ggull wrote:
> "Dan Rempel" <drempel@hurtly_flurty> wrote
> > >>Have you seen the Criterion stuff? The old Kurosawa ??? look
> > >
> > > pretty good.
> > >
> > > I have seen several (and own a couple) and honestly they look
like
> > > crap. The films are either too dark or too light and in Seven
Samurai
> > > they didn't correct for streaks on the original film. They also
don't
> > > do anything to make the subtitles more legible; often they get
lost in
> > > the dark background.
> <...>
> > I think you must have some early ones; the ones I have (e.g.
Yojimbo)
> > are quite clean, good contrast, and I don't remember any serious
> > streaking/film damage. In fact, to check, I just dug out "The
Hidden
> > Fortress," and there were a couple of streaks in the first few
minutes,
> > then pretty much as above. The subtitles are white on black below
the
> > actual film, and quite legible. I guess YMMV.
>
> I guess Criterion is pretty variable.  I rented Ozu's "Tokyo Story"
and the
> subtitles were crap, plain white at the bottom of the screen that
just
> disappeared against the intricately patterned clothes in many scenes.
 The
> overall film quality was OK but not great (then I don't know what
they were
> working from), but my recollection is that there was stuff that
should have
> been removable if any real digiprocessing had been done.  (The
commentary
> kind of sucked, too much on camera angle details and not enough on
meaning;
> and the guys voice was like fingernails on blackboard.)

My guess is the market isn't large enough to really put the time and
effort into digging up old, higher quality versions of the film
(assuming any exist), much less reprocessing them with better sound and
correcting picture quality. I also wonder if there's not some folks who
believe you shouldn't retouch the classics too much.

John W.