[quote=āYodlaf Peterson, post:1349, topic:660ā]German Blu Ray with English language out end of the month.
http://www.spaghetti-western.net/index.php/Mannaja/BluRay[/quote]Did anyone pick this up yet?
Blu-ray.com review of Blue Undergroundās release of Man, Pride and Vengeance, with screen caps: [url]Man, Pride and Vengeance Blu-ray (L'uomo, l'orgoglio, la vendetta)
It gets 3.5/5 and I have to say, it doesnāt look to have great PQ.
By the review is sounds like a pretty decent release though. Question is how it fares against the Koch Media BluRay.
It looks just like most(?) of the stuff coming out of Italy including almost all of BUās Italian filmsā¦ meaning it looks like shit as far as Iām concerned. 
Iām sure the Koch disc is about the same if not exactly the same (I havenāt checked it but was told it is clearly the weakest of the three in the box). And Arrow used to release this kind of stuff.
The degree of shittiness varies greatly but they all have (scanner) noise or they have been completely smoothed with DNR or whatever. Apparently there are these shitty labs in Italy who either donāt know what theyāre doing or their equipment sucks (at least LVR used some shitty scanner but supposedly they have replaced it) and you either get the scans from them or you get nothing at all.
And I donāt know where Raro does their scans and what they do to them afterwards but they have probably soon released couple of dozen discs of shitā¦ thereās like only a couple of discs that I think are good and I think they were all done somewhere else and Raro just distributes them.
BU scanned Zombie at LVR and Arrow then did their own scan somewhere else (mouse-over changes the image):
http://caps-a-holic.com/hd_vergleiche/multi_comparison.php?art=magnify&x=496&y=303&action=1&image=2&hd_multiID=106&cap1=3739&cap2=17407&disc1=358&disc2=1861&lossless=#vergleich
And here is Arrowās first Tenebrae which probably came from LVR compared to Wild Side Franceās scan (not that the Wild Side is anywhere near perfect either):
http://caps-a-holic.com/hd_vergleiche/multi_comparison.php?art=magnify&x=304&y=235&action=1&image=6&hd_multiID=185&cap1=18276&cap2=18266&disc1=1963&disc2=1962&lossless=#vergleich
This is of course just my opinion and I admit my standards are very high and perhaps Iām also stupid. A lot of people (majority?) probably donāt think there is anything wrong or just donāt care.
And sorry BU but this looks like shit: http://mondo-digital.com/newbarbarians7big.jpg
And sorry about all the SHIT.
Yea lots of wasted potentialā¦ but kudos for them even trying
Iām not sure if this came out yet Yodlaf, Amazon.de says June 12th currently? But based on what I read at some German forums I wouldnāt expect muchā¦ people seemed to think it might turn out to be upscale. 
LOL. So what youāre basically saying is, skip HD (for Italian genre movies) and stay with SD ? Or are you merely lamenting missed opportunities?
[quote=āSundance, post:1384, topic:660ā]It looks just like most(?) of the stuff coming out of Italy including almost all of BUās Italian filmsā¦ meaning it looks like shit as far as Iām concerned. Iām sure the Koch disc is about the same if not exactly the same (I havenāt checked it but was told it is clearly the weakest of the three in the box). And Arrow used to release this kind of stuff.
The degree of shittiness varies greatly but they all have (scanner) noise or they have been completely smoothed with DNR or whatever. Apparently there are these shitty labs in Italy who either donāt know what theyāre doing or their equipment sucks (at least LVR used some shitty scanner but supposedly they have replaced it) and you either get the scans from them or you get nothing at all.
And I donāt know where Raro does their scans and what they do to them afterwards but they have probably soon released couple of dozen discs of shitā¦ thereās like only a couple of discs that I think are good and I think they were all done somewhere else and Raro just distributes them.
BU scanned Zombie at LVR and Arrow then did their own scan somewhere else (mouse-over changes the image):
http://caps-a-holic.com/hd_vergleiche/multi_comparison.php?art=magnify&x=496&y=303&action=1&image=2&hd_multiID=106&cap1=3739&cap2=17407&disc1=358&disc2=1861&lossless=#vergleich
And here is Arrowās first Tenebrae which probably came from LVR compared to Wild Side Franceās scan (not that the Wild Side is anywhere near perfect either):
http://caps-a-holic.com/hd_vergleiche/multi_comparison.php?art=magnify&x=304&y=235&action=1&image=6&hd_multiID=185&cap1=18276&cap2=18266&disc1=1963&disc2=1962&lossless=#vergleich
This is of course just my opinion and I admit my standards are very high and perhaps Iām also stupid. A lot of people (majority?) probably donāt think there is anything wrong or just donāt care.
