TheHutt
Agent
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2009
- Messages
- 47
- Real Name
- Peter
Specially on German BluRays (but not only) there is an annoying trend going for some while now: specially major labels seem to be rather incompetent when converting existing foreign language dubs for BluRay.
A hot example is "The Lord of the Rings SEE" released in Germany by Warner on BluRay. The same pitch correction which played tricks on the PAL DVD releases of "The Fellowship of the Ring" now made the German release practically unwatchable.
The reason is this: when a theatrical feature is converted to PAL, it is sped up by 4% (from 24 fps to 25 fps). The audio is also sped up and sounds 4% higher (this is almost a halftone). To compensate for this "PAL Speedup" phenomenon, sometimes studios make use of pitch correction to artificially lower the pitch to its theatrical level, while remaining at 25 fps.
However, for release on BluRay, some labels notoriously take these already pitch-corrected tracks and slow them down to 23,976 fps without pitch correction, thus making the soundtrack half a tone lower than the theatrical version. Mostly it happens to foreign dubs on MGM releases who masters all their DVDs in USA and seemingly don't give a crap about the sound of foreign language dubs. While the English audio sounds fine, the German, French, Spanish, Italian etc. dubs sound too low. And they do it for years. American reviewers never take notice - and that seems to be all they care about. Other labels who do such faulty conversions are FOX (German "Kingdom of Heaven" BluRay) and Warner ("Lord of the Rings SEE")
Now Warner joined them with "The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition" - the PAL DVD audio was pitch-corrected to retain its theatrical pitch (on FOTR, the audio studio MiCasa used some faulty algorithm which introdiced heavy artifacts into the PAL soundtrack in releases all over the world). Now if Warner wanted to do it properly, they should have used German dub mixes prior to PAL conversion. However, they just converted the DVD version, not minding that it was already pitch-corrected.
Now German viewers get Shore's Oscar-winning music a halftone too low. Other regional versions might be affected, too - because the audio is mastered by MiCasa in USA for all of them.
A hot example is "The Lord of the Rings SEE" released in Germany by Warner on BluRay. The same pitch correction which played tricks on the PAL DVD releases of "The Fellowship of the Ring" now made the German release practically unwatchable.
The reason is this: when a theatrical feature is converted to PAL, it is sped up by 4% (from 24 fps to 25 fps). The audio is also sped up and sounds 4% higher (this is almost a halftone). To compensate for this "PAL Speedup" phenomenon, sometimes studios make use of pitch correction to artificially lower the pitch to its theatrical level, while remaining at 25 fps.
However, for release on BluRay, some labels notoriously take these already pitch-corrected tracks and slow them down to 23,976 fps without pitch correction, thus making the soundtrack half a tone lower than the theatrical version. Mostly it happens to foreign dubs on MGM releases who masters all their DVDs in USA and seemingly don't give a crap about the sound of foreign language dubs. While the English audio sounds fine, the German, French, Spanish, Italian etc. dubs sound too low. And they do it for years. American reviewers never take notice - and that seems to be all they care about. Other labels who do such faulty conversions are FOX (German "Kingdom of Heaven" BluRay) and Warner ("Lord of the Rings SEE")
Now Warner joined them with "The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition" - the PAL DVD audio was pitch-corrected to retain its theatrical pitch (on FOTR, the audio studio MiCasa used some faulty algorithm which introdiced heavy artifacts into the PAL soundtrack in releases all over the world). Now if Warner wanted to do it properly, they should have used German dub mixes prior to PAL conversion. However, they just converted the DVD version, not minding that it was already pitch-corrected.
Now German viewers get Shore's Oscar-winning music a halftone too low. Other regional versions might be affected, too - because the audio is mastered by MiCasa in USA for all of them.