The Snow Queen 1, 2 & 3 3D Blu-ray (2012/2014/2017) [Region B Locked / Free]

[xenago]

Originally Posted by xenago

I had the exact same bad experience with the Brazilian release of the first Snow Queen. The disc I have appears to be legit, but it has zero depth to the actual feature presentation - I believe it to be a mastering error of some kind since the menus are all in full stereo but the actual video track is broken. I also noticed that the colors in the menus seemed incorrect, with purplish hues instead of blue for some reason, but that isn't really important in comparison to the missing stereo. It's worth noting that I have the Brazilian release for the second film, and it does not suffer from this issue; the French versions of the third and fourth film have proper 3D too.

Because I was disappointed by the lack of stereo, and thanks to simple curiosity, I decided to load the Brazilian, German, and Russian 3D versions on my PC and compare a bit more closely. Apologies if any of this has been mentioned already!

• The Russian version is in proper 3D, but is (terribly) cropped to 16:9 as noted in the database, which means it is missing a lot of the source image. It has a Russian-language title card.
• The German version is also in proper 3D, and is cropped only slightly in the vertical direction so it retains the original image horizontally but is missing an almost-imperceptible amount on the top/bottom. The colours appear slightly washed out relative to the other versions for some reason, with noticeably raised black levels. It has a German-language title card.
• The Brazilian feature presentation is uncropped and the colors seem correct like the Russian release, but it is not in 3D despite the MVC codec - each eye is presented the same image. It is also at least 100 frames shorter in length than the others. It has an English-language title card.
• The Russian and German versions are the same length for the actual feature film content, but the movie starts ~338 frames/14.1sec earlier on the German release. Therefore, it's possible to mux the Russian audio along with the German video with a bit of effort, to watch with that language track if you have it on hand. I uploaded an SRT-format subtitle file to Subscene that matches the German release's timing if anyone else is at all interested (I found the Russian VO to be enjoyable so preferred to watch that way with subtitles): https://subscene.com/subtitles/the-s...nglish/3116434
• Each disc has a different count/arrangement of chapters

Feature length/chapters of tested versions (top-to-bottom: Russian, Brazilian, German):



Here are comparison screenshots formatted in cross-eye 3D to demonstrate the differences in crop/colour/stereo:

Russian release, frame 6762



German release, frame 6424



Brazilian release, frame 6444



TL;DR - the German release of the first Snow Queen film offers a pretty good experience in 3D for English-language viewers, unlike the the Brazilian release which is not actually 3D.

Update to the above - I now have the French version of the first Snow Queen and it has the best visual presentation of them yet! It does not suffer from any of the issues with the German release, which has raised blacks and a weird vertically-cropped 2.38:1 AR along with a low quality German title card. The French 3D version has an exact 2.35:1 AR, no colour issues, and proper stereo 3D (unlike the Brazilian release). It even has a nicely-rendered English title card.. pity it lacks subtitles and provides only the French dub.

French release, frame 6448 (sync is exactly one second delayed vs the German release):