And sorry BU but this looks like shit: http://mondo-digital.com/newbarbarians7big.jpg
And sorry about all the SHIT. ;)[/quote]
An industry insider at Blu-ray.com forum:
Originally Posted by [b]onemanband[/b] Weāve worked on some of the titles discussed here for German label X-rated so maybe I can add my few cents. There are a lot of assumptions in this thread which, after a while, seem to become fact plus misinformation about the whole issue in general.:-[Solamente Nero and Spasmo are LVR scans with color correction done there. Dust busting, scratch removal etc. wasnāt, weāve done that. (Btw, weāve also worked on most of the new Spencer Hill BD releases by 3L in Germany, also done stuff for Koch, Ascot, Turbine, many others.
La Casa Con La Scala Nel Buio wasnāt done at LVR at all.
Weāve supplied SPASMO back to the producer in two versions, one with slight noise concealment, one without (I donāt know which label uses what, weāve never dealt with them directly) - so their clients can pick and choose. Why? Because these transfers are not for BD alone, in fact if it was for BD alone very few films would get transfers at all because it just isnāt worth it from an economic point of view for rights holders. Most tv stations would reject transfers with such heavy noise/grain because of lower transmission bitrates so it has to be dealt with. Like it or not. You will also find a lot of consumer TVs from certain manufacturers and some panel generations seriously struggling with a noise/grain component like that which results in smearing and clouding.Are these transfers problematic - partially, yes. There is just no easy answer to it. I am sorry to say but people here tend to have a very naive idea of the situation. Film is essentially dead in Italy, very few companies have any interest to invest in new technology in that field because there is not a big market for it anymore. Cinecitta closed itās lab quite a while ago. When Technicolor in Rome closed doors in 2013 it created huge problems, lots of producers and library holders where faced with hundreds of negatives, internegatives and interpositives that needed to go somewhere. And you cannot simply put them in any warehouse or your attic - it needs to go somewhere appropriate for film. Air conditioned, precautions for fire, insurrance issues, a place where people work who deal with film and which preferably can also scan the stuff because thatās the point of having those negatives stored in the first place.
But it also needs a place that has staff that knows how to deal with OLD film, knows how to clean it, repair it, prep it for scanning. And it has to be a place that can handle 2-perf because a lot of those films are.
Guess what, itās a tough call to find such a place these days. There are only a handful in all of Italy today. In France you have LāEclair that are well equipped to handle such tasks, in the US it is fairly easy - in Italy not so much.
So once you have a contract with a lab to store your negatives and positives, itās not a question of simply taking it out and giving it somewhere else for scanning (IF you have another place of which you KNOW can handle the material AND give good results). You canāt simply go ātrial and errorā, it all costs a lot of money. Again, there are insurance issues which are massive for the transport alone (unless you donāt care what happens to your property but believe it or not most companies and producers actually do). As a foreign licensee to ask for a negative to be sent abroad to a lab of your choice, unknown to the rights holder, is not only costly but very likely to not be meet with much enthusiasm - and as much as I would prefer different, more modern scanner technology used at times, I do understand the producerās position.
Unless youāve worked with a company for many years and they know and trust you and want to make you happy, you are very likely to have to live with whatever lab the negative is located at.Spasmo is a 2-perf negative, so half 35mm resolution which boosts the grain and noise when doing a transfer on certain equipment, also the neg wasnāt in pretty bad condition.
If this had been done with a DFT Scanity, yes, it would have looked better. A maxed out Scanity is half a million Euro. I am not even aware of a single Italian lab that has such equipment.The idea that āthere is lots of money to be madeā from such genre releases is silly. A lot of these releases from smaller labels are labours of love, some investing a lot of privat time without pay to make any kind of return on the investment. We, too, have put in a lot of non-pay work, especially in Spasmo, to clean damage a different scanner would have dealt with. It can be frustrating at times to read some of these comments here, especially since nobody here has seen the condition of the negative to begin with.
Most of the costly 2k and 4K transfer and restoration jobs in Italy can only be done via state subsidising. Todo Modo was done that way just recently. Came out on DVD only in Italy - nowhere else to be seen so far. Antonioni, Fellini, you can get financial help there. No subsidising for Spasmo I am afraid.
So, again, I, too, wish the quality of some of those scans was better to begin with as it makes restoration work a lot easier. But simply pointing fingers are labels and rights holders thinking they just donāt want to spent a few Euros more to make it all fantastic means not understanding the scope of the issue. Itās a lot more than just a few Euro and a lot more that comes into play beyond that.
