274 Night and the City

[chatterjees]

A definite upgrade for me, but the only regret is that I will be missing the old cover art.

[Stefan Andersson]

Info about the rough cut / pre-release version:


http://faustfatale.l...com/249433.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


http://christafaust....city-rough-cut/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



It is the same text on both sites. Included both links since the info is a bit hard to find.

[Lowry_Sam]

Lost third version rough cut restoration.

Your link is kaput. Can you expand?

I found this.

[Lowry_Sam]

While the entire rough cut might not be essential (with the inclusion of HD presentations of both the UK & US cuts) from the description, including at least the opening, closing & extended wrestling scenes as outtakes would be nice.

[dwk]

This poster at the Blu-ray.com forum said that Criterion emailed them back today and confirmed that the 101 minute UK cut will be from a 2K scan.

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

Is there any reason that we can't hope for this from Arrow?

[MichaelB]

Is there any reason that we can't hope for this from Arrow?

The fact that the BFI currently has the UK rights might be a bit of a stumbling block.

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

Thanks for pointing that out. Looks like Criterion get my money.

[EddieLarkin]

Well, the BFI could do a release equally as good as your hoped for Arrow release, right? Indeed, perhaps they're responsible for the new 2K scan of the UK cut?

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

That's very true .If they come up with a documentary on Gerald Kersh then I'll bag both.

[Ashirg]

Beaver

[tenia]

David, what are the credits writtent in the booklet for the materials for both cuts ?

EDIT : got my answer through blu-ray.com review.

This new digital transfer was created in 4K resolution on an Oxberry wet-gate film scanner from the 35mm original camera negative. The film was restored at Cineric in New York using Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Revival, Cinnafilm's Dark Energy, and Pixel Farm's PFClean. The original monaural soundtrack was remastered at 24-bit from the 35mm magnetic track. Clicks, thumps, hiss, hum, and crackle were manually removed using Pro Tools HD, AudioCube's integrated workstation, and iZotope RX4.

Transfer supervisor: Schawn Belston/Twentieth Century Fox, Los Angeles.
Colorist: Daniel DeVincent/Cineric, New York.
For Cineric: Seth Berkowitz, Andrew Betzer, Simon Lund, Janos Pileni, Ulrike Reichhold, Adam Wangerin.

[David M.]

I'll stand by my guess it was Mr Belston and Criterion who did the 2K cleanup by arrangement with BFI (who would presumably use the same encode on their forthcoming release.)

The BFI version will be different encodes, done by me. Very few labels re-use each other's encodes because storage requirements tend to differ across releases.

[Cagliostro]

This seems not so much a "Discovery" as a possibly concocted (or not) find about a post facto object, if it in fact exists.

David, for what it's worth, here is what Andrew Pulver writes in his monograph for the BFI Film Classics series:

James Hahn, Nitrate Film Curator at the AMPAS Film Archive, recently unearthed a third version, never released, of Night and the City; running at 111 minutes, it is assembled from both US and UK versions, using the longest sequences from each, and has Frankel's score attached. This would appear to support the idea that an early assembly was being looked at in head office, using the first (British) cut as the base.

[5meohd]

This is kind of a "generic" blu-ray question. I am asking here simply because this is the first instance where I "noticed" this possibility.

Blu-ray.com lists the original aspect ratio as 1:37:1 and the blu-ray aspect ratio at 1:33:1.

Why would Criterion Collection do this? It is possible to encode a blu-ray at any aspect ratio isn't it?

[CSM126]

I could be wrong, but I believe 1.37 is merely the full film aperture (including the rounded corners at the very edge of the frame), which isn't typically a ratio that's projected. It seems very common for projectionists and home video labels to crop the image to remove that "extra" area. I think blu-ray.com is generically listing 1.37 as the "original" aspect ratio because they're either misinformed or lazy.

Generally speaking it's a good idea to avoid reading most of the text over there anyway because there are some real loons writing for that site.

[EddieLarkin]

Completely wrong, I'm afraid. Before television, 1.33:1 was only used as an AR for silent films and the early sound on disc films. Sound on film started out as 1.19:1 and then was designated as 1.37:1 by AMPAS in 1932 (hence "Academy Ratio", which 1.37:1 is and 1.33:1 is not).

4-perf full frame aperture is in fact 1.33:1, but a much larger area than 1.37:1 (or the 1.33:1 area featured on this disc). The reason it is 1.33:1 here is simply because the ratios are so similar that often restorers or transfer supervisors do not bother making a distinction. But Blu-ray.com are correct in listing 1.37:1 as the correct ratio.