[Proposal] Halloween 2020 pipefan413 preservation: THE EXORCIST (1973)

[pipefan413]

Interesting observations! Appreciate the depth of your work, it's practically forensic.

Cool about the warmth. I remember I once got a laserdisc of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and found out that some title cards were the wrong color!

Aye see originally I thought maybe that scene was meant to be yellow pushed until the film continued and the whole thing was yellow pushed hahah. So I think it's just a yellowed print source.

I've not yet tested capturing through my sound card at 96 kHz mostly because where I have the player, I don't have a cable quite long enough (it'd be RCA-RCA instead of RCA-1/4" jack, which is what I'm doing with the capture card). Once decent cables arrive I'll try it. Really not looking forward to trial-and-error-ing my way to figuring out how much to slow down the audio to correct for the time compression...

[pipefan413]

A very quick update:

1. I am pretty confident that I don't really see much point in recording 96 kHz / 24-bit because although the noise floor is ever so slightly lower in 24-bit, it screws up sync and the benefit is very minimal because the actual track itself is so noisy and imperfect regardless

2. I've noticed that there seems to be unavoidable background noise caused by the actual LD player itself (*not* the capture device) which varies depending on the player, and was even present on somebody else's recording of the 1st JP Exorcist LD from an extremely high-end player. In fact, I feel that my recording from the player I used for the initial version of this project is better overall, despite it being from a much less fancy player (it is however an older one and I reckon that's probably why). So although I still intend to attempt to sync the sped-up (time compressed) original US LD, I have also sourced what I hope is a VHS copy with the original mono mix, and will be recording that too. Preliminary testing suggests that I'm getting better quality audio off my VCR than any LD player when recording non-CX analogue sound, so I'm going to try to do exactly that for films that might have mono on VHS (THE EXORCIST, PINOCCHIO, a handful of others). Unfortunately this involves a lot of guesswork as it's often hard to verify with certainty which particular version of a given tape you're buying and what the audio on it will be. For instance, I recently got a US copy of STAR WARS that all evidence told me would be a tape from 1984, but it turned out to have an ad at the start with a copyright notice dated 1990 even though the packaging was copyright 1984 (and was not the newer version of the same packaging design which still says copyright 1984, but rather the older one that doesn't mention digital restoration). So I could spend money importing tapes only to find them useless.

Watch this space anyway. For now, I think I'm going to prioritise TOY STORY for no reason other than I want to watch it ASAP. HERCULES and HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME DTS is also on the cards and I want to line up the MULAN theatrical 5.1 from the original Limited Issue DVD to something, most likely an HDTV capture or just the original UK DVD (being PAL and noticeably better quality than the US DVD).

[pipefan413]

Just realised I should probably mention this here:

If you're a horror fan - particularly of older horror and/or of vampire films - you might want to throw me a PM. I'm planning to get a couple of 35 mm prints scanned in the near future and I need some donations to make it happen. One of them is NEAR DARK, which I already mentioned in its own thread, but the other one I'm keeping a little more hush hush. If that's got you curious in any way, gimme a shout...

[SpookyDollhouse]

Sorry if this is not the place to pose such a question, but what differences are there between the original audio and later remix that's on the Bluray? I've actually never watched the Exorcist's remix before and I can't find a comparison anywhere. I'm curious because some say nothing was changed and others say it's very revisionist.

BTW this is excellent work and I'm totally down to check it out when done!

[pipefan413]

Sorry if this is not the place to pose such a question, but what differences are there between the original audio and later remix that's on the Bluray? I've actually never watched the Exorcist's remix before and I can't find a comparison anywhere. I'm curious because some say nothing was changed and others say it's very revisionist.

BTW this is excellent work and I'm totally down to check it out when done!

