erri_wan said:
msycamore for the question of the four different aspect ratio I would just leave exactly as it is for two reason
First because it's less work for you
Second and most importantly because we want to preserve the Italian version "as is", including the letterboxing choices.
Why in the world would you want to preserve a broadcasting error? The TV-master they had was correct that it had the picture in letterbox at the beginning and end, but it was still displayed at the wrong aspect ratio (vertically stretched).
erri_wan said:
Afterall we (us Europeans) will still have the PAL version in Disc 1 with correct widescreen so in my opinion it's best to leave it the way Italians choose to release it, with all four different aspect ratios. They are editing choices that we should leave untouched if we want to show THX as it was shown to Italians (and maybe other European countries too... if I can find a German or French tape to make sure).
That is my opinion at least. It seems to be the best choice for the project.
I'm not sure if I understand what you mean, or if you understand me, this is still video related flaws. When this film played at Italian cinemas, the picture was beautiful and not stretched vertically, and it didn't have PAL-speedup either. This is not editing choices, or some European standard, it has simply been broadcasted incorrectly, it happens all the time unfortunately.
As seen on your broadcast, letterboxed but wrong aspect:
letterboxed but correct aspect:
The reason I asked about the issue with the opening credits, is because the first half of it is presented in letterbox, still in the wrong aspect ratio though:
Corrected:
but when they decided to suddenly go fullscreen in the later parts of the credits, it became horribly streched in order to not crop out some of the titles, why they decided to do this, is beyond me, when they just could have had the whole credits letterboxed. The switch in aspect ratio comes at a place where the screen is black, so no problems with that. So the question is, do you want me to leave it as is:
or correct it with black borders:
No matter what, it will look jarring, the borders size will suddenly gets bigger. IMO the latter is a better choice but I want to know what you all think about it.
As for what this version should be called, why not call it what it is "Italian TV-broadcast version". The run time on the Italian video boxes indicates that this is the old regular Italian cut, but we're still not entirely sure of this. Also the German TV-broadcast discussed earlier in this thread was much longer and different from this version.