TServo2049

My friend is watching the broadcast right now, and he says the elevator scene is NOT the TV version?

I doubt that the Dolby SR and CDS theatrical tracks had different sound effects - correct me if I'm wrong, but by 1991, just before the advent of digital 5.1, was there really that much difference between matrixed and discrete mixes other than dynamic range and separation and maybe some extra LFE?

We weren't getting vastly different mixes like in the late 70s, if the silenced gunshots do show up on the theatrical Dolby SR track, they'd have probably have been on the theatrical CDS mix too...right?

Also, you said Rydstrom's near-field remix was done for the SE - wouldn't that mean the pre-2000 theatrical cut releases, or at least the pre-SE ones, weren't remixed for near-field?

Clarification - when I said "Over the air" I was referring to the means of reception, not the means of capture. It will be on DVD-R (albeit in 1 hour mode, across two DL discs), but it will be coming from digital antenna, not from a further-compressed digital cable feed like SilverWook's.

FWIW, my friend says his digital antenna reception is excellent and never has drop-outs or stuff like that. Unless someone here has a digital antenna wired into a capture card, and a clear shot at their This affiliate, this will probably be the best we can get.

At least my friend (who lives IN Los Angeles) will be able to get it from antenna - we'll see how that turns out.

My friend's DVD recorder previously belonged to me. Checking the discs I recorded on it, it seems that in 1-hour mode, the sound is encoded at 384kbps.

I will also say that both the digital tuner output and DVD recorder input have S-Video; I assume we should go with that over composite?

Also, it's rerunning Thursday 9/25 at 10:30 AM, and again on Monday 9/29 at 9:30 PM, if anybody else wants to take a shot at it. (Anybody else have the ability to pick up ThisTV over the air, like my friend does?)

I have a friend who has a digital tuner and DVD recorder. We've worked out that he can capture it on two dual-layer DVDs, each in 1-hour mode (switching during a commercial break).

That seems like the best thing other than ripping directly into a capture card (though if anybody has a high-quality This stream and can do that, that'd also be good...)

But if a 35mm print were to be found, it would have the theatrically accurate SR mix. So even if we never hear the CDS mix, we may someday at least learn if the SR mix in theaters was carried over to video...

Perhaps we do have to wait for a 35mm print to surface. (But do any CDS decoders still exist?)

Another question - would the Dolby Surround tracks on the original LD be the same as the Dolby SR theatrical mix (which is what most people would have heard in theaters)?

Of course Miami Vice was shot on film. Like all other filmed TV shows of the time, it was shot on 35mm, at 4:3 Academy ratio, protected for the "TV safe area." The only picture that is missing is info on all four sides that the viewer was never intended to see. (This was an issue when Star Trek: The Next Generation was scanned in HD for Blu-ray - there were shots that exposed equipment on the periphery, which was outside the "safe area" and never meant to be seen, and which had to be zoomed in to match the framing in the original aired versions. There were a couple times where they forgot to do this - the redshirt getting frozen by Q in "Encounter at Farpoint" exposes the blast coming from an air jet below frame.)

Also, an important point: Anything shot on 35mm film, that is not anamorphic or VistaVision, is 4:3. Widescreen is achieved by cropping off the top and bottom - this is/was usually done by the projectionist at the theater.

Some directors have shot films "hard-matted", placing a physical 1.66:1 - 1.85:1 matte box in front of the camera lens - the end result is a regular-sized film frame with black space at the top and bottom and a "widescreen" image in the middle. This is how James Cameron shot The Terminator and Aliens, and how Steven Spielberg shot E.T.

But TV shows were always shot in 4:3 with the intent of being shown in 4:3. IIRC, Babylon 5 was the first TV show to be shot protected for 16:9 (in anticipation of future HDTV broadcasts - B5 fans already know how this got screwed up and why we will probably never actually see the show in HD as was originally planned)

Good grief, can we just let this go? The uncut version was never released. EVER. Every version that has ever been made available to the public has the edits. The negative trims were probably thrown out, and if any copies of the scenes in any stage of completion did survive the last 26 years, Don Bluth doesn't have them. (Judging by the fact that over the years, Universal has found stuff like the director's cut of Legend in their own holdings, if a print of the finished uncut version was EVER struck, they would be the ones to have it - unless it was unknowingly stored in the vault that burned down in the 2008 fire...)

The cut scenes will never surface from anyone on the "outside."

That said, it would be cool to obtain this print anyway.

About Aliens: I've never seen Aliens in 35mm, but every 80s LPP print I've seen projected as of late (granted, most of them at the same theater, the Castro in San Francisco) seem to have (Caucasian) skin tones that are pale peach, maybe some muted orange or yellow in them. Skin tones don't usually seem to have too much red/pink in them. Also, fire and propane explosions and pyrotechnics often look very yellow, not much orange.

My question is: Anybody who's seen an original print of Aliens, does that sound at all accurate?

