The Young Savages (1961) coming in September from Kino Classics

[James Luckard]

Originally Posted by uther

Is there a thread on this issue? I could not find one. Was this issue reported for the earlier Black Sabbath BD release?



Ok but what were the two players and if on a computer what software?

My player at home is a Panasonic DMP-BDT220.

No idea what the one at work is, I'm not there right now, but it's a major brand 3D player, maybe a year old.

[oildude]

I just finished watching The Young Savages. A very riveting film, with another top performance from Burt Lancaster. The man owns every role he plays, and makes every movie he is in something worth watching.

I am pleased to report that my copy had zero audio or lip synch issues. After reading above about this, I approached my viewing apprehensively, expecting the worst. There was no out-of-synch issue at all.

The audio is crisp for the most part, although there are some volume fluctuations in a couple of scenes where dialog seems to have been recorded at a distance, rendering a voice here and there lower than others. The PQ is quite good, the film elements clean and nearly damage free. I never noticed any speckling or discolorations. There is one small 20 second moment near the end of the film during the trial when a thin vertical line appears on the right side of the image. The picture is detailed and clear, possessing a nice grain structure and a wide tonal range across the black and white spectrum.

The Young Savages was John Frankenheimer's second theatrical film and his first of several collaborations with Burt Lancaster. The cinematography and camera placement gives evidence of a director who is in control of his craft, each set piece meticulously thought out in advance. The camera angles and visual approach enhance the impact of many of the scenes, most memorably the violent murder that takes place in the opening moments of the film. Without showing any graphic details, the act takes place in the reflection of the victim's sunglasses while the witnesses scream nearby. It's as effectively disturbing as it is brilliant.

Add in the well written script with its intelligent dialogue, scene structure, and a few plot surprises, and you have a tight little dramatic movie filled with outstanding performances that grabs the viewer at the beginning and doesn't let go. We are carried away by an undercurrent of social commentary that cuts as sharply and swiftly as the murderers' blades as opposed to the bludgeon it would have been in the hands of a lesser director and writer. As a bonus, we get to see a younger Telly Savalas as a police lieutenant who, when he removes his hat, still has a ring of hair around his bald pate. But there is no doubt this is Burt's film, and he carries it to a worthy place on my shelf.

[James Luckard]

An update on this disc.

I got a second copy sent as a replacement by Amazon. It also had the audio synch problem. I sent it back and called Kino Lorber today.

I politely explained to the fellow there what my issue was. I said I was thrilled that they were releasing catalog titles like these, but that I was worried the continuing audio synch issues might stop people from buying future releases.

He seemed aware of the issue with this title and ON THE BEACH, and promised to report it to the brand rep for this line of discs.

He did say they had tested copies of both titles and had not seen the synch issue many of us are reporting.

He said they use the master provided by the studio, but that they take these comments seriously, and that returns to Amazon are definitely noted.

He said there are no plans at the moment to reissue the disc, but I'm hoping that if enough people call in like me, that may change.

I was able to get the incorrect audio on FRANTIC changed, but that was by contacting director Roman Polanski and notifying him. In this case, the director and all the cast are dead, and the film is a United Artists title, in the MGM catalog, licensed to Fox, licensed to Kino Lorber, so it's such a lengthy chain that I think only customer complaints will help.

Please be polite and don't be angry, nobody responds well to that. Tell them how much you love the fact they're releasing all these classic catalog titles, but that it would be amazing if they would make the effort to correct this problem.

Their phone number is:

Tel. (212) 629-6880
Tel. (800) 562-3330
http://www.kinolorber.com/contact-us.php

[hypnohighball]

Damn - I really wanted the br of this title. I wonder if the dvd is the same way?

[oildude]

Something is odd here. My copy had zero audio synch problems, as I noted above. I am very sensitive to this sort of thing, and sat down to watch with trepidation having read James's posts. I expected to see something bad and instead there was absolutely nothing wrong. The synch was spot on.

