Transformers: The Movie - Reconstructed (1 Viewer)

[Jeff Jacobson]

From seibertron.com


I trimmed out some stuff about "The Headmasters" release, which will have the cheezy English dub as well as subtitles. (I hope it also has the original Japanese soundtrack to go along with the subtitles, but the article does not specifically say that.)

 

[EricRWem]

GREAT!!!

 

[Inspector Hammer!]

Excellent news!! Although i'm a little hazy on the exact method of shooting and composing that was being described.

So, it's a 1.33:1 film but will be 16x9 anamorphic with matting on the sides to maintain the 1.33:1?

 

[Jay Pennington]

That is insane. You'd get more picture resolution by doing the 1:33.1 stuff full frame and letterboxing the 1.78 footage.

 

[Jim Barg]

Hell, I'm just happy that there's going to be a (mostly) widescreen transfer available...

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Only on a non-widescreen TV -- and despite the lack of any interest in HiVision on the part of broadcasters there, I understand that 16:9 TVs are more common in Europe than America, thanks at least in part to years of anamorphic widescreen standard-definition [PalPlus, &c.] broadcasts which we do not have in the U.S.

 

[Inspector Hammer!]

Wait a minute, I just re-read that article and am I right in that the film will shift back and forth between two ratios based on what the individual cell artists did for a given shot!?

What the hell was Nelson Shin thinking when he had the animators go to work on this film is what i'd like to know.

The film was 1.85:1 in theaters I believe, why not just restore and transfer the 1.85:1 elements? It would be better than all this zig zagging around between ratios.

 

[Damin J Toell]

This sounds like a terrible idea. No matter what the individual animators may have animated specific scenes at, the final theatrical product had only one AR. Just because a given scene may have been animated at an AR other than the theatrical, it doesn't mean it was designed to actually be seen that way. Among other things, the out-of-frame animation may have been designed as extraneous information meant only to make the film easier to unmatte for 4x3 television versions. They had me at "original picture negative"...and promptly lost me again.

DJ

 

[Inspector Hammer!]

I'm with Damin, I was initially excited but i'm souring really quickly.

I mean I want what was intended by the filmmakers, of course, but not to the extent where the image jumps erratically all over the place and I can't concentrate on the film. A film's AR should be invisible and constant.

 

[ChristopherDAC]

While there are a few films which really do employ changing aspect ratios, for effect in the same way as shifting back and forth between monochrome and colour, I don't think this is one. In many cases animators [not "laminators"!] will draw out to the edge of the frames they are given to work with, usually "cels" of some standard paper size, regardless of the intended final aspect ratio. Project A-Ko, for instance, was projected in theatres at 5:3 and the U.S. video release preserves this ratio, but the old Japanese LaserDisc release [I'm not sure about DVD] was opened out to 4:3 with the inclusion of apparently unimportant details. What is the OAR of such a film? I guess the theatrical one is as good a choice as any, but it does make sense to pick one and stick with it.

 

[Inspector Hammer!]

The combination of what was contained on the theatrical prints and the included instructions for the projectionist to matte at 5:3.

So it's 5:3 since that is what was first shown in theaters.

 

[PhilipG]

If this is a European project, are they going to reconstruct at 25fps - or even on PAL video 50fps?

Personally, I like the idea, considering that the best version we have right now is a pan/scan hack job, and the w/s master is "lost". I'd prefer plain black bars to curtains however.

 

[Mike.P]

As someone who watches TF the movie multiple times a year, I'm interested in hearing more on this. The current DVD doesn't satisfy my thirst for something much more complete.

 

[Jonathan Kaye]

True about the popularity of 16:9 TVs here in Europe, though strictly speaking I don't think PALplus is/was anamorphic. AIUI, PALplus was an extension to terrestrial PAL signals, so that 16:9 displays would show the full picture while 4:3 displays would show a letterbox picture. I can't speak for the rest of Europe, but in the UK only one of (then) four terrestrial channels took up PALplus (Channel Four).

