BD 49 The Blue Angel

Discuss releases by Eureka and Masters of Cinema and the films on them.
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MichaelB
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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#26 Post by MichaelB » Mon Jan 21, 2013 5:43 pm

Weren't the Kino and MoC (German) transfers taken from exactly the same Transit Films HD master?

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Donald Brown
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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#27 Post by Donald Brown » Mon Jan 21, 2013 6:58 pm

The Kino absolutely has better tonality and shadow detail.

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MichaelB
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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#28 Post by MichaelB » Tue Jan 22, 2013 3:43 am

"Absolutely" implies that you've watched both in motion all the way through.

But I bet you haven't.

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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#29 Post by JonasEB » Tue Jan 22, 2013 8:24 am

Zaki wrote:Isn't the MoC picture slightly darker than one would wish? Looking at the Beaver grab in which Dietrich sits on the barrel, for example, it is impossible to distinguish between her black dress and the barrel. This is not the case with the comparable Kino grab. Although I will personally buy the MoC for all the great extras (and the English version) it has, the Kino--based on the Beaver screen grabs, at least--does show slightly more detail.
It's the standard "One version is slightly lighter, one is slightly darker" - just M all over again. They are essentially the same, a very minor difference.

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TMDaines
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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#30 Post by TMDaines » Tue Jan 22, 2013 9:55 am

And surely one click of the brightness and/or contrast settings on your player would result in you getting the image you want anyway?

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tenia
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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#31 Post by tenia » Tue Jan 22, 2013 11:42 am

TMDaines wrote:And surely one click of the brightness and/or contrast settings on your player would result in you getting the image you want anyway?
On the contrary, if it's the encoding which is like this, shadow details are gone in the blacks. By changing brightness and/or contrast, you will furthermore disturb the settings of your set, and make the blacks greyer but that's it.

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TMDaines
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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#32 Post by TMDaines » Tue Jan 22, 2013 1:02 pm

True. I just hammered the brightness up on my laptop and all the detail is well and truly lost.

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manicsounds
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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#33 Post by manicsounds » Mon Jan 28, 2013 5:11 am


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John Edmond
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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#34 Post by John Edmond » Sat Feb 02, 2013 1:32 am

I have nothing to add bar seconding the terribleness of Baxter's book. One shouldn't spend so much time making out your subject as a short ugly gollum-esque creature if your book's cover contradicts you. Only by reading it simultaneously with Chinese Laundry, using the more straightforward biography as a reminder checklist, could somebody gain value from it.

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swo17
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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#35 Post by swo17 » Sat Feb 02, 2013 3:01 am

triodelover wrote:
Zaki wrote:Isn't the MoC picture slightly darker than one would wish? Looking at the Beaver grab in which Dietrich sits on the barrel, for example, it is impossible to distinguish between her black dress and the barrel.
If you are referencing the German version, your eyes are far better than mine if you can distinguish the hem of her skirt from the barrel on either the Kino or MoC. The MoC is certainly darker, but the hem and barrel are indistinguishable on both.
It should be mentioned that the image can tend to be a bit flickery in motion, so if a grab from the Kino is even just a few frames off from the MoC (as is the case with the barrel shot), one of them being a little brighter isn't necessarily meaningful. On the whole, I thought the MoC transfer looked very filmlike and about as good as could be expected.

stwrt
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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#36 Post by stwrt » Mon Apr 01, 2013 5:10 am

I watched the first five minutes of The Blue Angel last night, jesus this is a good movie.

The poster of Lola washed down and then the prof looks in the bird cage and the landlady storms in looks at the dead budgie and chucks it in the flaming stove.

It's like a poem with the vivid intensity of a few lines by the ex-Dean of St Paul's. Or maybe some German guy I don't know yet.

(I saw it years ago at the Scala in Kings Cross London on a triple bill with Pandora's Box and a third movie I don't remember the name of and the guy I saw it with is dead 10 years so I can't ask him. Does anywhere still put on that kind of scheduling ?)

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NABOB OF NOWHERE
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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#37 Post by NABOB OF NOWHERE » Mon Apr 01, 2013 6:44 am

stwrt wrote:It's like a poem with the vivid intensity of a few lines by the ex-Dean of St Paul's. Or maybe some German guy I don't know yet.
Do you mean Graeme Knowles and Rudolf Hess?

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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#38 Post by stwrt » Mon Apr 01, 2013 7:39 am

John Donne, you philistines.

He wrote somewhere about a dead budgie

"For I am every dead thing"

My name's not Gordon, in real life it's Henry Plink.