I've only spent any sort of time comparing the older mixes and none comparing any of them to the current mix, purely because I have no interest in the current mix. It definitely sounds noticeably different because just purely from memory alone I think I felt it to be much more "tame" than the mono or even the older 70 mm 6-track (or, more accurately, the old DVD 5.1 based on it). It might actually be that @The Aluminum Falcon is yer man for this, I'm not sure; I myself can't currently give you any kind of confident or detailed comparison, just that I recall the modern mix sounding a bit ploppers so I had no intention of considering it as a worthwhile thing to include.

[pipefan413]

So, the UHD release of The Exorcist is out. It would appear that the most pertinent details of the new iteration of the "theatrical cut" that appears on the UHD/4K release are as follows:

• The stupid digital morph at the end from "The Version You've Never Seen" is reverted back to the original jump cut
  
• It has the original mono soundtrack, for the first time since LaserDisc (which I intend to compare to the LaserDisc mono if I can get hold of a rip of the disc*)
  
• They still haven't restored the Saul Bass Warner logo at the start
  
• The blue tint that was also added to The Version You've Never Seen is, alas, still there
  

* I need to work out a solution for transferring UHD so I can do half-decent tone-mapping (e.g. to fix the weird magenta push on stuff like Hellboy) and indulge in my usual audio examinations, because my BD drive can't be flashed to support UHD and I don't have the money to buy a replacement drive that can. Unfortunately, Warner seems to have decided to be a dick and only release 4K stuff with recycled old discs from 10+ years ago (which they've just done for both The Exorcist and Enter The Dragon), which is extremely frustrating for those of us who don't have HDR-capable displays. I know it costs more to assemble a new 1080p disc from a new 4K transfer, but not doing so is a great big middle finger to the consumer.

[pipefan413]

It appears that the news is mostly good though not necessarily excellent regarding the theatrical mono soundtrack on the recently released 4K/UHD version of this released as part of the 100th anniversary of Warner Bros.:



There is definitely at least some recorded sound being lost here when you look at the spectrogram. Not ideal.

That said, listening to it subjectively, the result might still be an improvement overall. I would say after a cursory flick through that the vast majority of the missing/lost data on the top end is just mag hiss, meaning that they may have actually done a decent job of eradicating hiss without completely crippling the frequency response of the recorded sound. It doesn't sound completely fantastic, but neither does the LaserDisc, and the LaserDisc has loads of mag hiss with the additional minor annoyance of the ol' NTSC CRT hum at ~15.75 kHz (525 lines × 30 fields = 15750 Hz).

And yes, by the way, it is indeed mono and not a dodgy stereo track that's been mislabeled (I only remember seeing that a handful of times but it has happened in the past). In fact, it's just one "true mono" (1.0) track duplicated, since Flip 'N' Mix™ yields a totally null stream of sweet sweet binary zeroes for the entire runtime:




So, the sound isn't necessarily perfect, but it's possibly still the best it's ever sounded in 50 years.

Picture-wise, there's a decently natural grain field in there and colour looks subjectively pleasant more often than not but I'm not entirely convinced that it represents a true reflection of the 35 mm look of 1973, which is something that's increasingly hard to prove or disprove due to the fact that anything still left from the early-to-mid-70s is increasingly likely to have reduced to a faded, gooey biohazard. My instinct, which may very well be completely wrong, has me feeling that:

• the earthy browny-greeny colour palette seen in the elements scanned for TERROR IN THE AISLES (1984) and on the US flipper DVD (1997) is probably much more true to the original 1973 theatrical presentation, and
  
  
• the blue wash over the third act probably appeared no earlier than the 1979 re-release, the same mark on the timeline at which the previously monophonic soundtrack was revised with remixes done for Dolby Stereo (35 mm) and Dolby 6-track (70 mm).
  

We of course get the Blue Rinse treatment yet again on the UHD release:



Regardless of one's feelings on the colour, there is at least one other issue left unresolved on the UHD BD:



I'll next do some experimentation to work out how to get a decent tonemap going that I'm happy with so that I can convert the 4K HDR encode to 1080p SDR in order to watch the entire film from start to finish on my 1080p projector (I don't own a single HDR display and I don't particularly want to).

