Cult Labs - What Have You Bought Recently?

Just ordered this beauty from amazon.de:-

FRITZ LANG'S M - 80th anniversary edition digibook

http://cdn.hometheaterforum.com/7/7c...Schuber_3D.png

Basically a remaster of the Criterion remaster, and by the same team. They went back, added more footage and had more time to fix any transfer issues present on the criterion version of M!...Here it is from the horse's mouth:-

Quote:

With the Criterion Edition, it was a great opportunity to begin with to revisit Fritz Lang's work after our initial work on "M" back in 2003. However, Criterion's Lee Kline and I had extremely little time to go over the corrections necessary for the various shots. At the time (as I said Jan 2010) both he and I were happy we could make the corrections at all just in time for the release of the BD. With that in mind, I would have been (and I said as much) very happy with it to "close the book" and was. Then, soon after, that call from Universum Film came, opening the door again, but with an entirely different, exciting set of possibilities.

Most importantly, we could work on the material with a LOAD more time, and invested our efforts to go each individual shot for shot, frame by frame, where we could go into much more detail than we had the chance on the Criterion Edition. Also, what was not to be then(as Lee was not able to come to us here in Berlin) we could do now: work in our 2K DCI enviroment (suite) with native 2K projection on the 6-meter projection screen. This, alonside studio 2K displays and monitoring equipment is essential for such work. This allowed us to be much more precise and accurate in balancing as well as matching gradation and density - in a way far better than we ever could - to the original makers intention (as laid out by Lang and the various reference materials on record as well as nirate reference materials themselves).

This by itself was very welcome, but the time we had also gave us the opportunity to dig much deeper and for the first time takle and fix long standing issues such the very apparent, inherent instabilities in the picture caused by perforation damage* (mostly on the duplicate negative materials) and copying errors made in the 1930s as well as thick splices, tears, etc**. In many, many sequences that had to be restored from several elements aside from the OCN the densities and gradation had to be matched as closely as technically possible (which is at times extremely difficult given the difference in generation as developmental issues can make that job hard at best, next to impossible at worst). But in most sequences, the positions did not exactly match 100%, either on the photochemical restoration elements, since the precision in the photochemical realm has its limits to what you can do. In very frequent cases the frames would slide downward** very visibly at the beginning of a shot or even when the materials would vary.

This was another main focus of our attention, along with the many, many scratches, remnants of tears, wire scratches and stains that were, of course, "also on the menu" along with dust removal (the negative elements had quite a load of all) :o)).
We fixed most of the sequences to a degree where they either move much less visibly or did not move/tilt downward at all anymore depending on what the 35mm elements would allow. We tested furthergoing stabilization in general, especially on the duplicate negative material, which suffered some perforation problems ("M" is pretty unstable both in X as well as Y axis in those dupe neg sequences) but the results in the end caused artifacts with (too) little gain in return for it to go any further.

Another very important issue was the sound. The problem here is two-fold:
For one, Fritz Lang intended very clearly (as the variable density sound negative clearly shows) this film to be a silent / sound combination with scenes featuring sound (dialogue, ambient sounds etc) while other scenes were silent with merely a few bits of sound added here or there or scenes with no sound whatsoever. In many of these scenes he wanted to focus the viewers attention on the image alone, while in the others he added just bits of sound to "rattle" the audience a bit (loud sound of honking cars, bells, shreaking noises and whistles).

from http://www.hometheaterforum.com/t/30...ry-restoration