1923)
Stage Struck
Sumurun
Tartuffe
Ten Commandments, The (1923)
- Color segments reinserted
- Available as a 24fps BD and a 60fps MKV
Three Ages (1923)
Trip to the Moon, A (2018 edition)
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1910, Vitagraph)
Valley of Silent Men, The (1922)
Vampires, Les (Kino)

Greetings!

As my username might suggest, I'm interested in the preservation and archival of movies and television shows:

- Open Matte or OAR rarities, whether from DVDs or modern HD sources

- Any releases (HD or not) for content that sadly isn't released on Blu-ray (or sometimes even DVD) anywhere

- Any releases where the official disc releases are butchered, such as DNR, EE, aspect ratio changes, grading changes, bitrate, other changes (*cough* Disney *cough*)

- International imports for Blu-rays such as many 3D discs that sadly aren't released in North America

Let's say I have a DCP with Dolby Atmos, for example Mad Max: Fury Road, and the Blu-ray release of the same movie. What happens if I run both on a movie theater? Will I hear the same channels? (Dolby Atmos allows up to 128 audio tracks) I don't know if the Blu-ray (and UHD) releases come with a downmix.

The old-timers here will be well aware of this phenomenon and I certainly won't claim to have been the first to figure out what it was; a bunch of people here had worked this out long before I was even doing this kind of stuff, but I don't know if anybody's actually explained in any detail why it's at the specific frequency that it usually is. I figured others who also find this kind of thing interesting might benefit from having the numbers laid out clearly. This isn't the kind of thing that will help you capture LaserDiscs correctly, but it will give you some background info on what the hell those big horizontal lines are that appear in the spectrograms of the vast majority of LaserDisc captures (in my experience at least).

Quick note on fields vs frames: a "field" is half of one full frame of picture, containing either the odd-numbered or even-numbered scanlines. The electron beam in a CRT renders these alternately, drawing odd then even then odd and so on (I won't go into field order here because it's not really important to the thing I'm talking about, but you get the idea).

Right, so. Here's an example of a spectrogram for a PCM audio stream captured digitally from a LaserDisc (side 1 of one of my three different copies of THE HUNGER):



Notice that there's a very obvious straight horizontal line through basically the entire recording, just below 16 kHz:



As others have quite astutely noticed, this line is created when the person recording the soundtrack does so in the same room as one or more powered-on CRT monitors/TVs.

A CRT TV or monitor contains a flyback transformer that sends a sawtooth signal to the electromagnet, which is what causes the electron beam to bend in order to "draw" scanlines horizontally across the screen. Since the (full) resolution of NTSC video is actually 525 lines (of which only 480 are usually intended to be visible), and the frame rate of NTSC is 30/1.001 whole frames per second, this means that to render one full frame of video, the flyback transformer in an NTSC monitor or TV has to go on and off at 525 x (30/1.001) = 15,734.27 times in one second. In other words, it oscillates back and forth between being magnetised and demagnetised at a rate of about 15,734 Hz. As this happens, the magnetic core very, very slightly deforms then snaps back to its previous shape over and over again due to a phenomenon called magnetostriction, which creates an audible noise at that frequency. Incidentally, magnetostriction is also what makes those retail security tags work: they contain a small magnet and a thin, ferrous metal ribbon that's cut so that magnetostriction will cause it to oscillate at a frequency of around 58 kHz when its subjected to an alternating current electromagnetic field (e.g. the one created by those security things at the doors of a shop). There's a really good video about that here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAm7qAKAXwI

Anyway, yeah, so the magic number here is 15,734 Hz (15.73 kHz). Sure enough, that's pretty much exactly where that line seems to sit on Spek's Y axis scale: I quickly cropped in from the top and bottom to see how many pixels off 16 kHz the line is, and it's 10 off 16 kHz in the exported image with 75 pixels in between 14 and 16 kHz meaning that that line is at (65/75) * (16 - 14) + 14 = 15.73 kHz.