It was the advent of digital satellite (and lattely terrestrial) broadcasting that brought anamorphic 16:9 broadcasts to go with anamorphic 16:9 DVDs. These, of course, are not strictly speaking PAL or PALplus (which are descriptions of colour encoding).

 

[ChristopherDAC]

I guess "anamorphic" is the wrong word to describe the letterbox+enhancement channel structure of PalPlus, but it is certainly a native 16:9 aspect ratio format, and it was the first thing to come to mind. As I understand it PalPlus was only one of several extensions to the basic CCIR 625/25/2:1 television format to be implemented in Europe and elsewhere. It seems to me that Australia even used DMAC [the old analog DBS format] for terrestrial broadcasts, possibly in widescreen.

 

[Jay Pennington]

Okay, I did some math and retract my "insane" comment.

Either way, you're throwing away some resolution, whether it's from the 1.33 stuff or the 1.78 stuff.

Remember, whether you have a 16:9 display or not, we're still talking standard definition on the DVD, which amounts to a 720x480 image as far as the player is concerned. Whether it gets stretched out on your monitor has no relevance to how efficiently the "real estate" of the encoded image is utilized.

METHOD A: If it was encoded with the 1.33 material full frame and the 1.78 letterboxed, the only resolution "thrown away", in the form of the letterbox bars, would be 54,720 pixels, or 16% of the total encoded image area.

METHOD B: The way they're doing it, with the 1.78 material filling the frame animorphically (1.78 is a 16x9 ratio), and the 1.33 shrunk down to sit right in the middle, with pillarbox bars on either side, comes to a very similar loss of resolution. In this case, the 1.33 image is reduced from 345,600 to 292,320 pixels, again a loss of 16% (53,280).

So the method they're going with is indeed a bit better, with 1440 fewer pixels wasted on black bars than my "Method A" above.

It's especially better if there's more 1.78 footage than 1.33 in the film, since those with widescreen monitors would now see it filling their screen rather than letterboxed in a square in the middle (again, not so much a resolution thing than a display thing).

 

[Bryan Tuck]

I don't know if this has any bearing on anything, but I used to work as a projectionist, and many times a "flat" movie will actually have a variable aspect ratio on the print itself. The whole area of the frame is about 1.37:1, and different shots will be matted to different ratios, I'm assuming based on the style of effects shot or other factors. However, the aperture plate mattes the entire film to the 1.85:1 ratio.

Most prints for animated films that I saw had a fixed ratio on the print, usually somewhere between 1.66:1 and 1.85:1. But these, too were still matted to 1.85:1.

However, I agree with everyone else in that no matter what the ratios of varying shots are on the print, the projected ratio for the entire movie (I assume; I actually didn't see the film in theaters) was 1.85:1, or possibly 1.66:1 in some countries.

I think I understand the idea behind this release, but I'm afraid it seems a tad misguided.

 

[Inspector Hammer!]

I'm completely stumped with this one, i'll just have to watch the new dvd to grasp what was done to it.

That way I can also conduct a direct comparison with the old dvd and see the changes in action.

 

[Jerry Gracia]

I have mellowed alot on the issue of O.A.R. over the years.

Ideally, yes...I would like to see a version more faithful to what the theatrical release looked like.

However...whatever they're doing...the end result should be a better looking version than the current version from RHINO.

I'd like to see the end result of what they plan to do...

 

[Jeff Jacobson]

I just watched this disc and the audio sounds horrible.

According to this review of the DVD by Chris McFeely, the same guys that mixed the audio for the Rhino season sets did the audio for this DVD as well:


It's not just the extra sound effects, it just doesn't sound very good. (I wish I knew the technical terms to describe it.) There are also some effects that were originally in the movie that seem to be either missing or just much quieter.

I really wish they would stop using that "Magno" studio. They are really incompetent. I'm sure anybody on the HTF could do a better job than these guys. You would know that to create a stereo track for a movie that was in stereo, you just leave it alone! You don't create a horrible 5.1 track with extra sound effects and then downmix it to 2.0.