Spoke to Arrow about this earlier (seriously, I'm sure they're getting sick of me) and they had been reading the comments on here since I posted yesterday. Here's what they had to say:
Quote:
Indeed, synching dialogue is ‘easy’ (within reason obviously) but as our version of Demons is from the original camera negative is does contains a few seconds which prevented audio from other sources, which all derive from versions released through the years without those seconds which has prevented the audio from synching. The result would have meant audio holes and points where the audio wavers, way past the standards of Italian post-synch dubbing.
We could not, unfortunately, restore the original magnetic track because of budget constraints which only stretched to restoring picture. This was a huge undertaking for us – one we normally wouldn’t do. Like most distributors we depend on licensors and producers to do their own remastering which we buy into at a fraction of the cost since it is shared over the world. Going back to the negative is very expensive, especially, for an independent label. As such, we sadly couldn't stretch to adding in the very expensive audio costs.
Had we known this from the start that we wouldn’t be able to get our existing stereo track to synch, we would have had a re-think about our options but then hindsight is always 20/20!
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Hope this clears up the idea that anything 'fishy' is going on. Nothing suspicious, no conspiracies and Arrow haven't been ripped off. It's just the way it goes sometimes when dealing with these licensors.