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Info: True Lies - Archival Project??? — Page 7

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I have now seen a Dtheater Rip of True Lies but I was very disappointed. It was very smooth, but the worst was there was smearing all over the place if someone moved. Like a really bad Deinterlace.

Did you expierience that as well with your copies?

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I have a 1:1 rip and that is just how it looks :( 

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Any other news for this True Lies project? Was really interested to see what dark_jedi and you_too could come up with here. Really seems like Fox/Cameron do not ever want to officially release this.

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drngr said:

Reliance MediaWorks (the former Lowry) has clips in their demo reel of their True Lies remaster. Tealed to death, naturally. All of the clips from Super35 films are 16:9, as well.

http://player.vimeo.com/video/95919913

I have serious doubts that James Cameron would have approved that.

Dr. M

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When in need, I’m happy to contribute with the PCM, AC3 or DTS tracks as I bought the LaserDiscs of both versions.

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Any more movement on this project? Also is there a source out there with the open matte remaster?

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In order to hook up with Mjvmovieman:

Since it was mentioned that the Cinema DTS has been archived here as well - is there any significant difference to the DTS, the US LaserDisc provides?

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I have not heard anything yet. I believe they were still looking for a better video source to work with. As for the Cinema DTS, I don’t know. The D-VHS Home Video DTS sounds great so I can’t imagine the Cinema version wouldn’t be just as nice but as for differences, I could not tell you.

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35MM SCOPE DOLBY LPP print on ebay right now: price on this keeps dropping. Was $750 a few days ago, $695 this morning and now it’s $650…

http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?icep_ff3=2&pub=5575033532&toolid=10001&campid=5337201588&customid=TrueLies35&icep_item=291822001914&ipn=psmain&icep_vectorid=229466&kwid=902099&mtid=824&kw=lg

TheStarWarsTrilogy.com.
The007Dossier.com.
Donations always welcome: Paypal | Bitcoin: bc1qzr9ejyfpzm9ea2dglfegxzt59tys3uwmj26ytj

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Damn you, now you made me wanting this baby. 😉

I’m actually really considering it but of course wonder if the price is halfway decent.

If I really should end up buying it, of course I would also intend to make a project out of it thus releasing it properly scanned with the original Cinema DTS.

True Lies in decent at least 2K resolution without any stupid filtering or smearing, oh boy, that would be something.

Having said that, it remains a mystery to me how a director can make such a cool movie (T2 would be another example) and then not giving any an about a good release. I mean how often was T2 released on Blu-ray now? And all made from the same shitty outdated and postprocessed master. Shame on him and all the other idiots who make such decisions!

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T2 was at the very least given a “stealth” reissue at some point in the last year or so. It’s still from the same master, but without the filtering on the skynet edition.

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Thanks for that supplement. Forgive me my sarcasm but hurray, after about a decade we’re back where we started. I mean, neither did the first US release have the stupid filtering and while they managed it to get it slightly sharper and propably more efficiently compressed thanks to H.264, it’s hardly a huge difference:

http://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?d1=5918&d2=2552&c=262

Absolutely pathetic in my eyes, considering they had 10 years to properly re-release it.

Back to True Lies:

Since that seller obviously resides in America and is as keen on as most sellers from America to ship internationally, I wonder if anyone would be interested in getting a project running.

While I’d be actually interested to buy it, unfortunately I have neither the equipment nor the expertise to properly scan a 35mm film at 2K or even 4K (although I doubt that the original’s details go up that far anyway).

So many we could join our forces.

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Just checking in to see if anyone is still interested in this project. I have a 1080p open matte rip of the film (logo free) but it only has Russian audio. The quality appears to be quite good. I’m wondering if anyone could replace it with a 5.1 English mix - or better yet the DTS mix. Please message me if anyone is interested.

