Purpose:

To present Opera in open-matte - 1.77:1

Discussion:

As far as I know about, it appears there’s only one DVD transfer of the film used for every DVD release since 2001. But I stumbled across an interesting find. The 2011 84 Entertainment release has an unfinished version of the film.

After being scanned, the transfer was cleaned for scratches and dust (although the raw transfer is pretty clean for the most part). It was cropped to about 2.29:1. For 12 minutes from 1:13:17 - 1:25:03 the image was scanned in reverse, so the image was flipped back the correct way.

The 84 Ent release didn’t incorporate any of these corrections, so they must have used an earlier uncorrected master.

In addition to incorporating the fixes, the Arrow DVD is higher quality because it has less pixels to encode, thus the overall detail is a bit higher (even though the bit-rate is very similar to the EC Ent disc). The Arrow disc has English subtitles that contain numerous spelling errors.

I took this source, flipped the image from 1:13:17 - 1:25:03 to the correct way, and pasted the Arrow DVD image over the top (this took care of most of the scratches in the 2.29:1 area of the frame).

I then filtered the video to reduce the haloing present on the disc, and some other minor issues.

I also used my upscale script, added some film grain, and I’m pleased with the result.

Details:

11.1 GB.

Video:

x264 Encoded to BD Comparability.
1280 x 720
23.976 fps
14.0 Mbps

Audio:

AAC
Track 1: 5.1 English re-dub
Track 2: 2.0 English Cannes dub
Track 3: 2.0 Italian Theatrical
Track 4: 2.0 German Theatrical*

Subtitles*:

English

*Thanks go to faust1103. The German track includes some sections in Italian that require subtitles. I have included download links for the subs in the torrent description.

Availability:

MySpleen

Screenshots (yes I know they don’t fit correctly, just drag them into the tab bar to see the full images):

The Unresized DVD images are below.

The first three show scratches that are on the 84 Ent disc but are corrected on the Arrow disc.