As things stand, the situation is likely to get even worse in years to come as the market is declining and more labs are closing their fllm departments.
Thank you djvaso for the interesting quote!
Well of course some of the Italian genre movies turn out just fine. Like almost all of the 3L Spencer/Hill discs. And Arrow is now releasing good quality discs. So skipping everything is not needed. And like I said many will still like these more problematic transfers/discs and they are probably at least somewhat of an improvement over the DVDs soā¦ make your own damn decisions!
Personally I buy the spaghetti western releases even if they look bad to my eyes. But pretty much everything else I would want to buy I will skip if they look like for example this latest BU spaghetti looks. Basically this means there are dozens of Blu-Rays of movies I want but the quality is too bad for me to spend money on them. djvasoās quote from the Blu-Ray.com forums mention how X-Ratedās Solamente Nero and Spasmo are LVR scansā¦ which doesnāt surprise me, I had already decided not to buy them because of how they look (I am also ignoring the releases in other countries because the source is the same). I did buy one X-Ratedās discs for 30e and it turned out to be the same type of shit (and it was even praised by some).
And the person quoted even admits a couple of different times how simply using a different scanner would have produced better quality. >:(
Since I wonāt buy the bad stuff I guess I wouldnāt care if everybody else also stopped buying it and because of that some of this stuff would never even be released anymore. 
I wonder if the rights owners would rather make money by letting the scans be done elsewhere or never make any money ever again.
I like using smileys.
Well, Iāve been sitting here following this conversation and I thought after that large quote from onemanband, which I found to be really insightful, I had a few questions and comments. First off, djvaso, what thread is that from and does he post more about the inner workings of this process? Because, from what I gather, the decline in film in Italy has reached a point where you have to take whatever lab you can get and thereās not much to choose from anyways in Italy. While I do find this to be disheartening, especially the comment regarding āhundreds of negatives, internegatives and interpositives that needed to go somewhereā like reel orphans in need of a good home. Iām just wondering why do they need to be stored in Italy? Is it a rights issue? If places like that can close their doors and ālots of producers and library holdersā need places to store their film, why not just keep them stored in other labs through Europe or in the States? Does the storing and preservation process work like a space rental or does it need to be kept in the country of origin or is it simply a matter of money and expenses? Or do I have this whole process and all ass-backwards? If anybody can help to shed some light on the issue itād be much appreciated!
As far as the purchase of releases and the quality of the scan, I agree with Sundance to an extent. With most mainstream films Iāve got plenty of releases, for the most part, to choose from, so of course what I will do is pick the best one, and itās color cleaning and āwaxyā looks that really get to me, more than scanner noise. Yet with genre releases, this choice rarely exists. Sure, thereās often releases from one country or another for plenty of films on this database, although often when it comes to the lesser budget releases weāre having to pick from one VHS source print over another. Or, if a variety of prints do exist, oftentimes itās hoping that English language options exist that makes the difference in buying choice (unless one wants to wait for the CG fandub). When my only option for a film is the VHS release, a CG rip I probably couldnāt download cause I gotta watch my ratio, or a DVD/Blu-Ray with a less-than-great transfer, well, it comes down to how much Iām gonna pay to buy this. Certainly itās better than a VHS and most likely better than a TV rip, although I have no desire paying full price for something that will make me regret dropping approx. $30. While I may be pretty disappointed in the transfer, on the flip side Iām glad I can actually watch it and that itās getting a release, so Iāll wait till I can get it used for half that price. Like Sundance, Iāll buy the spaghettiās no matter what the quality is (I mean, I fell in love with Death rides a Horse from a VHS transfer), just so it means more are getting released, period. I have the feeling there will come a day when caring for film and negatives will hit a point where preserving these cult and genre films will be too expensive and, god forbid, the reels just disintegrate and weāll have nothing left to run through the scanners. I guess all we can really do is hope that we can get better scans for existing material and get scans for what isnāt out yet.
And, so as to not end on such a depressing note, hereās a gif of Clint with a kitten! ;D
The Official 88 Films Thread:
I will of course do that but damn it would be nice if there was some kind of consistant quality to these bluray-releases. As it is now it sounds like itās no so much as getting the very best release but getting the least bad.
Well, will have to go very slowly when getting those.
Thanks for some interesting reading from all involved here. You learn something new every day. Much appreciated!
[quote=āSundance, post:1384, topic:660ā]It looks just like most(?) of the stuff coming out of Italy including almost all of BUās Italian filmsā¦ meaning it looks like shit as far as Iām concerned. Iām sure the Koch disc is about the same if not exactly the same (I havenāt checked it but was told it is clearly the weakest of the three in the box). And Arrow used to release this kind of stuff.