But what's that? There are *two* horizontal lines in the above spectrogram? Why, yes! Just beneath the 15.73 kHz line there is a significantly fainter one that *also* runs through the entire recording from start to finish.

All the numbers used above are for NTSC, but there might be some cases where the line will be shunted downwards a little bit. If so, it's probably a decent indicator that somewhere in its lineage, it's been recorded in Europe, or another PAL region. PAL TVs/monitors render 625 lines (576 of which are visible) at an effective rate of 25 fps. So the calculation from before becomes 625 x 25 = 15,625‬ Hz (15.63 kHz). And sure enough, if I use the same method of just cropping the image by a pixel at a time, I find that in that 75-pixel range between 14 and 16 kHz, the lower of the two lines sits 61 pixels beyond 14 kHz, which means it's sitting at (61/75) * (16 - 14) + 14 = 15.63 kHz. So indeed, at some point, this track has been recorded with a PAL monitor running somewhere nearby. The effect of the NTSC resonant frequency however is a lot stronger in this example, which makes sense because it's an NTSC LaserDisc.

Some more recent home video releases deal with this artefact in a fairly unsophisticated way: they sometimes use what I've referred to in the past as the "ice pick lobotomy" method, a term I decided was appropriate because it looks rather like they just smashed a long, sharp implement through the spectrogram somewhere between 15 and 16 kHz, obliterating everything in the chosen range (which is arguably as devastating to the 15-16 kHz frequency band as a lobotomy is to a person's prefrontal cortex). You can clearly see this on TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY, for example, as it appears on the now out of print 2008 French Blu-ray Disc:



For comparison's sake, here's an earlier version of that same track (from an old Japanese DVD):



(T2 CDS mix spectrogram discussion is in this thread: https://fanrestore.com/thread-1876-page-14.html. Thanks to @MrBrown, @Stamper, and @Chewtobacca for info on the 2003 Japanese DVD and 2008 French BD containing this particular track.)

First of all...

Wikipedia (Saving Private Ryan):

Distributed by

DreamWorks Pictures (North America)
Paramount Pictures (International)

After Spielberg signed on to direct the film, Paramount and DreamWorks, who agreed to finance and produce the film together with Amblin Entertainment and Mutual Film Company, both made a distribution deal where DreamWorks would take over the film's domestic distribution while Paramount would release the film internationally. In exchange for distribution rights for Saving Private Ryan, Paramount would retain domestic distribution rights to Deep Impact, while DreamWorks would acquire international distribution.

Wikipedia (Deep Impact):

Distributed by

Paramount Pictures (North America)
DreamWorks Pictures (through United International Pictures) (International)

But, what can we see in the blu-ray releases? This order:

Deep Impact - Paramount logo-Dreamworks logo - RIGHT
Saving Private Ryan - Paramount logo-Dreamworks logo - WRONG?

Why? Ok, what about other Dreamworks-Paramount movies?:

Imdb (Michael Mann's Collateral):

There is no sound during the opening DreamWorks logo sequence but the sound of a jet landing are heard during the Paramount logo sequence. In the non-US versions, the studio logos order is reversed, so there is no sound on Paramount's and a jet landing is heard over Dreamworks'.

Like Collateral, I suppose the order must be Dreamworks logo-Paramount logo (for the US prints) and Paramount logo-Dreamworks logo (for the International prints). The US Collateral Blu-ray is ok, but what happens with Saving Private Ryan?

First Question - The UK Blu-ray release shows a runtime of 2:49:28 (with the wrong logo order, I suppose International version) Is there no blu-ray release of the US version?

Second Question - Are there any further differences between the US and international versions? There are some differences between the theatrical version and the DVD version. Perhaps the US theatrical version was also not released on Blu-ray.

Wikipedia:

Differences between theatrical version vs. DVD

• on the beach in Normandy Tom Hanks orders his men to take out the sniper that has them pinned down. Soldier after soldier die as they go around the corner while they have covering fire. There is a scene that was cut where he is telling a soldier (after soldier baulks) that they will both go out together. Tom counts down and fakes going out and the other soldier goes out and is gunned down.
• Scene where they let the two German soldiers walk away - DVD version does not show them shot in the back as they are down the road.

