The Arrow Thread

[Stephen@Cult Labs]

.........and The 'Burbs will now also be released on September 15th.

[keirarts]

Originally Posted by Stephen@Cult Labs

.........and The 'Burbs will now also be released on September 15th.

Bugger

[Stephen@Cult Labs]

And now Brute Force & the Stray Cat Rock collection will be released on the 15th & 22nd of September. Talk about a cluster****!

[Demdike@Cult Labs]

People dismissed it when i suggested their big release publicity should be held back until things were actually ready to hit the shelves.

[keirarts]

September is going to be a busy month for me.

[bizarre_eye@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

People dismissed it when i suggested their big release publicity should be held back until things were actually ready to hit the shelves.

The problem is, sites like Amazon etc. require preliminary release dates so they can start taking pre-orders in advance no matter how rough these dates may be.

Plus Arrow aren't alone in delaying their titles - far from it in fact. Network have been a lot worse this year, plus Odeon, 88, Artificial Eye and Eureka have all delayed multiple titles and will probably delay more, as will Arrow.

I can understand some people's frustration, as they want the product as soon as possible, however I'm more than happy to wait - especially if there are improvements to be made and the releases are not rushed out to market with errors where they have to then be recalled/replaced.

[The Reaper Man@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Stephen@Cult Labs

Mark Of The Devil & Killer Klowns have been delayed until September. 15th for Klowns and 29th for Devil. Ordered both the other day, and now they don't come out until after my next payday. Even I've got to step up and say, Arrow, ****ing sort yourself out!

There's a surprise eh?

I sometimes wonder if the release date is really the planned date.

It's a great way to bring in capital.....

[Michael Brooke]

Originally Posted by The Reaper Man@Cult Labs

There's a surprise eh?

I sometimes wonder if the release date is really the planned date.

It's a great way to bring in capital.....

That's completely unwarranted cynicism, and I suspect you know it.

I'm reluctant to speak for my colleagues, but my own delayed releases had sound reasons behind them, namely:

The Long Goodbye - at a fairly late stage in production, Arrow decided to redesign their menus across the board (which I was firmly behind, as I never liked the white-bordered ones). The first one with the new menu, Big Trouble in Little China, took forever to get right because the disc structure was so complicated, which meant that the other late-2013 releases had to wait their turn. (I don't think the delay was that severe, but I do recall late November releases turning into mid-December ones.)

Sullivan's Travels - this was all set to go to replication as per the original schedule until at pretty close to the very last minute I was told that I could have the big Preston Sturges documentary after all (after spending much of the autumn trying to track down the European rightsholder, I'd more or less written it off in January). But including it required re-encoding and reauthoring everything, not least because the authoring house suddenly had to create space for a 75-minute documentary - so there was no chance of hitting the original deadline.

Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection - the original June 30 release date was entirely feasible based on the original plan: four BDs, five DVDs, and a mixture of newly-created HD and off-the-shelf SD material. But thanks to the success of the Kickstarter project and the smooth running of the Goto restoration (which freed up quite a bit of contingency funding), we were able to scan everything in HD - the feature, the five shorts mentioned in the Kickstarter campaign, two more shorts (and an alternative cut of an existing one) that weren't, three commercials and the 16mm on-set footage from The Beast. But not only did this require a lot of extra time to create new masters (film materials had to be tracked down and imported from France, James White and Deluxe had to find extra time in their busy schedules), but we then thought that we might as well go over the extras and upgrade all their clips to HD as well. And all of this work dominated April and May, when according to the original schedule we should have been authoring and QCing the final discs. The most recent delay is because I wasn't happy with the subtitles on Immoral Tales and we're experimenting with ways of making them clearer when they unavoidably have to appear over big wodges of text - I could have let them through as they were, and many labels undoubtedly would have done so, but I felt that we'd come so far that it would be a crying shame not to get it absolutely perfect.

In other words, in all three of those cases I could have met the original release dates - but you'd have ended up with inferior packages every time (I'd argue significantly inferior packages in the case of the last two). And one of the great things about working for Arrow is that they're flexible enough to allow you to react to sudden changes of circumstance - I can well imagine other labels saying of something like the Sullivan's Travels scenario "No, it's too late - just go ahead with what you've got".

Oh, and as a footnote, when the Borowczyk project was being budgeted, I agreed a flat fee rather than my usual practice of charging per day, as Arrow otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford two full-time producers (which the project badly needed, given the workload). Thanks to the delays, I've effectively been working for nothing since at least May (and that's aside from the fact that I'd already ploughed most of my fee into the Kickstarter campaign), and it would obviously have been far more convenient for both me and my family if I'd simply adhered to the original specs and stuck to the original schedule.

