2021-02-03, 06:37 PM
(This post was last modified: 2021-02-03, 08:32 PM by pipefan413.)
(2020-06-09, 08:21 PM)pipefan413 Wrote: Anyway, this is good news for the overall picture, but bad news for the issue I described trying to eradicate: the Arrow release also has the really noticeable frame misalignment on hard cuts that you get on the earlier scan, presumably because although it does seem to have access to more vertical resolution, they've understandably chosen to preserve the maximum possible amount of picture rather than using the extra vertical resolution to manually crop every frame down and realign the hard cuts / splices. This is a pain in my arse, but does mean that I can take the Arrow release and crop in just enough to get the vertical space to fix the alignment issue without losing a huge amount of picture in the process (I'm guessing without actually testing it yet that the result would be similar framing to the Image release, though I'd probably stick to 1.37:1 to avoid cropping too much horizontally). Alternatively, I could do a "theatrical reconstruction" which goes back to the old 1.85:1 matte, I guess.
(2020-06-12, 02:39 AM)pipefan413 Wrote: GOOD NEWS: after checking several known problem sequences, the US-exclusive Arrow release *does not* appear to suffer from the jumpy cut problem I described. It's stable!
![[Image: pnzJTq3.gif]](https://i.imgur.com/pnzJTq3.gif)
Not a clue what the hell I was talking about the first time, maybe I meant to say "Image" and said "Arrow" by mistake. Or I played the wrong file. It's a mystery.
... Anyway.
I finally went about looking into sticking the logo from the Something Awful BD onto the start of the Arrow BD. But uh... I'm not even sure that it's as clear-cut as I originally expected.
See, since I initially was going to do this, 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!
![[Image: Basket-Case004940.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/kMWLz3HN/Basket-Case004940.png)
I've put together a fairly brief comparison video to show some of the main differences between these, with more comparisons of the colour grading as screenshots in a gallery.
Gallery: https://postimg.cc/gallery/qtfvqC1/df77b742
Video:
Note: Vimeo seems to be transcoding this to 360p for some reason despite it being encoded as 720p (and having eaten the full filesize out of my upload allowance). I don't know if it does that initially then the 720p version will become available later, or if there's something I can do to stop it downsampling to 360p when I don't want it to.
EDIT: Yeah it's still showing as 360p so I've just adjusted all the scaling to 1080p and am re-rendering. I could've sworn I uploaded 720p before and it worked just fine but never mind...
