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Originally Posted by Michael Brooke  I really can't wait for the reaction to that. Hand on heart, I don't think I've ever seen such a dramatic improvement in all my two decades plus of working on film restoration projects - a friend recently told me that he'd tried to watch Sweeney Todd on Netflix, but had to give up because the audio was so muffled (English isn't his native language). I happened to have the restoration on my laptop, so I showed him a bit and his jaw properly dropped, Tex Avery-style.
What's really exciting about projects like this isn't just the fact that these films haven't looked this good in eight decades or more (no exaggeration), it's the fact that because they now look this good, they'll hopefully lead to a complete rehabilitation of the films' wider reputation as well. Jonathan Rigby has already taken back what he said about Slaughter in his book English Gothic, which was based on watching abysmal-quality copies - now that he's seen them properly (he was extensively involved with the extras), he's done a complete U-turn. |
I hope this is a huge success that leads to other similar projects.
On a side-note, having subtitles is extremely important to me. I'm not a native speaker and, even though I'm a professional translator, I have enormous difficulty separating ambient/extraneous sounds from speech. With a copy with really muffled sound, even with headphones blocking all other sounds it's very difficult and I've had to give up on many low quality copies, even though they were the only available. So a sincere thank you for always including subtitles.