I downloaded (and am currently seeding) the 2.1 AVCHD at the spleen and it looks awesome. Practically every tiny little thing you could think of that wasn't quite right before has been taken care of, and the movie has never come this close to visual perfection, especially in terms of colour timing. I salute you, Harmy, for doing such amazing work, because it most definitely paid off in the best possible way. :)
It's just as well if there's going to be yet another release, though, because there's something I want to do to for the audio as well. For the sake of my academic career in sound I recently obtained a new Macbook Pro in order to be able to run Pro Tools, the professional recording software, and this means I'm now able to make use of the official DTS-HD MA encoder suite as well. The AC3 copy of the original '77 stereo mix which I provided for the Despecialized Edition was made from the analogue capture, because the digital version has numerous defects such as audio dropouts and pitch distortion which have gone uncorrected. The source for the analogue capture reportedly contains these same defects, but since Belbucus had already corrected them all, the simplest solution was to use his version instead, since to my ear the errors make for an unacceptable listening experience.
However, when I went to encode the various mixes of the movie in DTS-HD MA for the Bluray release, I decided to listen again to the digital version of the stereo mix and compare it in fine detail to the analogue capture. As expected, the digital does show a slight increase in overall fidelity, but my main discovery was far more significant and startling: the analogue capture has actually been dynamically compressed to a great extent in certain scenes.
What the reasoning for this is I don't know, though perhaps it has something to do with available headroom on analogue laserdisc audio compared to 35mm Dolby Stereo on film. Other parts of the tracks seem virtually identical, but there are numerous places in the film where the levels have been brought down significantly, and this leaves them sounding underpowered in comparison. Without even closer inspection, I can't say for sure whether the track has been put through a compressor to reduce the peaks or whether someone simply sat there with a fader and manually reduced the gain of the whole mix when they felt the levels were getting too high; but I'm starting to suspect it was the latter, since in one scene I can actually hear the level go back up by a large amount after first being much quieter—this happens in an obvious and obtrusive way and definitely isn't supposed to sound like that, so either way someone wasn't paying attention at the board!
What this all boils down to is that the dynamics of the digital version have clearly not been tampered with, and that it represents the 35mm stereo mix more accurately than the analogue version. Because of that, I'm taking it upon myself to remove all the defects in order to provide the best possible copy. Had I been aware of this discrepancy sooner, I would have done this a long time ago, but I had previously believed the two tracks to be identical.
Thus far in the digital version I have identified 13 audio dropouts, two instances of pitch distortion due to tape damage, and one spot in which the entire stereo image shifts radically to the left due to the right channel dropping in level before returning to what it should be. I'm not nearly as experienced or capable as Belbucus when it comes to audio work, so left to my own devices I'd probably have been at a loss to correct these errors, but since he took care of them all in the analogue capture already, all I really have to do is splice in short sections of that version to cover them up (making sure, of course, to level-match the two for a seamless transition).
As soon as I have more time I'll be taking care of this, and then uploading DTS-HD MA encodes of the stereo, mono, and '93 mixes for use on the upcoming Bluray. The '85 and 70mm mixes have been provided already, I believe. There is a slight problem in that I'm not actually able to listen to the resulting files once they're encoded, but since I have the official DTS software and its verification capability, there shouldn't be any problems.