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Does anyone know the source of the file available online which is called “True Lies 1994 1080p.BluRay.5.1.x264 . NVEE”? It is only 2.95 GB, so the quality isn’t great, but it didn’t come from the D-Theater release. For one thing, it is 23.976 FPS (indicates progressive source) instead of 29.97 FPS (interlaced source) and it doesn’t have those interlacing artifacts during motion scenes, such as ghosting, strobing, and fluttering brightness that the D-Theater rip has. Also, it has the theatrical 2.35:1 aspect ratio, unlike the open-matte HDTV broadcast sources I’ve heard about.

It has the word “BluRay” in the file name, which is impossible, right? However, it does have all of the characteristics of a Blu-ray rip/re-encode. If only it were at least 8 GB in file size it would be awesome. It is still better to watch than the 13.1 GB D-Theater rip I’ve seen, because in the case of compression artifacts vs. those nauseating interlacing artifacts, the former is the lesser evil.

Here’s a screenshot comparison - http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/211463

As you can see, the 2.95 GB mystery source file has none of that ghosting/smearing/whatever you want to call it that the D-Theater source has throughout.

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I think it might be source from iTunes?
It had NL subs so maybe it’s from NL.
It looks pretty clean, the pans are without any strobe.

Regarding open matte with russian audio, check if the station logo doesn’t intemitently appear. That new one was released a while back, but the station logo that pops in and out ruins the presentation.

If you have an older one, then muxes with DTS audio already exists out there.

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Richard Stamper said:

I think it might be source from iTunes?

I don’t think iTunes has it, but Netflix supposedly does:

https://www.netflixmovies.com/true-lies-1994

I don’t have a Netflix subscription, so I can’t see what the quality is like, or even if they really have it. They don’t give any technical details about the video stream, and there are no user comments at the bottom of the page.

It had NL subs so maybe it’s from NL.
It looks pretty clean, the pans are without any strobe.

Yes, the only subtitles it has other than English are Netherlands/Dutch, which suggests that whoever created the torrent was from the Netherlands. Whether or not that’s useful information for identifying the source, I don’t know.

If it came from a streaming site then the streamed source probably isn’t much better than the torrent file. Streaming sites usually use crap bitrates; far lower than a Blu-ray. One thing is for sure though: somewhere up the line a decent, progressive, HD transfer of this movie exists, and in the original 2.35:1 aspect ratio, which is exactly what would be used to master a Blu-ray.

It was encoded almost exactly 3 years ago, so whatever the source was, it isn’t new.

Edit: According to a few posts I’ve found on forums, you can get True Lies in HD through VUDU’s “disc to digital” thing, whatever that is:

If you have the DVD, you can do a disc to digital conversion at VUDU and get the movie in Hi Definition.

It’s my go to version when I watch it, nice transfer with great sound.

The movie doesn’t show up in their catalog when you do a search for it, but it’s there when you do the disc to digital, or at least it was.

There are many movies that they have in high definition and OAR that aren’t available elsewhere, including many Disney titles.

And there’s also this assertion from the same forum thread:

True Lies came out in Blue Ray in the Czech Republic and Germany, years ago but not in the rest of the aria odd, can someone explain this.

Others on the thread dispute that claim though.

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There was an iTunes version I got it like years ago, but deleted it since the file was fairly compressed. Maybe it’s the same one.

There’s no Blu-ray of True Lies, not even in Albany.

I doubt this version will be released, when it get released, this will be an all new scan. Archive this one while you can!

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In order to give this thread an update and hopefully a little boost as well - there is a parallel thread about True Lies, mainly about the 35mm film print scan.

In terms of HD versions floating around which have both advantages and disadvantages to the 35mm scan, I got three different ones at hand:

  • D-Theater with untouched MPEG2 1080i60/1.001 video stream, muxed to Matroska with a bunch of German DTS and AC3 tracks and English DTS, about 25.7 GB in size

  • Web-DL from Amazon with H.264 1080p24/1.001 open matte video stream, muxed to Matroska with E-AC3 audio, about 12.1 GB in size

  • HDTV from an unknown source with custom cropped H.264 1080p24/1.001 open matte video stream, muxed to Matroska with the same bunch of tracks like the D-Theater one, about 16.7 GB in size

Whereas the video streams of the Amazon Web-DL and the HDTV are roughly the same (the total size difference being only due to the muxed audio streams), the Amazon release has a slightly better sharpness and less data reduction artefacts after a quick check. Also the frame vertical stretch is slightly different.

Compared to the 35mm print, the SD and HD video versions have way higher detail in dark areas/scenes but on the other hand a little lower resolution and - risking to highly speculate here - probably not the color timing which was originally intended. Hence overall, the 35mm print of course provides a rougher cinematic experience, but at the cost of quite some severe black crush, a fact which can’t be embellished either.

Depending on the interest here, I’ll go ahead and provide screenshots for comparison later on.

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little-endian said:

Compared to the 35mm print, the SD and HD video versions have way higher detail in dark areas/scenes but on the other hand a little lower resolution and - risking to highly speculate here - probably not the color timing which was originally intended. Hence overall, the 35mm print of course provides a rougher cinematic experience, but at the cost of quite some severe black crush, a fact which can’t be embellished either.

Yes that’s correct that the 35mm print doesn’t have much detail in the dark areas, but it’s not correct that the blacks are crushed. LPP film prints do not have much shadow detail.

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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Well, while I am confident that the 35mm print was professionally captured as good as possible and probably virtually shows everything what the LPP film print had to offer, considering that the video releases (from whatever source they come from) show a lot more detail in dark areas, I think it’s fair to consider the blacks to be “crushed” compared to some original negative which must be lying around somewhere - at first independently of where that happened (during the film to video transfer or from film to film).

In other words - I didn’t mean to say that any dark detail was crushed on purpose within the scan project, all I am saying is - given the original negative - it should be possible to have all the grainy and cinematic look the current scan has plus the details in the dark areas (which would be nice). After all, one has to have dreams, right? 😉

Taking that aside, it is absolutely marvelous to have both versions so my highest respect to all who were involved creating that 35mm film scan.

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little-endian said:

Well, while I am confident that the 35mm print was professionally captured as good as possible and probably virtually shows everything what the LPP film print had to offer, considering that the video releases (from whatever source they come from) show a lot more detail in dark areas, I think it’s fair to consider the blacks to be “crushed” compared to some original negative which must be lying around somewhere - at first independently of where that happened (during the film to video transfer or from film to film).

“Black crush” generally refers to either the dark details being lost due to the capture device (i.e. the camera in the film scanner, video compression, or because of the contrast setting on the display device. My point was simply that the detail is not in the print, it’s already gone. We see the same thing with Lady and the Tramp - if we get to scan an IB Tech print there will be much more detail in the dark areas.

In other words - I didn’t mean to say that any dark detail was crushed on purpose within the scan project, all I am saying is - given the original negative - it should be possible to have all the grainy and cinematic look the current scan has plus the details in the dark areas (which would be nice). After all, one has to have dreams, right? 😉

Yes that’s possible, just not theatrically accurate for this film. 😛

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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I suppose we essentially agree. 😃

Of course, it’s a matter of taste. I’d welcome a bit more detail in darker areas but the gritty look is really neat and literally a nice contrast to the more video-like experience with the HD versions. Unfortunately (or luckily maybe as otherwise I’d be even older than I already am) I was too young to watch True Lies in the cinema, but I guess this was just the way it looked.

Will be interesting to see what they do with any official Blu-ray* release if Cameron ever cares to get it done instead of planning half a dozen Avatar sequels.

(*) considering how late they are, they could skip it right away and rather dump a 4K scan from the negative onto UHD. 😉

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little-endian said:

Will be interesting to see what they do with any official Blu-ray* release if Cameron ever cares to get it done instead of planning half a dozen Avatar sequels.

That’s the least of your worries… Cameron is about to defile the Terminator series with yet more sequels that will likely make Kingdom of the Crystal Skull look like a decent Indy film!

[ Scanning stuff since 2015 ]

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Checked my EPG, saw that this was going to air and recorded it. 😃

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“Logic is the battlefield of adulthood.”

  • Howard Berk