A 35 mm. print of the US theatrical version can shed light on these issues.

I had a copy on a HDD that crashed and was looking to find the track again for a possible project.

Indulging in a rare cross-post because this seems more relevant here than in the original thread it grew out of...

I watched the UK release of this a while back (distributed by Second Sight) and was relatively impressed overall except that the transfer suffers from a really distracting "bump" at nearly every hard cut in the entire film, which initially confused the hell out of me, but I've since decided is just an artefact of the physical cutting of the final IP at 16 mm size and is therefore inherent to the scan, though they could've easily fixed it by stabilising it digitally.

I learned afterwards that Arrow actually had their own restoration (courtesy of MoMA) but it was never released here, presumably because Second Sight has the rights. My experience of Arrow had been overwhelmingly positive so I ended up importing a copy. I had a vague intention to reinsert a missing distributor logo from the Second Sight version or the original US release of the same transfer, but I've been distracted with hundreds of other things and only just decided I wanted to do that now. But I think having compared the three releases, I've now changed my mind, at least for the time being.

See, in the interim, I've realised that Arrow's Achilles' heel more often than not seems to be colour grading accuracy. This makes sense to me, because they very often scan negatives, rather than IPs; I guess they're not necessarily aiming to recreate the original colours but rather just make them look subjectively "good". I feel like this would be more or less a non-issue if they graded to reliable colour references but from looking at this film and others they've released, I'm not convinced that they always do.

What I've ended up doing is lining up all three versions and comparing them, as I've done with some other things (including, recently, DRACULA). Look at the difference!

So just a question that I've been meaning to ask for a while. I consider 1080p to be the default nowadays and really don't see 2160p supplanting it for awhile at current pace. So most of my projects will still be 1080p for the foreseeable future.

The question I wanted to ask, was if I have a chance to do something in 2160p (probably 4K/2020/SDR, maybe HDR) would people want that over 1080p? I know a good chunk of members have moved up to 4K TVs which would say to me to go 2160p but the benefits at proper distance are limited and the render time is longer.

Just curious to hear from you good people here on fanres as to what you prefer.

This isn't about the various different cuts; I more or less see the unrated theatrical cut as definitive, the R-rated cut as a weird curiosity (the hypnotism subplot is very odd but explains some things better than they ended up being explained in the film), and the integral cut as an overlong mess.

No, what I'm confused by is the soundtrack.

The UK releases from Second Sight only have a "stereo" mix as LPCM and a 5.1 mix. The Arrow release that I only just discovered the existence of (because it wasn't released here due to Second Sight having the rights) also has a mono track. My assumption would be that the mono is the original audio and the other two are remixes. IMDb seems to disagree, claiming it was originally Ultra Stereo, and 4-track stereo "Bionic Sound" in Japan:



So uh... what gives? Where's this mono track coming from? Is IMDb just wrong? Where the heck might they have got the info from, if so?

I saw a 35 mm print of the unrated cut years ago but it was so long ago that I wasn't really paying enough attention to work out whether the soundtrack was stereophonic or not. It wouldn't surprise me either way, tbh. EDIT: The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced the print I saw (which I believe was a US print but might be wrong) was monophonic. The opening theme was noticeaby absent of stereo separation at the very least and I feel like if you're going to make a stereo mix that's one thing you'd make an effort to stereo-ise.

Hi,

I am desperately looking for a bonus video only available on the theatrical version bluray disc of LOTR ROTK.

Please note that it's only on Region-A (US) bluray. Not on Region-B Europe theatrical discs, or extended cut discs, or any other previously-released DVDs, or 4K-bluray discs,

The video I request is special extended edition preview trailer (about 7 minutes) of Return of the King.

Any help from US or Canadian members will be highly appreciated. Thanks.