Home Theater Forum - View Single Post - Abel Gance's Napoleon

Patrick McCart · 03-20-2007, 10:38 PM

http://www.zetaminor.com/whatsnew.htm

"Optimum have clarified some details of their forthcoming Napoleon DVD, which I will reproduce verbatim, since there seems to be little to be gained from paraphrasing it: "the version that we are releasing is the silent version restored by Francis Ford Coppola in 1980 with a new score composed by his father Carmine. The running time is 223 mins and the DVD has been encoded with a 16:9 aspect ratio. For those of you that know the film, you will be aware that Abel Gance shot it envisaging a three screen Polyvision projection technique to create a huge panorama for some scenes. This proved impractical and so this was only actually used by Gance for the final 20 minutes or so of the film. In our release, the 16:9 encoding allows for the three screens to be viewed as one widescreen for these last 20 minutes as Gance originally intended, with the preceding footage appearing as 4:3 on a 16:9 widescreen""

I'm hoping this doesn't mean the entire film is pillarboxed since it's easy to encode the finale as 16x9 with just a title change.

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03-20-2007, 10:38 PM	#10 of 21
Patrick McCart *Patrick J. McCart* Member Location: Decatur, GA, USA Join Date: May 2001 Local Time: 01:55 AM Local Date: 07-24-2008 Posts: 7,448	Re: Abel Gance's Napoleon - Optimum R2 DVD coming on May 28th? http://www.zetaminor.com/whatsnew.htm "Optimum have clarified some details of their forthcoming Napoleon DVD, which I will reproduce verbatim, since there seems to be little to be gained from paraphrasing it: "the version that we are releasing is the silent version restored by Francis Ford Coppola in 1980 with a new score composed by his father Carmine. The running time is 223 mins and the DVD has been encoded with a 16:9 aspect ratio. For those of you that know the film, you will be aware that Abel Gance shot it envisaging a three screen Polyvision projection technique to create a huge panorama for some scenes. This proved impractical and so this was only actually used by Gance for the final 20 minutes or so of the film. In our release, the 16:9 encoding allows for the three screens to be viewed as one widescreen for these last 20 minutes as Gance originally intended, with the preceding footage appearing as 4:3 on a 16:9 widescreen"" I'm hoping this doesn't mean the entire film is pillarboxed since it's easy to encode the finale as 16x9 with just a title change. Tell The Weinstein Company to release Richard Williams' animated masterpiece The Thief and the Cobbler on DVD in Panavision widescreen and uncut! See and hear what you're missing from their Bitsy Award winner of Worst Standard Edition DVD of 2006 on YouTube!