Okay, so a few weeks ago I was finally able to start getting back into this project. I was preparing new master sources to start editing with from the Japanese LD, US LD and German DVD, and I was starting to do the matting of the images. Then I decide to check in on this site and see this news about the HD version on UK iTunes. So I got it, and yeah, its legit. It’s still pretty compressed, and you get a lot of block artifacts which in some ways I find more disruptive than the analog video look of the LDs, which sort of blend with the 80s aesthetic better, but it’s hard to argue the picture isn’t overall superior to anything the other three sources are going to be able to offer. The audio is another story…
Something is wrong with that mix. If you compare the first scene in the pilot bar to the audio track from the other three sources, it is totally different. The song completely cuts out at some points. The fidelity overall is also much worse. I believe the US LD is far and above the best audio source.
So I’m going to work on getting the US LD audio synced to the iTunes UK HD picture. I’ll post some stills and maybe some audio samples in a few days. Excited to see this release, and I do hope this is a precursor to a proper Arrow 4k or at least BD. Thanks for sharing about its existence.