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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#39 Post by stwrt » Tue Apr 02, 2013 2:16 am

Couldn't call Lola "tense".

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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#40 Post by Moshrom » Wed Mar 15, 2017 7:40 pm

david hare wrote:MoC’s new Blue Angel follows their exemplary practice of not messing with the ingredients. Thus the image quality for the German language (unarguably the superior of the two versions) retains great black levels and to my eyes the enhanced high contrast picture does not suffer from any loss of shadow detail or any other potential problems like banding or compression. Transferred under the additional guiding hand of James White I think it’s an ideal presentation of the existing TransitFilm elements which, it has to be said are far from ideal. This extends to the soundtrack which retains all its crackle and hiss from the original Klangfilm audio. Again I believe MoC took the wise move in not subjecting the audio to extensive EQ and filtering to clean it up.
Because it was explicitly brought up, I was compelled to put this together:

https://vimeo.com/208578769" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Sure, MoC didn't perform any filtering, but TransitFilm sure as hell did. Everything over 8 kHz has been removed and some of the lower frequencies are enormously exaggerated, much like what Shochiku did with Early Summer, Late Spring, and The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum.

What MoC did do is replace the opening Mozart aria with a version from another source, probably because the first 10 seconds of the restored track given to them (as heard on the Universum and Kino blu-rays) were cut off. So the first two and a half minutes of the MoC blu-ray sound fine, but everything after definitely does not.

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TMDaines
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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#41 Post by TMDaines » Thu Mar 16, 2017 5:25 am

Why do companies keep doing this filtering?

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tenia
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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#42 Post by tenia » Thu Mar 16, 2017 9:06 am

Like for DNR and EE : because they think it fits better the general audience's expectations.
I just saw yesterday a French label boasting how they restored the 95' anime version of Ghost in the Shell and that they achieved a "better but still faithful visual aspect by the combination of 3 tools : removing the telecinema damages, removing the grain, sharpening the picture".
I even had a surreal conversation with another French label who clearly couldn't understand why it's a problem to wrongly encode a movie in 1080i50 while 24fps is the native / original framerate.

So I guess some professionals still are a long way from always making the best decisions - even people for who it's actually the line of work (see Bologna's controversial color-timing - yes, singular : all the restorations they color-timed now have the same color-timing).


Regarding Moshrom audio findings : I should go back in my Gaumont Classiques BD and analyse the soundtracks spectrums : I always thought all these old French movies sound muffled because it was recorded that way. It actually most likely is a by-product of a way too strong audio NR. It certainly is the case on Le dernier des six.
Last edited by tenia on Thu Mar 16, 2017 3:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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swo17
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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#43 Post by swo17 » Thu Mar 16, 2017 10:21 am

Isn't the issue that some degree of digital tinkering is a must for all projects, but it's an art, and some people go too far with it? Like the best CGI in movies, if people are doing their jobs right, you won't notice they're doing anything.

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tenia
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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#44 Post by tenia » Thu Mar 16, 2017 10:55 am

It could be it, but I believe that in many cases, it's due to digital tools not being used improperly but being used in a lazy way. Why bother adapting the filter on a shot-by-shot basis if you can just put an intensity and carry out the same filtering through the whole movie ?

It's the same for encodes : you can select the basic setup and obtain a varying but rather decent result or you can do like David does and adjust it on a shot-by-shot basis manually.

But you're right : when done right, you shouldn't notice anything at all.

On the other end, restoring with care should be the standard, and it seems that because audio is often less tangible (and less "obvious") than video, it has been rather left behind. DNR and EE are caracterised as detrimental for years, but audio NR still passes many people by, including many BD reviewers (see how many restorations with lossless tracks are given less than 4 out of 5 on blu-ray.com, for instance).

Following Moshrom's findings, I'm now checking the spectrum for every release I'm reviewing : most of them are noticeably filtered, even if the PQ is very very good. I wouldn't surprised if even some Sony restorations (which are currently some of the best on the market) have filtered sound too.

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Drucker
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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#45 Post by Drucker » Thu Mar 16, 2017 11:21 am

Moshrom's posts have been great because it finally makes sense to me why the theatrical sound experience is so different than home video. I saw Wild Bunch in 35mm last year and remember the sound of gunshots being piercingly loud, something I've never found with a home video. I figured, if sound is so "lossless" why don't these films sound the way they do in the theater? Now I know why.

