Jay Pennington
Screenwriter
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2003
- Messages
- 1,189
I, at last, was able to begin viewing my set this evening, and happily add my voice, whatever little value it has, to the crowd in highly recommending it. I've been hoping to hear Davis scores to these films ever since I first saw Unknown Chaplin in the mid-80s. Never thought it would actually come to pass!
We all owe so much to David Shepard's dogged persistence in repeatedly upgrading these restorations over the years. About ten years ago he was even nice enough to respond to a newsgroup query of mine about the laserdisc sets with an informative email.
I have to agree with some of Jeffrey Nelson's observations, though, in the best "glass half full" vein possible (as he intends them, obviously). I would've loved to see the intertitles restored/recreated to their original style. It is nice that these have been frozen to eliminate multigenerational gate weave, but the freezes are done crudely and look rather like high-compression jpegs.
The intercutting of new introductory titles with the old, weaving film-based Blackhawk ones ("the happiest time of my career", etc.) is a bit jarring--that could've easily been avoided by remaking the old ones while they were about typing in the new ones. Heck, I wouldn't mind if they were eliminated altogether and the feature allowed to start right away. The text is rather scholastic in nature, redundant to the information in the DVD booklet and already known by most of the "choir" viewing the material anyway. I suppose Mr. Shepard is still in the mindset of the film rental "Cavalcade" compilations, and feel they need opening credits, as it were, but it might be time to retire that notion for home video purposes. We DVD viewers are an impatient bunch and when we hit that button on the remote we want the program to start right away.
It's too bad that more footage might've been included, too (not to take away from the fact that these are the most complete we've ever seen them). I'm sure there are many good reasons (such as the alternate take redundancy already mentioned), although in my opinion comparatively poor print quality is not sufficient cause to leave footage out if it's the only element available. If it's remotely watchable, and even only a frame long, I'd personally prefer it be included in the interest of completeness. As for the issue of the scores already being recorded before more footage surfaced, well, music can be edited to compensate. Such is done all the time in modern post-production when picture editing continues after scoring is completed.
But these are simply "maybe next time" thoughts...I wouldn't want anyone to hesitate buying this set for a microsecond.
We all owe so much to David Shepard's dogged persistence in repeatedly upgrading these restorations over the years. About ten years ago he was even nice enough to respond to a newsgroup query of mine about the laserdisc sets with an informative email.
I have to agree with some of Jeffrey Nelson's observations, though, in the best "glass half full" vein possible (as he intends them, obviously). I would've loved to see the intertitles restored/recreated to their original style. It is nice that these have been frozen to eliminate multigenerational gate weave, but the freezes are done crudely and look rather like high-compression jpegs.
The intercutting of new introductory titles with the old, weaving film-based Blackhawk ones ("the happiest time of my career", etc.) is a bit jarring--that could've easily been avoided by remaking the old ones while they were about typing in the new ones. Heck, I wouldn't mind if they were eliminated altogether and the feature allowed to start right away. The text is rather scholastic in nature, redundant to the information in the DVD booklet and already known by most of the "choir" viewing the material anyway. I suppose Mr. Shepard is still in the mindset of the film rental "Cavalcade" compilations, and feel they need opening credits, as it were, but it might be time to retire that notion for home video purposes. We DVD viewers are an impatient bunch and when we hit that button on the remote we want the program to start right away.
It's too bad that more footage might've been included, too (not to take away from the fact that these are the most complete we've ever seen them). I'm sure there are many good reasons (such as the alternate take redundancy already mentioned), although in my opinion comparatively poor print quality is not sufficient cause to leave footage out if it's the only element available. If it's remotely watchable, and even only a frame long, I'd personally prefer it be included in the interest of completeness. As for the issue of the scores already being recorded before more footage surfaced, well, music can be edited to compensate. Such is done all the time in modern post-production when picture editing continues after scoring is completed.
But these are simply "maybe next time" thoughts...I wouldn't want anyone to hesitate buying this set for a microsecond.