So I would caution against blanket assumptions by those who have not viewed the Blu-ray that this is a universal problem. You got one user experiencing what is described as badly out-of-synch audio on two discs, and me who had no issue at all. Jayembee reports seeing some slight out-of-synch issues in the early police station scene, but this is brief and disappears with the remainder of the film in-synch. One thing I noticed is that the conversations in the police station following the murder could contain dubbing because there is a voice that drops in suddenly over the clamor of the crowd right at the beginning of the scene when we see the back of the booking officer. It is an obvious dub of the officer speaking amid the crowd noise, but we never see his mouth move since his back is to the camera. Then the camera moves on to other actors in the scene, including Lancaster, and everything is fine audio-wise except for some mild sound drop-offs from people speaking away from the recording mike.

I kept looking for a problem with my disc, but there was none. Needless to say, after preparing for the worst, I was relieved. Words and lips matched, and all external sounds synched with on-screen actions. I did a quick search of reviews a week ago and there were only a couple available at that time, with none mentioning any out-of-synch audio.

[James Luckard]

Originally Posted by oildude

Something is odd here. My copy had zero audio synch problems, as I noted above. I am very sensitive to this sort of thing, and sat down to watch with trepidation having read James's posts. I expected to see something bad and instead there was absolutely nothing wrong. The synch was spot on.

So I would caution against blanket assumptions by those who have not viewed the Blu-ray that this is a universal problem. You got one user experiencing what is described as badly out-of-synch audio on two discs, and me who had no issue at all. Jayembee reports seeing some slight out-of-synch issues in the early police station scene, but this is brief and disappears with the remainder of the film in-synch. One thing I noticed is that the conversations in the police station following the murder could contain dubbing because there is a voice that drops in suddenly over the clamor of the crowd right at the beginning of the scene when we see the back of the booking officer. It is an obvious dub of the officer speaking amid the crowd noise, but we never see his mouth move since his back is to the camera. Then the camera moves on to other actors in the scene, including Lancaster, and everything is fine audio-wise except for some mild sound drop-offs from people speaking away from the recording mike.

I kept looking for a problem with my disc, but there was none. Needless to say, after preparing for the worst, I was relieved. Words and lips matched, and all external sounds synched with on-screen actions. I did a quick search of reviews a week ago and there were only a couple available at that time, with none mentioning any out-of-synch audio.

It's probably bad batches, not all the discs. No doubt the second disc I got from Amazon was sent from the same warehouse, so it's likely from the same batch. I seriously doubt an obscure catalog title like this moved many copies between my two orders.

The same thing happened with ON THE BEACH, only in reverse. Others complained their BDs were badly out of synch, but mine was perfect. And as I think you can tell, I'm not the type of person to simply not notice this on my ON THE BEACH disc.

I'm aware some old movies have dubbed scenes that aren't in perfect synch. In fact, ON THE BEACH had two scenes like this.

However the easiest thing to do is to compare the BDs to old DVDs.

The two scenes in ON THE BEACH with out of synch ADR on my BD also had out of synch ADR on my old DVD. The rest of the entire movie was perfectly in synch on my BD, unlike those received by many other people.

As for THE YOUNG SAVAGES, I watched the identical scenes on my old MGM DVD, and they're in perfect synch. The two BDs I received were clearly flawed, and the Kino Lorber rep did not sound at all surprised to hear this.

[hypnohighball]

I think I'm just going to order the dvd instead of the blu - it's cheaper and I can't imagine that much of a difference in picture quality.

[James Luckard]

Originally Posted by hypnohighball

I think I'm just going to order the dvd instead of the blu - it's cheaper and I can't imagine that much of a difference in picture quality.

Be careful, the DVD I'm referring to that had perfectly synched sound is the old, OOP MGM DVD that was only ever available in "The John Frankenheimer Collection" boxset. I have no idea what the new Kino Lorber DVD is like.

[hypnohighball]

Originally Posted by James Luckard

Be careful, the DVD I'm referring to that had perfectly synched sound is the old, OOP MGM DVD that was only ever available in "The John Frankenheimer Collection" boxset. I have no idea what the new Kino Lorber DVD is like.

Well, it sounds like a crap shoot no matter what format that I pick. I just want this film on dvd or br, doesn't much matter which format to me.

