Hello together,
being keen on having the audio track as close as possible to the theatrical mix of one of my alltime favorite movies, I grabbed a used R1-US-DVD of T2 whose AC3-track indeed sounds quite different to the mix of the first US-Blu-ray from Lionsgate. The most apparent difference of the mix for me is the score which is more present on the surround channels in some quadrophonical style whereas the new mix only has some weird reverb of the score instead. The used echo seems to be dominant in general on the new mix; a good example is the scene where John first meets the T-800 while the flowers turn into a shiny shotgun. ;)
Syncing the AC3-Track to the video of the first US-Blu-ray is indeed a nightmare! When you have it synchronized at the beginning, the DVD-mix lags about 600ms behind the video at the end of the movie, which seems to be a constant drift. What makes it even more difficult to sync that beast, is the fact that you can't stretch the audio simply to the length of the old one because there is also a simple offset included before the movie starts due to some longer pause between the label sound and the movie. So you need some distinctive points within the waveform for orientation, for example it is difficult (at least for me) to determine the beginning of the movie in the waveform since it's faded in. The first "sceleton crush" is not bad for synchronization purposes but it's really some task, puh.
Has anyone already successfully synchronized this thing to any Blu-ray-release?
Oddly, Terminator 2 is not the only movie where I struggle to get an old AC3-source synced to the video. With Fight Club, I face the same issue and I wonder why and how this is possible. Despite the pulldown thing used for NTSC-sourced DVDs, the nominal frame rate and thus length should be exactly the same as the Blu-ray's with it's 24/1.001fps - encoding. Since I greatly assume that the DVD is perfectly in sync by itself, I don't really get how such drifts (which seem to be around 0,001%) occur. If both nominal frame rates (DVD vs. BD) are the same, one of the two would have to lack some frames.
Maybe someone can enlighten me here.
Furthermore, has anyone had the chance in the meantime to compare the AC3-track of any of the LaserDiscs floating around in addition?