I have a Sound Blaster X-FI Titanium HD PCIe card with RCA input/output. The red RCA "in" jack, from what I understand, also functions as an SPDIF optical input. So could I hook the digital sound output from an LD player directly into that?

I have Win7, though.

Another suggestion: The Last Starfighter. No home release since the widescreen LD has had the original Dolby Stereo track. This is the release that has the theatrical mix in PCM.

ElectricTriangle said:

TServo2049 said:

More suggestions: What about the Rocky series? The original mixes of all five are on the Blu-rays, but they are (of course) lossy.

There are PCM versions of the original mixes (mono for I, Dolby for II-IV) on the 1990 MGM/UA releases of I-IV (black covers with the image in the center). And there's only one LD release of V, which has PCM too.

I don't think that most people can tell the difference between properly compressed audio and lossless audio. Lossless audio is just needed if you want to edit it. Do they sound bad on the Blu-ray?

 I don't know. I just assumed PCM always sounded better than compressed DD.

More suggestions: What about the Rocky series? The original mixes of all five are on the Blu-rays, but they are (of course) lossy.

There are PCM versions of the original mixes (mono for I, Dolby for II-IV) on the 1990 MGM/UA releases of I-IV (black covers with the image in the center). And there's only one LD release of V, which has PCM too.

Anybody want to preserve the U.S. theatrical cut of Blade Runner? The only PCM release (going by LDDB) was a 1993 pan and scan Japanese LD [NJEL-20008], which is normally obscenely expensive...but it's currently on Urabanchou.com for $19.99! (Of course, that's before all the customs/duties/shipping charges, but I haven't seen another copy for sale for less than $70, again EXCLUDING those charges.)

Link here. Not sure when this sale ends - the regular price is $24.99. There's only one copy in stock. Anybody wanna buy this?

(We'd just have to hope the LDDB contributor is in fact correct, and this isn't just the International Cut again.)

The lightsaber training. Every home transfer has it show up as white in some shots, greenish in others, but in all the bootleg transfers it looks basically the same shade of blue throughout.

Those Italian screenshots give me a Raiders of the Lost Ark vibe - not horrendously screwed up, but still too warm/yellow.

Joel said:

I don't mean to belabor the point, but it would seem, theoretically, that a 70mm print would be able to preserve more detail than a 35mm print from the same interpositive. Is this not the case?

Possibly, but they are cropped, and they are very likely to be faded. So you may get more detail, but less picture area and much worse color.

The most useful things that could be gained from a 70mm would be the soundtracks, and the original, slightly different earlier version of Empire.

My understanding is that an entire print was cut up into individual frames - the Jedi cells are faded, suggesting they were an original 1983 source (which is still odd - all 35mm prints of Jedi were on low-fade stock, did 70mm LPP not come until later?). Both Empire and Jedi have soundtracks, which would be unnecessary if they were struck just for cell purposes (note that the cells for the original film, which have the least fading, DON'T have a mag soundtrack, suggesting that they WERE from a new blowup made strictly for the cells).

"Brown grain" seems to be a telltale sign of multi-generation duping, particularly in the late 70s/early 80s. I was just watching The Great Muppet Caper on HDNet Movies, and the opening credits (with the hot air balloon) showed a blue sky full of "brown" grain.

That Stormtrooper shot was duped to add in the Falcon, and it was diffused, and it was filmed in standard Panavision rather than VistaVision, so it makes sense that it would look grainier.

A "first printing" 70mm of Empire would be worthy of preservation because it has some differences (for example, some extra Rebel fleet establishing shots were added for the general 35mm version). The problem is that any original prints would be on the extremely fade-prone pre-LPP 70mm stock. (They would look more like the film cells of Jedi than the ones of Empire - which I theorize to have come from a print struck for a reissue, since they are LESS faded than the Jedi cells, and at least one cell has turned up on eBay showing Luke on the weathervane with the Falcon dish composited in - a change made after the first 70mm run.)

Right. The movie-only 1996 Pioneer release had the PCM and AC-3, but an isolated score instead of the commentary.

I just assumed the box set was in CAV. Thanks for clearing that up.

I think it would be worth it to track down, in the (apparently quite likely?) case that it sounds better than the DVD. The score is amazing (and I have always been miffed that the official soundtracks all leave out my absolute favorite part, the opening bars from Don Giovanni that start the film and return as the leitmotif for Mozart's father and the disguised Salieri).

The gamma levels were probably raised on LD too. It was common practice to boost gamma in video transfers in the 80s/90s so that they would "read" on CRT displays - Batman may have received particular complaint for the theatrical prints looking too dark, but the home release would have been boosted regardless so that the image would resolve on TV sets.

I wonder if the analog isolated track on the Pioneer CLV disc (and ONLY the CLV disc, not the CAV box set) would sound better than the digital one on the first DVD? Does the fact that it's not digital negate any possibility of it being better than the lossy Dolby track on the DVD?