HTF REIVEW: Mary Poppins 40th Anniversary SE - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!! (1 Viewer)

[ArthurMy]

Doug, via NTSC conversion - the quality is terrific and on a par with the US DVD, which I also have.

Does anyone else using AOL to access this site have the problems that I do? Is there something incompatible? Pages won't load, it's slow as molasses, don't get it.

If I use Safari everything loads perfectly, works fast, no probs. Just curious.

 

[rich_d]

Ken,

Fine. But this thread is addressing the DVD presentation of the film. Peter presents what the older Gold edition used of the print which is much wider than the new version and yet is still cropped on both sides.

So, why did we lose image in this release?

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

A 3% cropping on all four sides would result in a reduction in projected area of 12%. I measure the reduction in area of the DVD frame vs. the full film frame as 12.45%. I stick by my previous statement (post #140 in this thread) that it is not "excessive", but certainly "unnecessary".

Regards,

 

[Peter Apruzzese]

But the 2-3% I mentioned earlier would be the *total* reduction, not per side, in a theatrical presentation. My previous post may have been unclear.

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

Peter,
Now I'm confused by your previous example of showing a 32 foot wide image versus a 37 foot wide image. This would be a 13.5% reduction in only the horizontal dimension versus the talked about 12-13% reduction in film area.

Based on my measurements off of the previously posted frame, there is a 7% horizontal cropping (which would be about 16 inches on each side of a 37 foot wide screen) and a 5.5% vertical cropping of the new DVD versus the available frame area for a total reduction in exposed area of around 12.5%. The Gold Collection DVD has a

 

[DaViD Boulet]

Look...let's forget about what a theater "needs" to do for a minute because of the mechanics of projection... In such a venue matting is part of a necessary evil so to speak...and rarely is cropping to this magnitude required for a pristine well-produced print (last month I saw a projected film and the image was visible over the matted area around the screen...it was shifted to the left and up so that there was about 2 feet covering the left matte and about 2 feet covering the top matte that you could make out...and the whole movie people's heads were shaved off and the you could feel the composition was off-balance with too much getting sliced on the left of the screen...I don't consider such matting doing an artistic service to the content and clearly was WAY more than was needed to take care of any ragged film-frame edge).

looking at the film frame and given the previous DVD and laserdisc editions...it's obvious that this DVD video image needlessly discarded some meaningful picture area on all four sides. It was unnecessary, and given the digitally scanned/cleaned process used for each frame, it would have even been possible in this case to deliver the ENTIRE frame image for the DVD.

The current framing on the DVD feels a bit cramped for my tastes...watching the former DVD opens things up a bit (though the PQ is unwatchable otherwise on a FP) and so my feeling is that the artistry of the film would have been best served with a bit more image.

Mary Poppins wasn't just a live-action film with lots of excess image content left in tact for cropping...it is a film largely composed of painted mattes, hand-drawn images, and effects...and in such a case the matting in a theatrical projection is necessary given the reasons stated earlier, but it is not a process that serves the artistry of the film. Home-video media can actually provide a better solution in this regard.

Keep in mind that this is Disney. It wouldn't be the first time that their framing/cropping decisions were poorly made (just get RAH talking about the framing/cropping of Sleeping Beauty!).

 

[Peter Apruzzese]

Ken -

Once again, it may be my considerable lack of skill in communication via keyboard (and math) . I should have used an example of 13% loss across all four sides (as the DVD appears to have done.

In your case (total 13% loss in a "well within the margin of error for most theatrical presentations I will ever see"), our theoretical 1.85 movie on a 20' x 37' screen turns into a 17' x 32' image. But, in practice, there's no need for any loss on the top and bottom of a 1.85 image, to hide projection angle and print edge issues, so the majority of the loss would be on the sides. Note that these examples are not about Mary Poppins - I'm using a hypothetical open-matte (the majority of 1.85 films are not hard-matted) 1.85 movie to show how much actual image loss would occur with a 13% crop.

EDIT (David posted while I was writing) I agree with him on the DVD, there is no need for this amount of cropping on Mary Poppins.

