The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1 Viewer)

[FoxyMulder]

Hi Torsten

 

Good to see you now have your own spot here and i look forward to reading future posts from you.

 

I note you worked on the first two Fistful of Dollars movies but not the third, can you tell me why you didn't work on the third movie and whether we are likely to see a much improved english language speaking version of the restored print perhaps in time for a future 45th anniversary release. I understand the MGM financial issues and whether the studio get's sold or not may play a part in all this.

 

 

Have you seen How The West Was Won on blu ray, i recently re-visited that film and i swear i can see some ringing throughout the transfer on both the cinerama and straight widescreen editions and i wondered if this was introduced via the downconversion process, that's assuming my eyes are not playing tricks on me and the original camera lenses used for the production didn't introduce this side effect.

 

Can you tell us what you are currently working on. ?

 

[Torsten Kaiser]

Thanx & sorry I did not get to respond more quickly.

We worked on FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE on behalf of Paramount who are the distributors of these films in the German-speaking territories in Europe. The reason why we did not work on TGTB&TU is simply that this title is not part of that licensing arrangement. That film is with MGM/UA. As for a release on Blu-ray, MGM/UA through Fox have just issued what they already had on DVD - however, this time with the original Mono tracks (at least on two of the three as far as I could make out). Unfortunately, all these titles are originally copyrighted in Italy, so MGM is just a licensee, which makes also the work with low generation elements very difficult. I hope that this will improve/be revisited some time in the future. Of Fo$s there was a quite promising master in Italy - however, it (the Blu-ray issued there) has significant issues with what we call subpixel drag - an error where the native pixel information designated for one pixel is picked up by two instead in two different vertical rows causing significant problems for the eyes to "read" the signal a s a sharp image. Especially on big screens this is very evident. It is likely an encoding error.
 

As for HTWWW, I do not recall such a problem at all. I will view it again sometime this week/next week - but in the meantime: What display do you use and what sharpness level have you set (x of x) ? It may also have someting to do with that...

 

As for current projects, we just finished VELVET GOLDMINE. I am sure we can talk about other projects soon when they are finished.

 

Best,

 

TK

 

[FoxyMulder]

I view at 104inches using a Panasonic full hd projection system with a sharpness set at -8, i don't add any sharpness i subtract it and used Spears and Munsil test disc to calibrate the system. Not the best projector in the world but it's not adding any edge halo's into the mix, i ran many tests just to confirm this as halo's is a pet hate of mine when it comes to viewing movies at home.

 

I re-visited this for my own site as i'm intending to provide some caps and a review and noticed when making the caps what looked a little like ringing in some scenes, maybe it's not.

 

An example below, incidentally i take these with proper settings so as not to "enhance" anything and straight off the disc with once again no sharpness introduced via the computer.

 

One thing i did notice is the smilebox version appears sharper to me than the letterbox edition, maybe it's something to do with the whole process used but i wondered why that was, why would smilebox be sharper on blu ray. ?

 

Take a look around the right side of the face of James Stewart in the pic below and part of his hat and the top of his right shoulder, maybe it's an optical thing but i think i can see a very slight and very thin halo, i have been trying to find a shot which had a branch near the riverside which had a clear halo around it when i viewed it, I don't recall anything else having a halo in the scene though so maybe it is something else and not ringing.

 

http://www.darkrealmfox.com/htwww_5.png

 

Anyway i am nitpicking, the transfer is on the whole very detailed and looks lovely, i just thought i saw ringing in some scenes but maybe my eyes are playing tricks on me.