Strand Releasing
Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2015 12:06 am
Strand Releasing
Starting a main thread for Strand as all the posts about previous releases start with "I thought there was a Strand thread but posting here as there's not", and as Strand's been upping their BD game lately.
I've been looking forward for months to their release of "Love is the Devil", especially once they confirmed on Facebook that it would have lossless audio (unlike "Stranger by the Lake", which was the one drawback to that release).
The BD of LITD definitely stands as the strongest home video presentation of the film, in comparison to Strand's own DVD from the dark ages and the UK Artificial Eye and BFI DVDs (the BFI DVD being windowboxed for no apparent reason). Strand has even ported over the BFI commentary (though not the "Colony" featurette on interview with producers that was also on that disc) as a special feature, which is nice. Unfortunately, there's at least one minor issue, as at 33 minutes in, a visible color-correction power window frame appears over Jacobi's face as he's looking in the mirror. It only shows up on the first appearance of this shot, so only for a few seconds, but it's distracting. I also suspect the scene introducing Craig is brighter than it should be - it's supposed to be night but it's so bright that he doesn't seem to need his flashlight. I checked it against the AE release, which is the only one I currently have, and the scene is a bit darker there, and it plays more convincingly as night. Caveats aside, it's still the best available release.
DVD Beaver assessment.
For comparison to the third screenshot on DVD Beaver, here's the same scene from earlier DVDs (not an exact frame match - I made these a few years ago):
Strand DVD:
Artificial Eye DVD:
BFI DVD:
Starting a main thread for Strand as all the posts about previous releases start with "I thought there was a Strand thread but posting here as there's not", and as Strand's been upping their BD game lately.
I've been looking forward for months to their release of "Love is the Devil", especially once they confirmed on Facebook that it would have lossless audio (unlike "Stranger by the Lake", which was the one drawback to that release).
The BD of LITD definitely stands as the strongest home video presentation of the film, in comparison to Strand's own DVD from the dark ages and the UK Artificial Eye and BFI DVDs (the BFI DVD being windowboxed for no apparent reason). Strand has even ported over the BFI commentary (though not the "Colony" featurette on interview with producers that was also on that disc) as a special feature, which is nice. Unfortunately, there's at least one minor issue, as at 33 minutes in, a visible color-correction power window frame appears over Jacobi's face as he's looking in the mirror. It only shows up on the first appearance of this shot, so only for a few seconds, but it's distracting. I also suspect the scene introducing Craig is brighter than it should be - it's supposed to be night but it's so bright that he doesn't seem to need his flashlight. I checked it against the AE release, which is the only one I currently have, and the scene is a bit darker there, and it plays more convincingly as night. Caveats aside, it's still the best available release.
DVD Beaver assessment.
For comparison to the third screenshot on DVD Beaver, here's the same scene from earlier DVDs (not an exact frame match - I made these a few years ago):
Strand DVD:
Artificial Eye DVD:
BFI DVD: