Artificial Eye / Curzon Film World

[kidc85]

There is currently a great AE sale on in Fopp. Loads of films for a fiver and boxsets for £15. Satantango is a bargain at £12.

I owe you a major thank you. Picked up the Angelopoulos Collection for £15, alongside a whole bunch of other great stuff.

[rattlebag]

I owe you a major thank you. Picked up the Angelopoulos Collection for £15, alongside a whole bunch of other great stuff.

You are welcome! I bought the third Angelopoulos boxset and I'm kicking myself for buying the second one two weeks ago! Same goes for the first Arrow Fassbinder box that they had in for £15. Although I mustn't complain as I got some gems.

[peerpee]

I've just abandoned a late-night screening of Sokurov's FAUST on Blu-ray due to what looks like massive embedded interlacing that I couldn't take my eyes off. I've tried it on two players, all my other Blus play great – it's definitely this disc. It's apparent right away from the opening text credits, which are noticeably lined. Stepping through on pause reveals that every frame of the film is interlaced and it looks like a badly encoded DVD.

If you click the Beaver pics to get the full image and look closely at each grab, you can see the lines clearly. Beaver says: "The 1080P supports the film's idiosyncrasies as adeptly as possible which includes some horizontal lines - mostly imperceptible in standard viewing." --- Why would part of Sokurov's visual aesthetic be to introduce the sort of interlacing we're familiar with from PAL > NTSC conversions? It doesn't make any sense. I realise that I'm highly perceptive to these issues, but this surely can't be supposed to look like this? It looks bobbins.

Something really shit has gone on somewhere here. There is also massive compression artefact blooming in shadows. Looks like a duff encode and a recall to me.

Are there any other Blu-rays of this film available in other territories? Are they similarly afflicted?

[warren oates]

This is so disappointing. My copy is en route from the UK... Shit. I was so psyched to see this... And there's no U.S. release on the horizon.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

There's an Italian Blu-ray (no English subs). No idea how it looks, though I've seen the Italian DVD and it looks fine. It's certainly not interlaced.

[Oedipax]

The Italian blu does NOT have the same issues. It must be something strictly on AE's end. I hope they get it sorted!

[peerpee]

The film was shot on film with Arricams. I'm wondering whether at some point in post, during all the digital FX work, someone somewhere has done a poor conversion to or from 1080/50i (25fps > 24fps, or 24fps > 25fps) and embedded the interlacing in a 1080/24p master that AE couldn't unravel? With AE simply encoding that to BD? (ie. the HD tape AE were sent looked like this?)

It beggars belief that these "lines" are part of Sokurov's aesthetic.

[bigP]

HMV are listing a Dardenne Brothers Collection 6 DVD box set, for December 10th.

[Calvin]

Bresson's Mouchette is also slated for December 10th. DVD-only.

[HJackson]

Is Nouveaux Pictures dead or something? COME AND SEE, CRANES ARE FLYING and MOUCHETTE are now Artificial Eye, their Resnais and Godard films are now handled by Studio Canal. How soon until people in the UK can expect a decent copy of 8½ (Nouveux's disc of that was a real turd, right up there with Second Sight's 4x3 letterboxed GIRL CAN'T HELP IT)?

[Calvin]

Is Nouveaux Pictures dead or something? COME AND SEE, CRANES ARE FLYING and MOUCHETTE are now Artificial Eye, their Resnais and Godard films are now handled by Studio Canal. How soon until people in the UK can expect a decent copy of 8½ (Nouveux's disc of that was a real turd, right up there with Second Sight's 4x3 letterboxed GIRL CAN'T HELP IT)?

I don't know whether or not they are still functioning but even if they are, they probably won't be around for much longer. Their non-Fellini big titles have been re-released by Artificial Eye, Arrow and Studio Canal. Their last release was Suspiria, back in 2010.

[MichaelB]

Their last release was Suspiria, back in 2010.

...which was supposed to be part of a series that never materialised.

A shame: once I'd tuned out the toe-curlingly patronising "taking trash seriously" tagline, I was rather impressed with the extras on that disc - they had a fair bit more substance than the usual self-congratulatory puff pieces.

[feckless boy]

Beaver on The Turin Horse. Is that a new bitrate record?

[martin]

I've made a list of specifications for a lot of French films on blu-ray, and I think I've seen video bitrates approaching 40,000 kbs. 35 Mbs is very high though.

[GaryC]

It's not quite true that the only extra on the UK disc (DVD) of The Turin Horse is the short Hotel Magnezit - there's also the trailer, all 44 seconds of it. The feature is 1.66:1 anamorphic with a Dolby 2.0 soundtrack.

Two other AE titles I've received DVD checkdiscs for are:

Goodbye First Love - 1.85:1 anamorphic. Dolby 5.1 & 2.0. The only extra is the trailer, though there are adverts for Curzon On Demand at the start.

Corpo Celeste - 1.85:1 anamorphic. Dolby 5.1 and 2.0. Extras: the trailer plus a 40-minute interview with the director and producer. This interview looks odd - it's 16:9 anamorphic but seems like it was shot in 4:3 and has been horizontally stretched. This may of course not be the case on the retail copies.

Picture quality looks fine at a brief glance. Corpo Celeste looks particularly grainy, but then it was shot on 16mm.

Most Artificial Eye DVDs I've seen recently have been region-free, but these three are Region 2 only.

[MichaelB]

Excellent news - I'm glad I waited for the Beaver comparison. Nice though the additional Cinema Guild extras undoubtedly are, the short was the only thing I was really interested in, and the Artificial Eye disc will be significantly cheaper for the UK-based likes of me.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Beaver on The Turin Horse. Is that a new bitrate record?

There's a lengthy list here. A few IMAX documentaries released in the early days of BD apparently used constant-bitrate 40Mbps encodes, though it doesn't seem to have helped the PQ much. Anime titles from Japan regularly exceed 35Mbps. Two of the most surprising high-bitrate titles on the list are The Simpsons Movie and 28 Days Later (!!!).

[peerpee]

Has no-one else had a close look at the FAUST BD yet?

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

Has no-one else had a close look at the FAUST BD yet?

Thanks to you we've all cancelled our orders.

[rattlebag]

Has no-one else had a close look at the FAUST BD yet?

Thanks to you we've all cancelled our orders.

Seconded!

[Matt]

Thirded.

[peerpee]

Shitting hell. I was really looking forward to my first Sokurov on BD. It's terrible when a small but enthusiastic crowd of folk all bail on an anticipated release because of flaws that should have been caught in QC. If for some reason Sokurov stands by this master, I would ask "does he stand by this particular Blu-ray encode? Has he been shown the lines, and is he happy with that?"

Reminiscences of a retired producer #482: I once rejected a master of a film by a famous French director, and was told "the director is happy with this master, he has signed it off". I said "He can't have. He seriously can't have. The master is horizontally stretched, the lab have made a pig's ear of a 1.66:1 anamorphic master, and this is definitely not right." They insisted it was fine. I insisted it wasn't. I refused to budge. Weeks later they eventually called in the director to the lab to look at the master I rejected, he was horrified, and had them redo it in HD. The lab got a bollocking.

[Mathew2468]

Was that Alain Resnais?

[zedz]

(a bit late, but) Fourthed.

You're a regular Dr Mabuse, peerpee, orchestrating international market manipulations through the power of your mind.

[RossyG]

Fifthed.

I had a nice under a tenner pre-order, too, but if it's buggered up I can't be bothered with the hassle.

What you've never seen you never miss.