Waterloo (1 Viewer)

[Winston T. Boogie]

Well, I believe the Russian version Greg and I have is from Atrium DVD ( ATRIUM DVDART ) and Columbia Tristar Film Distributors International, it certainly appears to be an official release. It is not the Shinco disc. I also screened the film on a Pioneer upconverting DVD player. I assumed the reason that the audio sync drifts in the second half of the film was due to the fact that they ported this transfer over from a PAL disc. I have not tried playing the film on another player but I can do this and see if my Pioneer was the reason for the sync problems. It is true that the post dub done on Waterloo is very much like a Spaghetti Western, but I was aware of that and that to me is no big deal.

I screened two other import films, also region 0 and NTSC, over the weekend on the Pioneer. A Korean version of 55 Days at Peking and a Russian version of The Ipcress File...no sync issues on either one. I also would guess these were ported over from PAL discs but I'm not certain of that.

 

[Greg_M]

Yes Reggie, I to have the DVD from ATRIUM DVDART. Is there another Russian DVD out there?

 

[Mark Zimmer]

No synch problems here with the UK DVD. Glad I opted for that since even with a superior picture unsynched dialogue would be just too distracting for me. YMMV.

 

[Gordon McMurphy]

I have a lot of admiration for Waterloo (and War and Peace) and I have owned the UKR2 DVD for about five years. I bought it for £5 ($9). It's a DVD-5 (single layer) btw, though it is generally very good for a transfer made in 1999. But I'd love to see a Blu-ray.

The main problem with the Ruscico transfer of War and Peace is the encoding. It looks like they used the old codec (?) of MPEG2 with lots of macro-blocking and noise, especially when the camera pans left/right during a detailed background - you see this at the very start, when the bushes and trees break up. The elements used - and this may be inherent in the currently unlocated 70mm negative (not 65mm, the Russian's used a 70mm negative) - have a contrast problem, where there is flickering througout the film. Otherwise, it looks good - not great, just good, most of the time, in the way that Russian color films from this period look - cold, dark, sometimes dangerously low contrast and generally quite dense, unlike UK/USA Super Panavision 65mm productions, which were bright, sharp, lush and stable.

What is needed is to find the original 65mm neg cans and do a James Bond-style 6-8k digitial restoration. But where would the money and time come from? The Eastern European economy is in meltdown.

BTW, try to get the OOP soundtrack to Waterloo - it's awesome.

 

[Winston T. Boogie]

Ok, it took quite a while for me to get back to this thread but I just screened the Russian DVD of Waterloo again last night and this time on my Pioneer Elite Blu-Ray player and did not have the audio sync issues in the second half of the film that I did on the Pioneer DVD player...so maybe this is a player thing and not a DVD thing.


Here is what I did notice though, at the point just before the layer shift the audio goes out of sync for one line of dialogue spoken by Christopher Plummer (playing Wellington, of course) then after the shift the audio was immediately back in sync and remained so for the rest of the film. So, perhaps the audio on the Russian DVD only goes out of sync on some players or upconverting standard DVD players. Obviously, the Pioneer Blu-Ray player also upconverts the picture quality but in this case there was no audio sync problem in the second half of the film. This seems to clearly indicate the audio sync issues are more player related than disc related.


On a final note, this film is gorgeous to look at and we will never see the battle of Waterloo filmed this way again...this really should get full Criterion treatment on Blu as this is a fantastic film that was just harshly judged and ignored at the time. Please Criterion attempt to get your hands on this one!