Hello David,david hare wrote:Svet, I think David Mackenzie, or others if not him, also had problems with the white crush (or overblown white) on the S-C A Bout de Souffle. Anyhow I decided to cancel my bets on that and pre-order the Criterion.
I understand. And I also agree that Criterion have a much stronger, more competent team that will makes sure that Breathless probably looks as good as it possibly can.
This being said, however, I think that Canal are nowhere near as bad as some people who have seen only a few of their U.S. cloned releases have claimed. They have certainly made mistakes, and I wholeheartedly agree with you that their quality control could be improved, but let's be objective when it comes to the titles they are releasing - there are simply no funds to rescan many of them. Even Criterion have struggled with the same issue - see Kagemusha. I recently checked a screener for one of Melville's films, and while not perfect, I fail to see how anyone could possibly argue that the SDVD transfer(s) from UK boxset/releases are in any way preferable - the difference in quality is enormous.
As to the "demise" of DVD - you know that I happen to communicate with a number of different parties, so suffice to say this transition to downloading that some people are hyping up is as ridiculous as one of the ongoing threads on this forum where there are "serious" speculations that Paramount are about to stop producing DVDs. For the record, Paramount's reduction of catalog titles began long before 2006, and what you are seeing at the moment is nothing more than catalog sorting - the same type that has made a number or Warner titles, for instance, unavailable. I am not entirely sure how some people expect(ed) the studios to maintain their entire catalog libraries as we move forward.
Good to see you still posting.
(and a fox is always welcome to contribute elsewhere
).Pro-B
