caligulathegod

An acquaintance sent a letter to Criterion and received this response.

Hi Shane,

Thanks for writing!

I wanted to make sure we were communicating the most accurate information regarding our PINK FLAMINGOS release, so I went straight to the source. Please see her response below:

Thanks for your questions regarding our 50th Anniversary restoration of Pink Flamingos. Since we undertook the restoration from the original film elements, I can only speak to the work we did and not to any previous VHS home video releases. There are no defects on our edition.
As you know, the music in the film is mostly “needle drops” of records from John Waters’ personal collection. At the time the film was made in 1972, they were not considering music clearances needing to be made for home video. On the 25th Anniversary home video release, New Line had to replace some songs and also made all the music “stereo” (with much of it being “fake” or synthesized stereo) as part of their restoration.

While Criterion could also not go back and clear the original, original set of songs, we did take what we could from the original 16mm magnetic track and used it in combination with the cleared songs in the 25th Anniversary version. 90% of what you are hearing, including the dialogue, is from the most original recordings made for the film. I’m almost 100% sure neither the original Ektachrome picture positive or the original mono 16mm mag have ever been used for a home video presentation.

There are no more original elements than the ones we used, as these are the elements John has been holding on to in his attic in Baltimore for over 50 years. The 25th Anniversary restoration was made from a 35mm blow-up print of the original 16mm film, which had all of the graphics (opening credits) already composited. We had the textless opening shot from the camera positive and also the titles on their own that we were able to re-create.

The goal is to still make the film look and sound good and also to be faithful to the original theatrical presentation, so with John’s supervision, we restored the picture and sound and presented the film in its original mono format, as it was always intended to be.

Susan Arosteguy
Senior Producer

I hope this information helps, and you can finally put that 40-year-old tape to rest.

Best,

JM

I think it used to work if you ran the video through a receiver and then the monitor output into the recorder.  Disney was always a difficult one.

Big fan of this edit.  I just happened across this and thought that it was a bit more effective than the James Earl Jones redub

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_n8FRILoYE&

Chewtobacca said:

caligulathegod said: I never got a copy of the Miami BE PAL.

That is on fanedit.info and apprarently with the extras added, if you want it.  If you upload the Miami ROTJ PAL we might look into converting that to NTSC.

What do you mean by the sound post-correction?  All I have ever done with a true PAL to NTSC conversion is run the audio through a program such as eac3to.  I suppose it might be more complicated if many audio sources have been used, but if they were all PAL or at least converted to the right speed for PAL properly, I do not see why it should not be as simple as running the completed PAL audio through a program such as eac3to.  Perhaps I am missing something.

Because Jambe used PAL sources for the film itself with the PAL speedup but used proper speed sources for much of the commentaries they sound unnatural, so I re-pitched those bits manually.  Since I was working with spectral analysis, I was also able to spot pops and other errors and fix those, too.  Needless to say, it's very tedious work.  I'm searching my hard drives to see if I still have the files.

I haven't been here for a while and just checked it out on a lark.  To clarify some questions as far as I know.

I converted BE from PAL 25 fps to NTSC 23.978 fps with slowed down audio and completely recreated the menu structure/authoring from scratch to replicate the PAL original.  The extras were all converted with the speedup intact.

Boon converted RTJ single layer using the original soundtrack and speedup.  I converted the PAL to NTSC with slowed down audio on a dual layer.  I used Boon's authoring for the menus and just inserted my feature conversion.

I got half way through the sound post-correction on the Miami cut and just got sick of listening to it for the 100th time, so I stepped away and honestly forgot about it.  I'll have to check if I still have it and see it wasn't on the hard drive I lost.

I never got a copy of the Miami BE PAL.

Best one I found was at the devilish website.  Search for Metropolis (2010) and it will come up.  The comments link to some subs others had done adjusting them 16 seconds, but I did it 15 1/2 and it is better.

Shouldn't be a problem linking to srt files, I would hope, since it's not the movie itself.

http://rapidshare.com/files/357122184/Metropolis__2010_.srt.html

I got a full PAL resolution (702x528) copy and the music ends right at the end of the film, so the announcer doesn't actually talk over any of the music, only over silent end titles.  I also managed to get some English subtitles and only had to tweak them 15 and a half seconds to get them right on.  I'm watching it now while not as sharp as the DVD, it still looks pretty good.  The "new" footage isn't going to be improved much in an official release, as it is pretty scarred up.  Still, it might get me back to work, since I was beaten on the original project.

No prob.  I just hope I can remember how I did it.  My first test run turned out ok.  I went for highest quality and 8 hours got me 20 minutes of converted footage.  Considering the original is 3700 KBs average, the quality isn't all that great to begin with.  What I got looked just like the source so I'm going to try a straight encode at the final size instead of the intermediate steps I took last time.

