Danieladbidh
Member
A review went up for the 1974 Guillermin and Irwin Allen Fox picture on Blu-ray, and my first thought was not about resolution at all. With a seventies disaster film the thing that makes or breaks a disc is how the audio and the effects photography have been handled, and that is where these catalog releases usually go wrong.
The sound question is simple enough. Do you get the original theatrical mix in reasonable shape, or do you get a modern remix that spreads everything out, pushes the score wide and leaves the dialogue sounding like it was recorded in a different building? I have bought enough seventies catalog discs where the remix is the default track and the original is buried in the menu, or missing, to be wary before I read a spec sheet.
The picture side is the same argument in a different form. Films from that era stack optical composites for the effects work, so those shots are inherently softer and grainier than everything around them. That is what the movie looks like. What I do not want is a restoration that has been scrubbed until the miniature and matte work looks like clean video while the live action next to it looks normal. The mismatch is worse than the grain ever was.
I have not seen the disc, so all of this is what I want to find out rather than a complaint about this release specifically. For those of you with multiple editions of the big seventies titles on the shelf: has any label handled the optical effects sequences without smearing them into mush?
The sound question is simple enough. Do you get the original theatrical mix in reasonable shape, or do you get a modern remix that spreads everything out, pushes the score wide and leaves the dialogue sounding like it was recorded in a different building? I have bought enough seventies catalog discs where the remix is the default track and the original is buried in the menu, or missing, to be wary before I read a spec sheet.
The picture side is the same argument in a different form. Films from that era stack optical composites for the effects work, so those shots are inherently softer and grainier than everything around them. That is what the movie looks like. What I do not want is a restoration that has been scrubbed until the miniature and matte work looks like clean video while the live action next to it looks normal. The mismatch is worse than the grain ever was.
I have not seen the disc, so all of this is what I want to find out rather than a complaint about this release specifically. For those of you with multiple editions of the big seventies titles on the shelf: has any label handled the optical effects sequences without smearing them into mush?
