Help Wanted: Christmas with the Kranks - Sky Cinema / UK (anyone preserve this?)

I am hoping someone can help me out with a Christmas request/project. One of my favorite movies is “Christmas with the Kranks”, yet it never has received a Blu-Ray release in any market. I see where the Sky Cinema family of networks in the UK is airing this movie many times coming up in the next week. Could someone possibly record this film for me in HD? It only airs on Lifetime/FX/FXX in the USA, and they either speed it up or cut out portions to make room for more commercials. I’m looking for a nice clean copy to work with.

Edit: I realize a few Web-DL rips are out there but none are very good quality.

I will be happy to return the favor by recording anything you might need for a project in HD from US TV.

Check your PM’s.

Love this film as well and can’t fathom why there isn’t a Bluray yet. The AMZN WEB-DL (much better than the low bitrate iTunes) is the best version available for this at present as far as I am aware, Sky Movies nowadays is not the best picture quality. I used to have a high bitrate Sky HD cap from around 2006/7 when they used to have 18mbps constant bitrate which I unfortunately lost in a hard drive crash and is way past retention on Usenet which I’d love to get ahold of again. Saying that, from what I remember I think the AMZN one beats it as Sky even then slightly filtered there output for compression reasons. I used to be able to capture Sky HD directly using PC Sat card (only UK Freesat HD at present) and now only can capture through hdmi capture card from Sat Box.

Would love to have that PM as well Dark Jedi in case you have info re a better version. Would be much appreciated.

x5gb said:

Would love to have that PM as well Dark Jedi in case you have info re a better version. Would be much appreciated.

Sent.

I’m pretty sure the version everybody has sent is the Amazon Web-DL. I share your pain. This movie hasn’t aired on a premium movie channel in the USA in three years now. I’ve been watching for it. Most of the TV airings cut it up and leave out entire scenes to make room for more commercials. The Web-DL version Dark Jedi sent information on is by far the best I’ve seen. Honestly I still prefer the 1.85:1 version of this film to the original 2.35:1 version too. I wish they had gone that route on Amazon.

cpalmer2k said:

I’m pretty sure the version everybody has sent is the Amazon Web-DL. I share your pain. This movie hasn’t aired on a premium movie channel in the USA in three years now. I’ve been watching for it. Most of the TV airings cut it up and leave out entire scenes to make room for more commercials. The Web-DL version Dark Jedi sent information on is by far the best I’ve seen. Honestly I still prefer the 1.85:1 version of this film to the original 2.35:1 version too. I wish they had gone that route on Amazon.

But it was filmed 2.35:1 not Super 35 so that would mean it is cropped, not Open Matte, if it was I would agree with you on 1.85:1 over 2.35:1 but not when its cropped, OAR all the way on that point. As said the AMZN WEB-DL in my eyes is actually very good compared to the present Sky version and is not far behind what a Bluray version would look like, all in all a good compromise. The 18 mbps Sky version I had may have been slightly better on compression (from memory) but its downfall was it is slightly filtered and the AMZN is alot better on that front.

We could have probably made a really nice Blu-ray from this file, sucks being dead in the water, I miss all our Team projects and shit lol.

dark_jedi said:

We could have probably made a really nice Blu-ray from this file, sucks being dead in the water, I miss all our Team projects and shit lol.

The Sky HD version I have was on Usenet (the present retention just misses it by a month or two) so I’m sure other people grabbed it and have it sitting on a hard drive somewhere and hopefully it will re-surface sometime (it was on around the time just before the Sky Star Trek’s were up), the WEB-DL and that file overlaid with each other would create a really nice version.

Note: just gone back and checked, it was actually further back than I thought, it was put up on 17 Dec 2007.

Christmas-with-the-Kranks-OAR-1080p-DD2-0-h264

So 3653 days ago.

x5gb said:

dark_jedi said:

We could have probably made a really nice Blu-ray from this file, sucks being dead in the water, I miss all our Team projects and shit lol.

The Sky HD version I hae was on Usenet (the present retention just misses it by a month or two) so I’m sure other people grabbed it and have it sitting on a hard drive somewhere and hopefully it will re-surface sometime (it was on around the time just before the Sky Star Trek’s were up), the WEB-DL and that file overlaid with each other would create a really nice version.

Any chance another provider would have more retention? I’ve searched a few groups but can’t turn it up