"DVD released in the infancy of the format"
You got that right, James! Yellow was actually my very first DVD!
I bought it cus i finally would have true multichannel mixes of psicodelic Beatles songs (I've been listening to the Beatles in matrix surround since i was a wee baby cus i had discovered how to decode the surround matrix out of the stereo from reading an article in a magazine. While everybody else danced to A Hard Day's Night or Can't Buy Me Love in mono CDs I studied while grooving to surround Beatle Lps and LDs
) so the allure of true, discrete, 5 channel Beatle tracks lured
me to the dark side of DVD collecting. Now I could play only the vocals, or the left guitar or even weirder combinations!!!!!!!! (From 2 track (Stereo) you can derive 4 different channels, but from 5.1 you can find even weirder stuff! : twisted: And it also had the original mono too! (Something the LD didn't have)
If you want me to, i can post the Eleanor Rigby song tombstone capture from the DVD, but I can't go do that particular piccie in a complete open matte version at the moment cus for now my LD player is in a box, sickie.. I did have the one I derived the Aspect ratio comparisons from, cus since the DVD booklet showed that pic as a "widescreen" demostration, and I knew the LD was in open matte, I inmediatly went and captured it from the LD and the DVD all those years ago, to "compare". This thread made me look for them in the HD and actually work out the "complete" (or as complete as I could make it) "open matte" version, and derive the Projection mattes. As you can see, the DVD, seems to be neither a true 1.66 nor a 1.85, in fact it's almost the same story as Poppins, just that in my opinion it's slighly misframed up or down (in that pic they chop John head, you mentioned the tombstone, on the Hey Bulldog sequence when they raise their hands out of the pianothing the top fingers are cut off, etc.) but it seems it's minor overall (I Robot was misframed MUCH worse when I saw it in the theater
). Maybe I can do an educated guess to see if the tombstone name would fall inside the 1.66 matte. I actually think there could even be more of John on the negative than I managed to composite since he looks a little cramped, and then the mattes would be slightly taller too, but I work with what I have. In any case my "open matte" pic and it's derivations should be showing most of the image, if not actually all of it!
The DVD does LOOK good. You can see the brush strokes in the art..
Here's more dethi "criticisms": The mono soundtrack is incomplete, two songs and the parts surrounding them (When I'm 64 and It's Only a Northern Song) are notfrom the true mono soundtrack, the soundtrack there is almost folded down to mono from the stereo (actually the multichannel one, I suppose) soundtrack, but you can get hear it's stereo with a stereo discriminator(tm)
Maybe they lost a reel or so of the mono track or it was really in bad shape ? Anyway you get the rest in true mono, sounding the best i've personally heard (as I've told James, the sound of the print I saw once was the worst 35mm sound i've heard!) altho is not "Hi-Fi" it's acceptable, you can hear Hey Bulldog in all its mono glory (not issued anywhere else in true mono) and other songs in their mono mixes, etc. so it's great! It has most of the original soundtrack included and that's a big thumbs up. (The Help! and Magical Mistery Tour DVD's don't have the original mono tracks for example)
Apart from the tight framing cropping, the colours in this version are different than on the LD, not worse, just different. The image qualiy is great! It too looks much better than the projection I saw. The disc is not 16:9 coded. But there's always the PAL disc if you want extra resolution. (In fact, since I've seen that some PAL discs have slightly (very slightly) more vertical image than dvd NTSC discs made from the same master image (Brother Bear is one) I wonder if the PAL disc framing would be better...) but overall the image is very satisfying you can see lots of grain too! In this case that's a good thing. Makes the image very painterly. The Psicodelic Fantasia.
On the super plus side it has the soundtrack done in 5.1, AND the isolated music score in 5.1 too! So you can play it like that and leave it all day long on your Plasma like a long livingpsicodelicpainting come to life or lava lamp music video.
It also has a commentary track and some suplements (some of the supplements are faded to damnation which makes you appreciate how good the film looks (since the clips wer made at the same time) on the DVD. (hey now that i mention it, the clips of the movie on those supplements remind me of the projection I saw, all murky and dark ;P)
Maybe in a following post I'll talk more about the convos I've had with James about other Beatle soundtracks. Maybe I should make a dvd review there. Blue Meanies and Miramax: The secret Beatle/Disney degree of separation. But since i'm trying to make this post short
I'll just mention this: Netty, since our last conversation, I have sad news to report: Recently (like a week or two ago) the producer of the Miramax Hard Day's Night DVD said that the original mono mix soundtrack element of the movie was destroyed in 1982 or 83.