But would you really have preferred that?

[Stephen@Cult Labs]

Originally Posted by Michael Brooke

That's completely unwarranted cynicism, and I suspect you know it.

I'm reluctant to speak for my colleagues, but my own delayed releases had sound reasons behind them, namely:

The Long Goodbye - at a fairly late stage in production, Arrow decided to redesign their menus across the board (which I was firmly behind, as I never liked the white-bordered ones). The first one with the new menu, Big Trouble in Little China, took forever to get right because the disc structure was so complicated, which meant that the other late-2013 releases had to wait their turn. (I don't think the delay was that severe, but I do recall late November releases turning into mid-December ones.)

Sullivan's Travels - this was all set to go to replication as per the original schedule until at pretty close to the very last minute I was told that I could have the big Preston Sturges documentary after all (after spending much of the autumn trying to track down the European rightsholder, I'd more or less written it off in January). But including it required re-encoding and reauthoring everything, not least because the authoring house suddenly had to create space for a 75-minute documentary - so there was no chance of hitting the original deadline.

Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection - the original June 30 release date was entirely feasible based on the original plan: four BDs, five DVDs, and a mixture of newly-created HD and off-the-shelf SD material. But thanks to the success of the Kickstarter project and the smooth running of the Goto restoration (which freed up quite a bit of contingency funding), we were able to scan everything in HD - the feature, the five shorts mentioned in the Kickstarter campaign, two more shorts (and an alternative cut of an existing one) that weren't, three commercials and the 16mm on-set footage from The Beast. But not only did this require a lot of extra time to create new masters (film materials had to be tracked down and imported from France, James White and Deluxe had to find extra time in their busy schedules), but we then thought that we might as well go over the extras and upgrade all their clips to HD as well. And all of this work dominated April and May, when according to the original schedule we should have been authoring and QCing the final discs. The most recent delay is because I wasn't happy with the subtitles on Immoral Tales and we're experimenting with ways of making them clearer when they unavoidably have to appear over big wodges of text - I could have let them through as they were, and many labels undoubtedly would have done so, but I felt that we'd come so far that it would be a crying shame not to get it absolutely perfect.

In other words, in all three of those cases I could have met the original release dates - but you'd have ended up with inferior packages every time (I'd argue significantly inferior packages in the case of the last two). And one of the great things about working for Arrow is that they're flexible enough to allow you to react to sudden changes of circumstance - I can well imagine other labels saying of something like the Sullivan's Travels scenario "No, it's too late - just go ahead with what you've got".

Oh, and as a footnote, when the Borowczyk project was being budgeted, I agreed a flat fee rather than my usual practice of charging per day, as Arrow otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford two full-time producers (which the project badly needed, given the workload). Thanks to the delays, I've effectively been working for nothing since at least May (and that's aside from the fact that I'd already ploughed most of my fee into the Kickstarter campaign), and it would obviously have been far more convenient for both me and my family if I'd simply adhered to the original specs and stuck to the original schedule.

But would you really have preferred that?

I realize that Arrow want to make the releases the best they can be. I think I'm more annoyed about the only accepting paypal as a payment option. As I said, I got paid today and ordered 2 titles after juggling/stretching my finances for the month, now they've been moved to after my next payday. It's frustrating.

[BAKA]

Delays generally don't bother me in the slightest, however, I think Arrow need to be a bit more savvy with their delays. September is now an unreasonably expensive month from their releases alone.

September 8th – Camera Obscura and the individual Borowczyk titles
September 15th – Brute Force, The ‘Burbs and Killer Klowns from Outer Space
September 22nd – Stray Cat Rock Collection and Night of the Comet
September 29th – Mark of the Devil, Salvatore Giuliano and Shivers

I have no issue with around 4 releases a month from a label, but there are 7 I have pre-ordered (one a box set and two steelbooks). Sadly a couple will now be cancelled, and I'll relegate them to £7.99 buys in Arrow's end of year sale. I only have so much disposable income I can spend on releases, and I regularly purchase from a wide range of labels both in my home territory and internationally. Of course, there's no rush to purchase everything (besides the limited releases), but I don't think it's good for the consumer, nor good for Arrow themselves. It surely can't be good for them to have people cancelling pre-orders and waiting for sales to pick them up for a fraction of the cost.

Fortunately for me I'm not interested in the Camera Obscura set, and I have one of the releases already via Scream Factory, but I can see arduous financial times for those picking up all of the above. Of course knowing Arrow, it's probably likely some of those will be delayed even further, which will lighten the load.