[Archived] Escape from New York [Evit/PAVIS]: US & Italian theatrical [ARCHIVED]

[PDB]

So sounds like you are still a go ahead for this project, Evit.

[Evit]

Yeah, but this German fixed-Shout release is precious. I'll inspect it carefully soon enough, I want to know if they just took a Shout bluray and did what I'm doing (hence, re-encoded it at least once) or if they had access to the actual scan and applied the fixes BEFORE encoding it onto a consumer BluRay disc. Depending on this I might either take parts from the German BR and use them to fix the last things that mine need fixed or make the German release as the base on which to apply my own fixes (only where my fixes were better than theirs).

[spoRv]

Great job, Evit!

[Evit]

Thank me only when it's over ahah! You never know!

So far I checked David14 screen, is it just me or the German release (video kindly posted by bendermac in the previous page) has less grain than the Shout one (DNR?) and a weird grid effect on the glare around the words? (you can find Shout and first MGM releases in the first post, I posted screengrabs for both Shout and SpoRv releases, plus my fixed one)

[bendermac]

The new German BD has DNR applied.

[Evit]

I guess I'll still have to base my the work on the American release then, and use parts of the German BR for the last things that need fixed.
I take for granted that you all like the original film grain around here

[Evit]

Ok folks, with a huge help from MrBrown I could finally integrate the last fixes needed. Visually the film is all fixed, you'll find more details on the first post. I'll discuss audio compression with DoomBot shortly. And I'm still waiting to hear from my seamless branching guy who recently vanished for work (he does that sometimes). If anyone else likes to meddle with seamless branching let me know, I like to keep my options open. Even if you can branch "non seamlessly" I would still consider it because the cut happens in a part of the film where it fades to black for a while and there is no music.

A couple of notes on the latest German BR release from last month, as we have already mentioned it's basically the same Shout release that they digitally fixed in post... which is exactly what I was doing. Aside from going through a DNR treatment, I also noticed the following things on the German 2016 BR:

1) David14 screen is identical to Shout (too bright), but they enhanced the outline of the letters since people complained that they couldn't see what was written on the screen, but still appears too bright. My fix is better than the German one.

2) moiree effect was fixed by superimposing a freeze frame of the wooden board and making it shake a bit so it wouldn't look completely still. It's not elegant but it's a decent compromise (which I stole). The problem is that on the German BR this somehow affected the black levels and they lost details on shadows. Obviously I "imported" only the area of the wooden board to eliminate the moiree effect from it, black levels and face details are still the same in my final version as they are in the Shout factory BR.

3) In the intro, the colors of the neon outline of New York are exactly the same but the German BR appears zoomed in for some inexplicable reason! So it loses informations from the sides. I don't know why they would do this. So in short, they didn't fix the colors there (one of the complaints of some fans) and they screwed it up by zooming in for no real reason.

4) For what is worth, DNR used for the German BR is applied pretty decently compared to other titles (it's no Predator!).

5) German BR features German audio that they took from laserdisc but compressed in AC3 at 224 kpbps. It is virtually identical to MrBrown's audio capture of his Laserdisc so obviously I'm using MrBrown's, which has the advantage of being saved in PCM so we can give it a higher quality treatment than 224kpbs.

Can't think of anything else for the moment. Ah yes, it looks like I removed the infamous blu line more efficiently than the Germans did for their release so my months of work were not in vain after all!
Now I'll have to investigate how to make subtitles. If anybody wants to give me a hand with that I'd be very grateful

[PDB]

Sounds great Evit. Can't wait to see the final results.

[Evit]

Trust me, I can't wait either! Look at my hard disk situation...

[Evit]

I haven't heard from the seamless branching guy for a while so in case he doesn't show up again I'll probably have to work differently and I'm considering two separate releases, although that's not necessarily a bad thing for the world outside of Italy.

1) American release with English, German and Italian audio tracks (This is basically a "fixed" Shout Blu Ray with no extras and three properly-synched audio tracks from Laserdiscs).

2) Italian release (intro credits translated, as seen on 35mm) including English and Italian language

All I have left to do is the subtitles and I'm not sure how to move about it. I'm working with Premiere and then I guess I'll do the authoring with Encore. Not sure how to make and insert subtitles, can they be done in Encore or Premiere? Has anyone worked on subtitles with the adobe suite?