EDIT: And I'll probably fix the logo plastering at some point, but I have a long list of Things I Want To Do At Some Point and we all know how that's turned out for me in the past. I would like to, in any case.

[pipefan413]

I've still not watched the whole film but have discovered that there are some anomalies with the UHD mono track (gain fluctuation in a crowd scene, a few moments where it does sound noticeably strangled compared to LaserDisc). So, at some point, I do want to go back over all of my recordings of all of my LaserDiscs and try to create a single more-or-less-definitive resync, and probably at the very very least, reattach a Saul Bass Warner logo to the start of the 4K release. The colour is, in my opinion, definitely wrong, but it's still the best source available right now in terms of fidelity and can perhaps be somewhat corrected.

Mostly for my own sanity, the LaserDiscs I know that have the mono soundtrack are as follows:

1007 LV (1983, US; sped up to fit)
10JL-1007 (1985, JP; not sped up, and from a different source with different frame gaps)
NJEL-01007 (1989, JP; appears to be a functionally identical reissue of 10JL-1007)

I also have the following, which do not feature the original mono soundtrack:
1007 (1993, US; Dolby Surround, presumably based on 1979 Dolby Stereo/6-track)
PILF-2196 (1996, JP; weirdly, seems to have a "plain" stereo track with a unique mix, not matrix encoded (e.g. Dolby) in any way, but not mono either)

And, of course, the 4K/UHD release's version of the mono soundtrack should at the very worst be a useful patch-making resource if I end up deciding that one or more mono LaserDiscs represent better source material overall than the UHD.

I don't imagine I'll get this done very quickly because it's quite a lot of work, I have unreasonably high standards for making all edits sound as undetectable as humanly possible, I've got Real Life to contend with, and it's Christmas next week. I want to do it as soon as I can, though.

[M A]

I've still not watched the whole film but have discovered that there are some anomalies with the UHD mono track (gain fluctuation in a crowd scene, a few moments where it does sound noticeably strangled compared to LaserDisc). So, at some point, I do want to go back over all of my recordings of all of my LaserDiscs and try to create a single more-or-less-definitive resync, and probably at the very very least, reattach a Saul Bass Warner logo to the start of the 4K release. The colour is, in my opinion, definitely wrong, but it's still the best source available right now in terms of fidelity and can perhaps be somewhat corrected.

Mostly for my own sanity, the LaserDiscs I know that have the mono soundtrack are as follows:

1007 LV (1983, US; sped up to fit)
10JL-1007 (1985, JP; not sped up, and from a different source with different frame gaps)
NJEL-01007 (1989, JP; appears to be a functionally identical reissue of 10JL-1007)

I also have the following, which do not feature the original mono soundtrack:
1007 (1993, US; Dolby Surround, presumably based on 1979 Dolby Stereo/6-track)
PILF-2196 (1996, JP; weirdly, seems to have a "plain" stereo track with a unique mix, not matrix encoded (e.g. Dolby) in any way, but not mono either)

And, of course, the 4K/UHD release's version of the mono soundtrack should at the very worst be a useful patch-making resource if I end up deciding that one or more mono LaserDiscs represent better source material overall than the UHD.

I don't imagine I'll get this done very quickly because it's quite a lot of work, I have unreasonably high standards for making all edits sound as undetectable as humanly possible, I've got Real Life to contend with, and it's Christmas next week. I want to do it as soon as I can, though.

I have the 1985 LD synced to the UHD (not mine) if you want it. I think it sounds better than the UHD's audio.

[stwd4nder2]

PILF-2196 (1996, JP; weirdly, seems to have a "plain" stereo track with a unique mix, not matrix encoded (e.g. Dolby) in any way, but not mono either)

How can you tell it's just stereo and not matrixed?