Some things (ie warts) to look for:
-The opening "Criterion Collection" splash was unintentionally cropped. I replaced the original black letterboxing bars with new black bars, reasoning that the noisy analog black would waste compression, and the new digital black would be easier to crunch down. I cropped to the edge of the film's frame, not remembering that the opening criteiron logo was 4:3. Since I had already gone through 22 hours of cinema craft compression time, I didn't go back and mess with what I feel is a minor point.
-Smearing on the dark scenes. This is an artifact of my laserdisc player. It looks the exact same coming from the LD on my television. Movement in darkness is severely smeared...look at their faces in the fire swamp. ech! (also the reason why I couldn't finish watching Halloween on LD). I'm looking into hacking up my old industrial player to see what kind of pure composite stream I can get.
-the behind the scenes stuff on the second disc comes from pure interlaced 3/4" magnetic tape, so all of that smearing isn't my fault, although it does match the rest of the video nicely.
-In my original post, I said I was going to include the essay from the '89 laserdisc, but as it has the critical depth of a 13-year-old myspace user reviewing the latest justin timberlake album, I left it off in lieu of Goldman's excellent account of getting the film's rights into the hands of a competent filmmaker.
Some things I learned:
-Adobe Encore blows. The compiler crashed about 75% of the time. The only way I could get it to function was to save the project, shut down the software, and then reopen it and compile before making any other changes. I wiill be using the old standby DVD-Lab in the future. Also, there's the nifty option to add files to a DVD-Rom folder, and then when you make the disc, it just dumps them in no directory at all, out there with VIDEO_TS. Oh yeah, there's also no AUDIO_TS. It played fine on my stand-alone dvd player, but if you're having problems, you may want to check a few other players to see if the quirky authoring from Encore isn't the culprit.
-It's hard to build a professional-looking menu that doesn't flicker on a cheap-ass wal-mart television.
-slideshows are inherently clunky to use... there's just no elegant way to present 75 pictures. I even meticulously created 75 menus with the pictures, and then carefully strung them together so that the navigation would be better, but Encore rejected that idea. Hence the extra week of work on these.
All negativity aside (the perfectionist in me was starting to be a stumbling block), I'm happy to finally have this content on DVD, and I'm proud of the artwork I created for its presentation.
If there are any problems, bugs, typos (I've already seen one,) let me know, and we'll see if it's something that can be rectified, hopefully online.
Enjoy,
--bdev
PS - there's an easter egg, too.