The degree of shittiness varies greatly but they all have (scanner) noise or they have been completely smoothed with DNR or whatever. Apparently there are these shitty labs in Italy who either donāt know what theyāre doing or their equipment sucks (at least LVR used some shitty scanner but supposedly they have replaced it) and you either get the scans from them or you get nothing at all.
And I donāt know where Raro does their scans and what they do to them afterwards but they have probably soon released couple of dozen discs of shitā¦ thereās like only a couple of discs that I think are good and I think they were all done somewhere else and Raro just distributes them.
ā¦
And here is Arrowās first Tenebrae which probably came from LVR compared to Wild Side Franceās scan (not that the Wild Side is anywhere near perfect either):
http://caps-a-holic.com/hd_vergleiche/multi_comparison.php?art=magnify&x=304&y=235&action=1&image=6&hd_multiID=185&cap1=18276&cap2=18266&disc1=1963&disc2=1962&lossless=#vergleich[/quote]
Youāre right in a whole bunch of ways here Sundance - I would point out that Arrowās recent re-release of Tenebrae uses the Wild Side scan, but it does suffer from edge enhancement regrettably (you can even see it in the cap you posted, on the guyās shoulder sitting down on the left hand side). Still an improvement and Iām glad I got the disc, butā¦ This is a problem that plagues lots of releases as well, including Arrowās otherwise very fine Day of Anger disc and it can be annoying when reviewers on Blu-ray.com, DVD Beaver, DVD Savant, donāt spot these things. Raro get it right occasionally, but I think thatās probably more luck than anything else; their release of Viscontiās Conversation Piece is an abomination, like itās an oil painting. Blue Underground put out discs that looked good back in 2008, but they simply have not upped their standards and while I have a few of their films simply as they are so far the best releases available of say, Deep Red, they look pretty dated by the standards of 2015 with mastered in 4K releases. I known not all labels have the budget of Criterion to give such restorative efforts to titles that are the definition of ānicheā, but many of these labels are in a catch-22 will these subpar releases. If they put them out, people like me will not buy them, which exacerbates the low-selling nature of these titles. Sadly, I think weāre going to be seeing more labels follow the Twilight Time approach of limiting everything to 3000 and thus encouraging people to pre-order BDs before thereāre even reviews (Arrow are already starting to limit booklets to the first thousand discs) and allow the company to break even as soon as possible, at a price point thatās retail value and not heavily discounted in order to shift units.
Arrow just announced Requiescant for US and UK Blu-Ray and DVD 8)
Great! And damn, just ordered the Koch Media disc. Will see if it is to late to cancel.
Thanks for the info!
Craptastic cover again by Arrow. Love that tiny left hand.
This is a problem that plagues lots of releases as well, including Arrow's otherwise very fine Day of Anger disc and it can be annoying when reviewers on Blu-ray.com, DVD Beaver, DVD Savant, don't spot these things.
I agree with some of your comments, but thereās enough blogger critics online suggesting that edge enhancement exists on discs where the restoration and compression specialists have (a.) overseen the whole process, and (b.) repeatedly and bluntly stated that edge enhancement wasnāt used, that Arrow can equally respond that itās annoying when zealous pundits spot things that arenāt there.
DEEP RED does look somewhat disappointing in light of current Blu standards. Synapseās SUSPIRIA should look many times better. Raro are so hit and miss (usually miss) that I typically view their releases as good-to-okay looking DVDās.
If they put them out, people like me will not buy them, which exacerbates the low-selling nature of these titles.
Camera Obscura certainly went back to the well to redo their upcoming SHORT NIGHT OF THE GLASS DOLLS, but I wonder if collectors with high A/V standards overstate their importance in the scheme of things. Thereās a vocal contingent who seemingly obsess over grain and edge-enhancement above most other matters, and (Iām guessing) a much larger but quieter group of collectors who really donāt care.
Sadly, I think we're going to be seeing more labels follow the Twilight Time approach of limiting everything to 3000 and thus encouraging people to pre-order BDs before there're even reviews (Arrow are already starting to limit booklets to the first thousand discs) and allow the company to break even as soon as possible, at a price point that's retail value and not heavily discounted in order to shift units.
Not sure why any of that is a sad thing, unless anyone has a moral issue with the labels breaking even as soon as possible. Would it be better if they cut back on their releases and acquisitions, or went broke? We might agree to disagree but I think with A/V quality youāre pretty much fine ordering an Arrow title these days sight unseen.
Good news about Requiescant !
I had been hovering around the German DVD for ages
I think this is quite an underrated one personally
REQUIESCANT! YOU F*CKING BEAUTIES!