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domino harvey
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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#46 Post by domino harvey » Thu Mar 16, 2017 11:36 am

Something I've always wondered: who does QC for these issues on labels? Are there James White equivalents supervising or at least signing off on transfers and checkdiscs? What does enlisting the services of an expert cost? I would be terrified to start a boutique label and shovel a lot of money into it only to miss these problems and get hammered online by the very niche audience I was trying to attract

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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#47 Post by peerpee » Thu Mar 16, 2017 12:12 pm

There are a shit ton of issues here. Firstly, the MoC Series didn't exist in 2003, so when Moshrom's video says "Masters of Cinema DVD (2003)" presumably this is referring to the Eureka DVD from around that time? I didn't produce either the Eureka DVD or the later MoC Blu – so I have no idea what's gone on here.

Most of the time, labels are at the mercy of the licensor and whatever their internal or external restoration house presents them with. It's typically up to the producer of the disc to spot any discrepancies with the quality of the audio, but it's probably not something that gets much attention – there's a whole area of responsibility to deal with elsewhere in a very short timeframe. The sound is either present or it's not, it's either in sync or it's not. That's about as far as the typical producer will go. They're not all sat there with their heads inbetween massive studio monitors performing A-B tests on previous versions. That's the job of the restoration house, and it's assumed it's already been done. If, as a fledgling DVD producer in 2004, I had gone back to the licensor complaining about frequencies over 8kHz being missing, nothing would have happened. They'd finished that restoration, closed it down, and moved on to something else.

The best QCer is the producer of the disc. He/she who knows everything about the project from start to finish. I generally don't trust *anyone* to QC, unless they're an established professional producer type, who can be relied upon (ie. there's not many of them).

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tenia
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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#48 Post by tenia » Thu Mar 16, 2017 1:18 pm

peerpee wrote:That's the job of the restoration house, and it's assumed it's already been done.
But even if it hasn't been done, or not properly, the label wouldn't be able to get the restoration corrected or re-performed, or would it ?
peerpee wrote:If, as a fledgling DVD producer in 2004, I had gone back to the licensor complaining about frequencies over 8kHz being missing, nothing would have happened. They'd finished that restoration, closed it down, and moved on to something else.
And 13 years later, it basically still hasn't changed, or by so little...

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hearthesilence
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Re: BD 49 The Blue Angel

#49 Post by hearthesilence » Thu Mar 16, 2017 1:55 pm

Ugh, massively disappointing. Too bad MoC didn't (or couldn't?) use the audio track from the 2003 DVD.

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MichaelB
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BD 49 The Blue Angel

#50 Post by MichaelB » Thu Mar 16, 2017 2:04 pm

peerpee wrote:The best QCer is the producer of the disc. He/she who knows everything about the project from start to finish. I generally don't trust *anyone* to QC, unless they're an established professional producer type, who can be relied upon (ie. there's not many of them).
With hardly any exceptions*, I always, always personally QC my own stuff, including both formats where applicable. In virtually all cases someone else is doing the job as well, whether it be Arrow's full-time QC manager Nora Mehenni or her equivalents at authoring houses like IBF, so the discs get at least two pairs of eyes on them, but this is part of the job that I can never shirk. After all, it's the final product.

And also, the producer is much more likely to have access to - and most likely have already watched in full - the ProRes masters, so can quickly investigate any apparent encoding problems. They're also more likely to have other releases to hand for comparison purposes - for instance, on Three Brothers IBF's QC flagged up a number of apparent technical glitches that all turned out to be inherent in the original material. In one case, you can spot a crew member crouching in the background (we debated cropping him out, but he occupies too much of the frame, and he's in every other version that I checked), and in another, there were what appeared to be sound inconsistencies in a scene where Philippe Noiret's judge is taking part in a lively political debate - but in that case it seemed to be a bodge job by Francesco Rosi himself, whereby he could include as much live sound as possible while still having to dub Noiret into Italian (so the ambience changes noticeably whenever he's speaking - but just at those moments). There was also an almost imperceptible jump cut in the scene with the tank that seems to have been a crude but nonetheless clearly deliberate attempt at shortening a shot: we assume Rosi didn't have any decent cutaway material. Every other version of the film that I could get my hands on (including an off-air BBC-sourced recording) had those issues, and since all of those would have come from a different master I'm very sure indeed that they were equally present at the film's world premiere in 35mm. (And when I watched both discs in Arrow's US release recently, I found that I hadn't changed my mind!).

(*The Human Condition is the only one that springs to mind, where we had to tag-team the final QC because it takes twenty hours to get through the whole dual-format package.)

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