587 Three Colors Trilogy

[swo17]

Beaver on the Bleu Blu

[hearthesilence]

Damn, that's an improvement. Now I don't feel so bad about selling my Miramax DVDs.

[Der Spieler]

Selling it? At the price it's going for now, you might as well give it away.

[dadaistnun]

Beav on Blanc.

[knives]

Why is it that usually resources list White under it's Polish title, but the other two under their French titles.

[swo17]

Perhaps because White is partly set in Poland?

[knives]

I've considered that, but there's a lot of American films set in England for example. Seems an odd distinction to make.

[zedz]

It's probably because by some measures it's 'technically' a Polish film whereas the others are 'technically' French. They're all international co-productions, but that film tilts one way and the other tilt a different way. I imagine some nationality-determining rules were blindly applied (which included proportion of cast and where it was filmed) and White came up Polish, and there was no sentient human being on the job to rationalise that result with the outcome for the other two films.

[MichaelB]

Technically, Bleu is French, Biały is Polish and Rouge is Swiss - but French-speaking Swiss, hence the common language with Bleu.

[knives]

Aw, that makes more sense and is kind of clever. Nice joke on the whole international co-productions thing.

[manicsounds]

Wonder if that BD runtime of 1 hour 46 minutes listed in the review is wrong....

[dadaistnun]

Beaver on Rouge.

[hearthesilence]

Interesting how different they are, especially that last screencap (the only one that doesn't match Artifical Eye in terms tonality).

[dwk]

Seems there is a problem with the audio on White and Criterion is fixing it

[cdnchris]

Interesting. I don't recall that. Now I have to go home and check mine and make sure my system is set up correctly as I remember the surrounds kicking in while watching it.

[Paul Moran]

Bother. From past experience, Criterion won't send replacement discs outside their licensed region A, so I'll have to go through B & N.

[MichaelB]

Thanks for the warning - now that I'm multiregion I was going on a Criterion splurge and this was clearly pretty high on my list. Though I might as well wait for a comparison with the Artificial Eyes now.

[ZiggyMonroe]

In addition to any sound issues on White, look at the Framing issues on Blue.
In most cases it doesn't matter much but when Binoche lowers her head and her chin is awkwardly cut off it's frustrating the full frame isn't used.

This was shot with a cell phone camera so the image isn't great but you can see the difference.



Also check the DVD Beaver site for the comparisons, especially the coffee cup and the blond woman's locket. The bottom of the frame is similarly cropped.

The picture quality of the Criterion Blu-ray is so nice it's a real frustrating shame they didn't get the full frame.

[Paul Moran]

I think the Three Colors: White problem only affects the DVD edition. The blu-ray edition has a single DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 (Stereo) soundtrack - as do Blue and Red.

[Noiretirc]

I'm starting to shy away from what was number 1 on my wishlist: Three Colors DVD. (Yes, DVD.) Can someone please confirm if this sound issue on White and the cropping issue described above is for the DVDs? Edit: I now understand the cropping issue was from Blu, but it must therefore be the same on DVD. Edit 2: Discussion of DVD vs Blu moved to appropriate thread. Thanks Mods.

[fdm]

I think the Three Colors: White problem only affects the DVD edition. The blu-ray edition has a single DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 (Stereo) soundtrack - as do Blue and Red.

My caveat is that I've not listened to it, have only read about it (waiting for the fixed disc to become available), but for the blu-ray, the soundtrack would have to be DTS HD-MA 5.1 for the surround to be hard coded. WIth 2.0 you would still need to engage Pro Logic to get surround sound, and that's apparently what's broken, as instead of surround you end up with only one channel of sound. If you only want stereo sound, then presumably you wouldn't have any problem with that.

[Paul Moran]

WIth 2.0 you would still need to engage Pro Logic to get surround sound, and that's apparently what's broken, as instead of surround you end up with only one channel of sound.

Yes, that's what John Hodson has been telling me on AVForums! However, my Pioneer SC-LX83 receiver - although it offers 13 Home THX Modes, including 7 Pro Logic variations, with 2-channel sources - won't allow Pro Logic processing with DTS-HD MA. And, frankly, why should it? DTS-HD MA is supposed to be the gold standard for blu-ray audio. Who in their right mind would buy an expensive amp to decode it properly, and then ***** up the result by feeding it through Dolby processing? What Criterion should have done, of course, is put the surround signal on discrete channels, e.g. as a 5.0 track, which is what the standard requires, and apparently is what Artificial Eye did with their UK release. I'm not worried about listening to White (and Blue and Red) in stereo; that's precisely what I expect from DTS-HD MA 2.0. However, I'd be interested to know whether the "White" surround fix will improve the stereo playback, e.g. by adding surround info which my receiver will retain in the L and R channels.

[tenia]

If someone can explain me how you can have information for the surround speakers in a 2.0 soundtrack, it would be highly appreciated.

[MichaelB]

If someone can explain me how you can have information for the surround speakers in a 2.0 soundtrack, it would be highly appreciated.

This is a legacy of the original Dolby Stereo system, which allowed for four soundtracks to be encoded into a two-channel system, which were unscrambled thanks to a matrix decoding system similar to that used in 1970s quadraphonic sound systems (which is how four-channel recordings could be released on LPs, which had to be notionally two-channel thanks to the fact that the LP's grooves could only have two sides).

So any film that was originally in Dolby Stereo (in practice the vast majority of non-monophonic films released between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s, certainly including Kieślowski's last four films) can have their surround information extracted from the stereo tracks by means of an appropriate decoder, whether installed in a cinema or at home. I suspect any decent home cinema amp released in the last 15-20 years can do this: mine certainly can.

In fact, this was how home cinema surround sound was able to work before all-digital systems like Dolby 5.1 and DTS were introduced in the 1990s: once relatively high-quality stereo soundtracks were incorporated into VHS releases in the mid-1980s, it was a comparatively simple matter to adapt the technology used in cinemas to create four-channel amplifiers that would reproduce genuine cinema surround sound in the home. I first bought one of these circa 1988-9 or thereabouts, and I'm still using two of the speakers to this day. And when television started broadcasting in stereo, the system worked too - in fact, I remember the thrill I felt when I discovered that the BBC was effectively broadcasting Twin Peaks in four-channel surround sound, only just after they started broadcasting high-quality stereo in the first place.

For more info on the technical side, Wikipedia's entry on Dolby Stereo looks pretty solid, and it also has entries on Dolby Surround (the original three-channel domestic system) and Dolby Pro-Logic (its four-channel successor).

[fdm]

I guess I am puzzled then also, because my receiver quite likely will not do pro-logic and permit lossless at the same time either, now that I bother to think about it a little bit more (my at the time top of the line Denon receiver predates lossless DTS/DD codecs slightly, my blu-ray player has to translate them to lossless multi-channel LPCM first).

So basically the whole trilogy is 2.0 lossless stereo only then for blu-ray? This is even more disappointing than finding out that one of the discs wasn't encoded properly, particularly since AE has taken that extra step to do them in 5.0. Wonder if this is true with some of Criterion's other 2.0 DTS HD-MA tracks that should really be 5.x... Looks to be the case at least with Veronique, I've only checked out the AE 5.1 blu-ray disc at this point however, but Criterion's is also only 2.0 for that one as well.

(This reminds me of all those import dvd titles that overseas get nice 5.1 surround soundtracks, but by the time whoever puts them out in the states gets them onto disc they end up with 2.0 soundtracks.)