But that discussion is just for Another Day. (oooohh oohhh How Do They Sleep at Niiight?)
Going back to the Sumarino Yellow, and in sync with the Aladdin TLK and Beauty and The Beast thread about colors on DVD, here I present the pic from the laserdisc to compare to the DVD
The Yellow Sub Laserdisc color is very different from the one on the DVD. Maybe the LD might have been made from a open matte Techicolor print? The various shades of yellows in the sub are very different. Technicolor Yellow la la la.. Also the LD image is timed much warmer so Pepperland looks greyer or neutral (colorless) instead of the pale blue of the DVD (i mean after the attack) Maybe this was done cus the master was done when TVs used to be calibrated to the bluer (Japanese TV set) D93 Kelvin white point standard, to compensate for that. Or maybe Pepperland after the attack was really colorless and thats the true color scheme. For these pics I made two versions, the first one I just took the original capture and touched up the greyscale balance a nudge so that the sky was truly neutral grey (was a tad warmer or "yellowish" so i made it truly neutral) I assumed since the blue meanies sucked up color, the sky being blue might turn into grey. There's really not much difference from it to the unbalanced capture so i'm calling this one the calibrated original
As you can see the stone piramid is still yellow green! in other words it's a very different different color than the sky (see the DVD image where they are both very similar, slight pastel shades of blue) Then taking my cue from the DVD image, thinking the color differences might be due to the original movie image being much bluer (less warm) than this, i decided to try a experiment to see what would happen if i further balanced it bluer, maybe the colors would turn into the DVD? No such thing. So the piramid's stone became stone grey and the sky on the LD turned a shade of blue now, but the overal colors remained different. This is image number two. Mind you this balancings are overall changes (similar to what a photo lab makes on your pics to get rid of color casts) it's actually not what's called color alteration (the colors are not touched individually, it's an overall universal color change or "rebalancing"). Like what some tv's have as color temperature settings, like warm, cool, D65 D93, etc, . (if you add blue, people tend to turn magentaish, if you remove blue you turn them yellowish green
then you use your color and tint controls to make them ok to keep the colors as they were.) All this color moves can be done with your TV controls if you have them, like when you adjust from station to station, I didn't play with the individual colors cus i wanted to preseve what was originally on the LD.
Now comes the good part. The comparisons! Never mind the piramids! Look at the ties and scarfs! (or actually, shirt, John's shirt) and the skin tones on the LD vs the DVD!! For example George is pale on the DVD but on the LD he has a healthy tan! (All those months in India?
o/~ But if the sun don't come you'll get a tan from standing in the English rain aaaah
o/~ ) His jacket color kind of changed too. What's very interesting is John's shirt, it's light values seem to have been reversed! Etc, etc.. Ahhh the wonders of color and different color dyes, colometric sensitometry of the the film emulsion (different from the dyes that they produce later!), telecine capture elements, phosphour sets, and the operators who ride them!
disclaimer: due to the analog nature of the captures this Compact Disc can actually reveal the limitations of the analog source and be hazardous to your health. Please watch movies on vhs and in b/w if you notice any simptoms or adverse reactions. When the Sun comes. When the Suuun coooomesss
So i hope you have fun comparing the differences
top: Laserdisc colors
middle: LD colors balanced as an experiment, towards blue (like in the DVD)
bottom: DVD colors
The colors play a very basic part on this movie (Yellow and Blue are opposites) and i would never part with my two different versions. Kind of like having the Mono and Stereo mixes!
And I haven't talked about the movie. (Hey! i do techie stuff
), but I too think it's art. It's crazy, it's a potpurri it's psicoldelia, it's paint, its music, it's Beatles, it even has Disney running around all through the movie! Imagine how this woulda looked for a kid that went on a double bill of it with Fantasia, or even better, Fantasia first, Yellow Submarine second, and then 2001: A Space Odissey in 70mm 6 channel sound
The brain woulda melted. I wish i had been around then to see such an audiovisual evening feast at the theaters.
Well it was my first dvd
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one two three four, can I have a little rose
five six seven eight, blue I love you
To make this post even longer, this was
