Howdy all!
I saw this up on
Amazon.co.uk a couple of months ago and decided to do something I very rarely do: pre-order. I did this as it was billed as a limited edition (no details on print count) and I figured I'd better get it immediately instead of risking having to pay dearly for it as a punishment for waiting.
Here is the
blu-ray.com page for this title:
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Anime...lu-ray/192756/
The set came in the mail today and I just spent around thirty minutes skimming both discs to check that the AV quality is decent (it may take me some time to get around to watching these so I felt I should preview them now.)
Unfortunately both movies are riddled with AV problems. The set claims the transfers are sourced from a recent 2K restoration. My initial impressions lead me to believe that this supposed "restoration" was led not by professionals but by dilettantes who fancy themselves film preservationists.
Alarm bells will start ringing even as you read the plot synopsis at the back of the blu-ray case. There are many stylistic errors in the writing and even a couple of typos - already a sign of shoddiness in the overall package.
Let's start with
A Thousand and One Nights. Overall the film is presented from a rather dirty-looking 35mm print, but I can deal with natural film artefacts. What I do not deal with is a dirty film print that on top of that has been heavily processed on the computer on a shot-by-shot basis to end up looking like something that at its worst moments reminds you of VHS.
Some shots look reasonably sharp despite the film wear. However, if you zoom into the image on your TV you will notice that there are halos around most objects indicative of artificial sharpening. Moreover, in many shots you can see stair-stepping on lineart - this is something I normally encounter on DVD. This leads me to believe that the transfer is either an SD upscale, or the dolt responsible for the disc's encoding (or perhaps some other greater dolt in charge of the "restoration") managed to reduce the image's vertical resolution by half before re-upscaling it back to 1080p.
Other shots look really muddy, pasty and ugly. Sometimes white highlights produce strange artefacts which certainly don't look like anything resembling motion picture film. Grain is visible somewhat, though I am certain the picture has been through incompetently-handled DVNR. Finally, the film's black levels are egregiously bad. Apparently somebody at
Third Window films did not notice that all blacks in the film appear grey. To correct the black levels I had to set the brightness level of my Panasonic Plasma TV to
-25!
As for the audio, it also sounds really poor. Thin, tinny and distorted in the higher frequencies - seemingly throughout the entire picture. Whether this is once more the result of incompetence or limitations of the source elements I do not know.
There is one things that looked good about the transfer - the colours. In most cases they are rich and deeply saturated (especially after lowering the TV's brightness) At the very least it doesn't look like Third Window used a faded print as a source.
Cleopatra seems to suffer from all the same ailments as the other film except for the stair-stepping on the lineart. Keep in mind though that I only skimmed through these discs and there very well may be a number of shots in the film with the same undesirable artefacts.
I am currently wondering whether to keep this set or return it. For all its faults, it
does look better than DVD overall and the image is not constantly DVNRed to death (it changes from shot to shot). I would also like to watch the movies as they are new to me, and I really doubt they will get a rerelease. What do you think I should do?
Now if only these films could have looked as good as
Belladonna of Sadness.