Well, I have RTJ PAL MFF version and am working on the NTSC encode.  Thanks, Mallwalker.  I'll post when it's done.  Now all I need is a copy of BE PAL MFF.

Darth Mallwalker said:

ImperialFighter said:

 someone to DL some copies in the U.K. 

 

Language barrier I guess, but I'm not sure what you mean by "DL" ?

It's a single layer disc.

And anyone, UK or not, can download the copy Moth3r posted. I've now finished DL'ing it -- caligula still want a copy ?

Sure do.  You have them both?

Yeah.  Even if you do a dual layer perfectly it's just too easy to have some glitch somewhere and mess it up.  This version doesn't have all the DVDROM stuff or the fancy menus to replicate.  Where the problem was before was the soundtrack wasn't exactly the same length as the video for some reason plus there was the learning curve in that no one actually had a straight Mpeg2 to Mpeg2 conversion method that actually slowed down the video.  I also scrubbed the soundtrack and repitched any sound that seemed too slowed down (mostly Mark and Carrie).  When I did the RTJ dual layer it went perfectly the first time, but no one wanted it so it didn't get released until a few months ago.  Honestly, I hope I can remember how I did it. 

Actually, I'm the one who did the original Building Empire NTSC conversion.  Boon did the Jedi one.

That interlaced subtitle issue was one of the issues that caused me problems back when I converted.  I think I fixed it by deinterlacing the PAL before I did the NTSC conversion.

Is there any chance I can have one of each sent to me?  I was hoping to convert both BE and RTJ to NTSC for further distribution.

There are 4K (4096×2160) cinemas, but the projectors are extremely expensive.  Most digital theaters have 2K (2048×1080) projection, which is about the same as HD television (1920x1080).  The pre-show advertising typically uses the older 1280×1024 resolution.

(2048 x 1536) is 2K full aperture at 1.32:1.  Remember, we're talking fixed pixels.  Digital cinema doesn't use anamorphic.  Digital Cinema 2K is (2048 × 858) at 2.39:1 or (1998 × 1080) at 1.85:1.  HD television is essentially the same thing as 2K Digital Cinema.

Maybe that print has the missing footage from the Argentina print.

Dunedain said:

Actually, The Phantom Menace has far more resolution than Episodes II and III. The Phantom Menace was shot on real film, which has enough detail to easily support a 4k scan, even tough they only scanned it in at 2k at the time. The other two prequels were shot on a HD camera with it's fixed resolution of only 1920x1080 (you can think of this as sort of the rough equivalent of what we might call a 1k scan), so they are stuck with that. You can try to upsample that, of course, but you can't add in resolution that wasn't filmed.

On the other hand, Lucas can go back any time and scan in The Phantom Menace master prints at 4k and double the res and detail of their scanned copy, which then is down-sampled for use on VHS, laserdisk, DVD, HD, etc. for home video. But Episodes II and III will always be stuck with the fact that they only have 1920x1080 worth of resolution in their source picture. This was a really dumb thing to do, but that's what Lucas decided to try. So, ironically, it's the first Star Wars prequel that will always look better than the latest two prequels. :)

Just a nitpick, but isn't 1920x1080 actually 2K, more or less?  2K is (2048×1080) and 4K is (4096×2160).  The higher resolution might make a difference for the month or two a film is in the theater, but it lives forever at ~2K in our homes.

Looks like it took him two years, too.  I'd better redouble my efforts.  I pulled an X0.

bkev said:

Outta curiosity, just what does the DL version offer that the SL does not?

The actual authoring is the same (Boon23 helped me out here).  The feature, however on the dual layer is less compressed than the single layer (two and a half hour film plus all the DVDRom stuff was pretty compressed).  Other than the PAL to NTSC resizing, it is the same bitrate as the original PAL.  Also, the dual layer version was actually slowed down from 25fps to 23.976 so the audio doesn't sound sped up.  The single layer version was converted using the method that keeps the original sound.  I then pitch corrected the individual commentaries that were actually already at the correct speed but now slowed down.  I also denoised and depopped the soundtrack manually.  Basically, I used all the lessons learned in my conversion of Building Empire and applied them to this cut.  It's been done for almost two years but was never released except to a few people directly.  I noticed on Demonoid that the original uploads were dead and deleted and only XVID versions survived.  A few people requested the full DVDs, so I took the opportunity to upload the DL for the first time.

I've uploaded the dual layer NTSC version on Demonoid for the first time ever.  It's not going to help you much with your 99%, but it's a better version.

I've reposted Building Empire NTSC on Demonoid.  I've also posted the Dual Layer NTSC version of Returning to Jedi for the first time ever.

bkev said:

Cal, do you even READ our posts before you make fun of us with lolcats?  As awesome as they are, it does get old.

 

Can't be any older than, "Hey, how's Laserman doing?  Any updates?" for two straight years.

Anywho, it's all in fun...  Have one more then I'll quit until popular demand...