IMO, this does not seems to be a denoising issue like Bande à part or, to a lesser degree, A Man Escaped french BD, but really a filtering effect close to what was seen on the first encode of Le samourai.
It also looks quite far from Children of Paradise, which is just FUBAR flat, but does not have this painting-by-number / mosaïc effect.
We'll see the Gaumont in a few months, but looking at Jérome Soulet enthusiasm, the Criterion results is surprising, and I'm wondering what we will get in France. As Svet noted, the notes seems to point that we're likely to have the same kind of PQ, but on the other end, what was on the first encode of Le samourai was not seen on the theater prints, nor in the 2nd encode, so I guess some doors are still open (fingers crossed).
david hare wrote:The degree of filtering and clean up is mirrored somewhat in Gaumont's overly DVNRed Bande a Part but that film has the benefit of a new encode from the Crit team. If only they ahd done the same thing here. Svet's textual quotation on production credits gives the game away I think.
Remember that usually, Gaumont does 2 transfers/masters : one degrained, one untouched. If you take Rififi, Gaumont released the degrained one while Arrow released the untouched one, with obvious superiority for Arrow. Gaumont might have chosen to only give the FUBARed material to Criterion, and kept the good one for themselves. Which is still pretty bad practice anyway.
david hare wrote:The whole fuckup is down to the Gaumont and/or Éclair technicians and production staff. This now gives us the sad certainty that any BD product coming from Gaumont/Pathe can no longer be relied on for quality.
Again, I'd like to emphasise that, this year, Gaumont have released 2 movies which are better than their US counterpart, including one Criterion title (Identification of a Woman) (the other Conversation Piece). Their 6 Pialat releases have received almost unanimous good reviews, and their 3 other releases of the year don't have any notable issues. They're also likely to top Criterion a 2nd time on Fanny & Alexander by splitting the TV cut on 2 discs. And L'assassin habite au 21, while not being perfect, is quite good looking already at MoC.
It seems unfair, IMO, to go to this type of length due to a couple of major FUBAR releases and rejecting now almost spontaneously / systematically anything from them when 90% of their 70 other releases don't have any problem even remotely close to this. Yes, they screwed up pretty bad about 10 titles, but that's still leaves 85% of pretty neat releases, including the beautiful France-exclusive BD of Le général Della Rovere, Les maudits, La traversée de Paris, Alexandre le bienheureux, French Cancan, Elena et les hommes (but I read it has slight compression issues), etc etc.
david hare wrote:I simply cannot believe M. Soulet thinks this is all perfectly OK.
He just posted this on DVD Classik :
http://www.dvdclassik.com/forum/viewtop ... 6#p2329586" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
"You're scaring me with the review at criterionforum. I'll gather information. I didn't received any alert from my tehcnical team"
