[The Limey]

Two very interesting posts from Michael Brooke on that 'Pooch' Amazon review:

Michael Brooke says:
There's a sentence one often encounters in investment prospectuses that reads "Past performance is not a guide to future performance", and it very much applies here.

Thanks to being a good friend and former colleague of restoration supervisor James White, I've been lucky enough to spend the weekend watching a test pressing of the new Arrow Blu-ray, and it really is very impressive indeed.

It is definitely not the same as the Blue Underground transfer. James created a brand new 2K scan directly from the original camera negative, and because he was able to supervise the entire scanning and restoration process, he was able to maintain complete and consistent control over every single element - a very rare luxury in this business.

On many past releases, Arrow have been hamstrung from the start by having to deal with off-the-shelf HD masters, and Italian facilities houses are notoriously fond of smearing digital noise reduction over everything, which is usually impossible to remove without making things worse. Other labels have also been affected by this, but Arrow disproportionately so because they release so many Italian titles.

But this time round, they were granted direct access to the original celluloid materials and had the nous to hire a freelancer with one of the most impressive CVs in the business: he spent the better part of a decade supervising the overwhelming majority of the BFI's DVD and Blu-ray releases and since then he's worked for Masters of Cinema, with all that that implies in terms of quality standards. I've worked with him myself on a number of occasions, most recently when I co-produced the Blu-ray of Jan Svankmajer's 'Alice', for which he created a transfer that's one of the most dramatic advances on previous video versions that I've ever seen (a sentiment echoed by every reviewer that I'm aware of).

His speciality is masterminding the passage from celluloid to final encode with as little interference as possible, and in this particular case what you're seeing is as close to what Lucio Fulci and Sergio Salvati originally shot as is possible within the limitations of the Blu-ray format. And the differences between it and Arrow's previous Fulci/Argento releases really are quite startling - the grain is completely natural, the image devoid of digital manipulation bar removal of physical damage, and I genuinely don't see how he could have done any better.

As for the special features, I enjoyed them immensely - personal favourites were the Alan Jones/Stephen Thrower commentary (these guys really know their Fulci), the 46-minute Ian McCulloch interview (far more wittily polished than the rather slapdash commentary that he recorded in the 1990s) and the half-hour Gino de Rossi documentary (which includes numerous clips from his work and a guided tour of his workshop), but there's plenty more to chew on. As it were.

But please don't take my word for it: review copies should be sent out this coming week, and I'm looking forward to the reaction.

Michael Brooke says:
Incidentally, I think PoochJD is confusing a comment I made on YouTube with an official statement from Arrow.

Just to be clear: I'm not an Arrow employee - I know them, and I've done occasional freelance work for them (mainly on the Arrow Academy sub-label, for which I wrote booklet essays on 'Bicycle Thieves' and 'Ashes and Diamonds'), but I had no input into this particular restoration.

It just so happens that I was interviewing James White for a Sight & Sound article on one of his other big 2012 restorations (MoC's 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' - how's that for an unlikely double bill?), and since he was working on 'Zombie Flesh Eaters' at the time, we inevitably chatted quite a bit about that too, which is why I know so much about what happened behind the scenes.

I was initially under the impression that the Blue Underground release hadn't been struck from the original camera negative, but when challenged on this on YouTube (by PoochJD, I see), I posted a retraction - and I repeat that retraction here, for the avoidance of any doubt.

That said, I'd be intrigued to know how directly they were able to supervise the creation of their version - the restoration demo (thanks for the link, by the way) suggests that it was a two-stage process, with the scanning and initial digitising being carried out in Italy and the remaining digital restoration in L.A. It's safe to assume that the latter process was under Blue Underground's direct supervision, but was a BU producer present at the Italian end?

Because I know for certain that Arrow's restoration was entirely created and supervised in London by the same team - which amongst other things had the massive advantage of them constantly being able to check against the actual negative if there was any doubt about the way things were turning out.

For a good illustration of this, there are very faint yellow streaks in the underwater sequence - they're visible in all other home video versions, but are clearer in the Arrow disc because of the overall level of detail. It's impossible to be sure what caused them: the most likely explanation is a problem with the film or the lab (the footage was shot by a separate second-unit team), as they look distinctly chemical in origin.

Now this is the kind of thing that can lead to considerable worry if spotted in a digital file, because often there's no way of telling if it's inherent in the negative or introduced as an unwanted by-product of the digitisation process. But when James spotted them, he was able to confirm directly that they were indeed present in the original negative.

(He told me that he tried to get them removed digitally, but this proved impossible to do without introducing unwanted artefacting in the relevant parts of the image - and in situations like this it's far better to take a hands-off approach. For a similar example, there are faint white streaks in 'Lawrence of Arabia' that were caused by the film actually overheating in the camera - it might be possible to clean them up digitally, but Sony decided not to, and I think that's sensible.)

Amazon.co.uk: PoochJD's review of Zombie Flesh Eaters [Blu-ray Steelbook]