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

Peter,
You are not following my math. The area is the horizontal times the vertical. For instance, with 3% cropping on all four sides, the lost area would be 11.6%. That would not mean an 11.6% reduction in either length or width.

Regards,

 

[george kaplan]

Hmm.

Consider a 100 x 100 square. The area is 100*100=10000.

Now if you reduce by 3% on all 4 sides, you lose 3 on each side, or a total of 6 for both length and width. This gives you 94*94=8836.

Now, 10000-8836=1164, which would be losing 11.64% of the original area.

Now if you only lose 3% on each side (and not top or bottom), you would have 94*1000=9400, which is 6% of area lost.

EDIT: I posted all of that because of a number in Ken's previous post, which he's now corrected (which makes my post look stupid, but it wasn't when Ken was talking about 12.6%)

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

Whew! I snuck in there and fixed my math just four minutes before it was gonna be done for me. I appreciate the efforts to keep me from posting "geometrically incorrect" statements.

Regards,

 

[RobertSiegel]

Hello all, I thought I would post this. Today, I finally bought the new two-CD edition of the Mary Poppins soundtrack, and I ended up listening to it for over 3 hours, over and over again. I am stunned at the quality. I started with the original 1964 album and bought all of the releases that were issued after that, but nothing prepared me for this cd. I have never heard Mary Poppins sound so good, as if it were recorded yesterday. Finally, the original masters beautifully transferred, including much of the great underscore. I have never heard a pre-1980 Disney release with so much bass, so accurate a sound and awesome stereo separation. If you love this score, don't walk, RUN and buy this cd. In addition, one entire cd contains PL Travers giving the Disney people her ideas for the film before she gave it the ok, and other extras including interviews.

The one sad thing is that listening to the quality of this master tape and the recorded quality, it makes me sad that Disney did not start from scratch and completely remix these into the film soundtrack and use that for the home theatre mix. They could have used the dialogue,effects and orchestral recording from these masters to create what would have been unprecidented for Mary Poppins. I like the 2.0 theatrical mix, but after hearing this cd, I realize what COULD have been done for that 5.1 mix and it makes me realize how awful the final result was of what they actually did.

Thanks for this CD Randy Thornton, you did one great job. Now, if Disney would do the same with HAPPIEST MILLIONAIRE and BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS soundtracks , which came out on cd last year but from the album masters which had the echos from those album issues, they were not the scoring session masters for the films. I also wouldn't mind THE ONE AND ONLY GENUINE ORIGINAL FAMILY BAND.

 

[rich_d]

Likewise I got the two-disc set after someone posted about it. I've only listened to the score disc so one more disc still to go but I was very happy with the audio.

I wish they had included Bert's rhyming segment in the park. When Bert starts singing about the wind shift ... just a terrific segment. Other than that, lovely. I'm not a big packaging fan, but I thought they did a nice job with the packaging/images as well.

Regarding the 5.1 mixes ... hopefully someone will tell us who the tin-eared audio supervisor responsible for this project was .... he/she needs to be stopped!

 

[Al (alweho)]

It was probably an intern from marketing.

 

[Ernest Rister]

Finally finished the disc, and listened to the 2.0 track. Much better, but recorded far too low, as David said. Had to crank it up, but it sounded fine even in Pro-Logic II surround.

For fun, I flipped over to certain instances in the new 5.1 track for comparison. The new firework sound effects are so pointless and completely anachronistic to the rest of the film, as are the new "pops" when people come erupting out of the chimneys.

The sit down with Richard, Dick and Julie was great, as was Sherman's tour through the song concepts and deleted material.

 

[Jeffrey Nelson]

After reading about the MP DVD issues here, I hauled off and snagged the old collector's edition laserdisc from eBay for 10 bucks. More info at top and bottom, plus an absolutely BRILLIANT-sounding soundtrack, with NO new foley effects, and recorded ecstatically LOUD, with no digital compression natch. I think I'll stick with that for watching the film, and pick up the DVD for the amazing extras...

 

[Ron Reda]

Like another poster said previously, why is this thread archived when this DVD (and review for that matter) is only a few months old? I just now heard about the 5.1 audio "issue" as I haven't watched the DVD yet and had a heck of a time finding information on it.