[jayembee]

Originally Posted by oildude

Jayembee reports seeing some slight out-of-synch issues in the early police station scene, but this is brief and disappears with the remainder of the film in-synch. One thing I noticed is that the conversations in the police station following the murder could contain dubbing because there is a voice that drops in suddenly over the clamor of the crowd right at the beginning of the scene when we see the back of the booking officer. It is an obvious dub of the officer speaking amid the crowd noise, but we never see his mouth move since his back is to the camera. Then the camera moves on to other actors in the scene, including Lancaster, and everything is fine audio-wise except for some mild sound drop-offs from people speaking away from the recording mike.

I did wonder whether some of the synch issues I saw in the police station scene were due to changed dialogue being looped in rather than actual synch problems. Unfortunately, I don't have this title on DVD to compare. I do have it on LD, but (a) my LD player isn't working right at the moment, and (b) the LD is in storage and not easily accessible.

[James Luckard]

Originally Posted by jayembee

I did wonder whether some of the synch issues I saw in the police station scene were due to changed dialogue being looped in rather than actual synch problems. Unfortunately, I don't have this title on DVD to compare. I do have it on LD, but (a) my LD player isn't working right at the moment, and (b) the LD is in storage and not easily accessible.

That scene is perfectly in synch on the old MGM DVD.

[jayembee]

After seeing a new post in the thread for Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery, which is also having some synch issues, I'm wondering if my not seeing a problem with the audio synch might be due to my sending the audio directly to the TV rather than to my receiver (which has been having problems lately).

https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.p...postcount=3003

It's more that people's setups are different. The people who are bitstreaming the audio to a receiver (myself included) seem to be having far more trouble than those who are piping the audio straight into a TV from their player, which will usually have been decoded into PCM by the player first and that seems to help with a lot of the sync problems.

James: Try playing the audio directly to the TV (assuming you're not already doing that) and see if that makes a difference. Not that you should have to when the audio is screwed up, but it might be worth finding out what happens.

[James Luckard]

Originally Posted by jayembee

James: Try playing the audio directly to the TV (assuming you're not already doing that) and see if that makes a difference. Not that you should have to when the audio is screwed up, but it might be worth finding out what happens.

Glad to try it, but it's only happening on this one disc. I watched Edge of Tomorrow last night and it was fine, and I watched The Counselor over the weekend and it was fine too.

[jayembee]

Originally Posted by James Luckard

Glad to try it, but it's only happening on this one disc. I watched Edge of Tomorrow last night and it was fine, and I watched The Counselor over the weekend and it was fine too.

Well, I think the point of the posting I linked to is that, depending on how the audio and video gets encoded by the authors, even if it's OOS when going to a receiver, it might be OK going straight to a TV, because of the way the signal gets interpreted:

Folks should bear in mind that the audio and video aren't encoded together, as they're separate streams which rely on flags embedded in them to sync properly when playing back, and it's possible that that process isn't being interpreted correctly by some combinations of equipment. Changing audio to PCM and disabling 24p playback (so it plays at 60Hz) seems to help in some cases and it's the 24p bit I find interesting, as if CBS aren't properly encoding the audio within that time frame or something.

I'm just curious if the problems being experienced with The Young Savages are the same as what's being experience with Twin Peaks.

[hypnohighball]

Originally Posted by jayembee

I did wonder whether some of the synch issues I saw in the police station scene were due to changed dialogue being looped in rather than actual synch problems. Unfortunately, I don't have this title on DVD to compare. I do have it on LD, but (a) my LD player isn't working right at the moment, and (b) the LD is in storage and not easily accessible.

Young Savages was on laser disc? I never knew that.

On a related note - I saw YS on cable tv a few years back, and I think it was TCM and all the racial slurs, of which there are many in the film, were dubbed out and replaced with less offensive <and ridiculous> terms. It screwed the whole movie up.

[hypnohighball]

Just checked my sealed, new Blu-ray I bought from a Marketplace Seller at Amazon. I didn't watch the entire film but lots of spot-checks and could see no problems with audio being out of synch. Is there a particular spot that any of you are having problems with or is it the entire film?

Anyway, I'm happy - it looks great to me.

[Monterey Jack]

No audio synch problems on my copy.

Great little movie. Frankenheimer rarely did wrong, unless it was one of his thankfully-infrequent forays into monster movies (Prophecy, The Island Of Dr. Moreau). Glad I picked this up before it goes OOP.