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Maybe I'm blind and I wear thick glasses for a reason, but is anyone here really bothered by the image and bitrate? When I see the stills, it makes me beyond excited to see these films in HD. I mean, it was only a few decades ago that many of these films were either not avilable or viewable only in cropped editions. The stills look wonderful and a major leap from the Eureka boxset I previously owned. I miss the mid-2000s when Criterion released Japanese genre films almost every month and get excited for releases like this.

Three films per disc does indeed seem like a lot, but as far as I know the Blu format is equipped to handle the roughly 4 1/2 hours of content each of the first two discs hold. The bit rates do not seem to have suffered, so there is really nothing to take issue with, but it does seem a bit peculiar to me too to have the third disc be so lightly utilized in comparison to the first two.

It's the same spread as for the Zatoichi set, which are also ultra-wide, relatively short films. It shouldn't be a problem.

The "ultra-wide" point being important: a Scope-framed film by definition takes up less space than a full 16:9 one.

swo17 wrote:It's the same spread as for the Zatoichi set, which are also ultra-wide, relatively short films. It shouldn't be a problem.

It shouldn't be a problem per se, indeed, it's just the logic behind which surprises me.
However, I believe the LW&C are sourced from recent masters while the Zatoichis were all (except the 1st one) sourced from older masters.

The gamma looks a bit off...

In fact, where are the black levels?

Ribs wrote:Beaver

Missed opportunity to use "Lone Wolf and Beaver" (at least, that's what I would have done) =D

Lone Svet and Cub
That make up for the loss of a Tooze pun?

Minkin wrote:Lone Svet and Cub
That make up for the loss of a Tooze pun?

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

The Shogun Assasin transfer looks ok from those pics, but I'm not convinced at all about the actual Japanese films.

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film5/blu-ray_ ... lu-ray.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Hi, I'm new to this form,
I saw the stills on DVD Beaver and they think the new criterion is surperior to the Animeigo version.
But if you look at the Criterion stills, there is a lot of Magenta or Cyan in the colours were they shouldn't be, any thoughts?

yuri1204 wrote:I saw the stills on DVD Beaver and they think the new criterion is surperior to the Animeigo version.
But if you look at the Criterion stills, there is a lot of Magenta or Cyan in the colours were they shouldn't be, any thoughts?

On whose authority are you claiming "shouldn't be"?

Beavers' caps are also notorious for not being 100% on RGB values so they're not the best to compare colors.

MichaelB wrote:

yuri1204 wrote:I saw the stills on DVD Beaver and they think the new criterion is surperior to the Animeigo version.
But if you look at the Criterion stills, there is a lot of Magenta or Cyan in the colours were they shouldn't be, any thoughts?

On whose authority are you claiming "shouldn't be"?

My own eyes and my calibrated screen... ;-)

And what filmmaker-approved reference are you using as a comparison?

My, my, my.... "filmmaker-approved"

I think he was just pointing out what mostly every "non filmmaker approved" online media critic does, which is to his eye, the colors were looking off. I saw this recently projected from 35mm and though I can't recall the exact color hues so can't really tell which version falls towards the print I saw. But this Criterion set looks really good. Have only watched snippets of each disc so far, but CC tend to usually stay as close to what the film was going for as anyone.

But as long as the blood is that fake samurai red, I'm happy.

The six films are loads of fun, more entertaining than zatoichi as a general rule but also lacking some of the humor and humility of ichi as well. Itto is great, and the performance is great, but he also is a bit too omnipotent, whereas ichi often gets himself into trouble by butting into conflict. That said, even if some of them aren't as good as the best ichi films they're a better than the worst.

I'm assuming the Shogun Assassin master is exactly the same one used for the previous Blu-Rays, including the Eureka! UK release? As grateful as I am that it's been released on BD at all (given before that I only had the terrible Vipco DVD) and as deeply anal as this is, I do wish there was a source that had the original photochemical titles and not digital recreations, which in this case are generally fine but work least well with the appearance of the title itself.

It seems that it is sourced from the same master, though I don't have technical details to confirm.

Shogun assassin is pretty entertaining, the re-edit is pretty good, the voice over narration is delightfully terrible, but the dubbing is not as bad as I presumed it would be.

Compared to the German BDs (see Caps holic), the gamma on these is very low hence the murky image - see Criterion's recent Cronenberg title for a similar example.

And it's awfully...pink

As I was re-watching this I happened to open the back of the slipcase by mistake - carefully folded plans for a baby carriage fell out.

[edit: I see it was shown in the packaging preview, it just took me a while to find it]

I bought the uk version of the boxset. While watching the movies and revel in memories I recognized that the first two films (Sword Of Vengeance & Baby Cart at the River Styx) have a permanent pulsing (flickering), especially in dark scenes (Baby Cart at River Styx shows the most strong impairment, though). Playing the dark scenes in slow motion I found out that more or less every half second a frame is brighter than the rest. Comparing it to different dvd editions I still have in my collection (AnimEigo, US; Rapid Eye Movies, DE) I could confirm that this "pulsing" already existed in the old editions and so could simply be part of the master.

What confused me is, that the Criterion edition has the most obvious and unfortunately also the most distracting "pulsing" of all releases I was able to compare.

Since I found some information of people speaking about that problem (https://www.reddit.com/r/criterion/comm ... f_and_cub/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;) but wasn't able to find out if that affects all criterion releases or maybe only a special batch, I would like to ask if someone here might have had the same problem and could maybe even confirm or negate if it's just normal or a defective batch of the us or even the uk release of the boxset?