Taxi Driver 35th Anniversary edition

Great effort to secure the Criterion commentary. Also makes you wonder what title(s) Criterion got from the deal.

The BBS box set perhaps?

Just a heads-up - it's back down to 12.99 at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Taxi-Driver-Bl...uct/B004IFYMYI

And...preordered. Never did get this on DVD (and I keep missing parts of it on cable), so this is a no-brainer.

Awesome interview with Grover Crisp, tons of insightful info: http://thedigitalbits.com/articles/t...interview.html

"Having said that, though, we don't take the position that grain is an automatic "problem", and we usually just leave it alone."

"Actually, Lawrence is not completed, yet, though we have begun work on it. It is a complicated project and will certainly take a year to complete. The 8K scans of the negative are done, so we are at least headed down that road."

That article is a great read. I'm not sure any other studio has shown the excellence in video mastering that Sony consistently has.

"film, regardless of what the particular element is, needs to be scanned at 4K at a minimum"

Universal & Paramount take note: "Most filmmakers know what they are doing with the resources at hand and our job, after all, is to replicate the vision of the filmmaker, not to impose our own aesthetic outlook on a film". STEP AWAY FROM THE DNR CONSOLE!

Man, $13 for a 4k restoration of a classic, now that's a great deal
I usually don't pre-order but I don't think there's anything to lose...

Other studios take note...THIS is how you do it.

I have been in Sony's Colorworks facility and audio post production in Culver City and it is hard to envision a group that would be better equipped or dedicated to quality.

A high percentage of their work is for other studios. Many well known films with other studios pass through their shop.

Another article on the restoration... this time with 1080p screenshots!

http://magazine.creativecow.net/arti...-driveri-in-4k

Dammit... I'd hoped to see the killing scene restored to it's saturated glory...
I remember it being discussed in the audio commentary of the old DVD release. They said the scene looked vivid like the bloody still photos taken and that they'd hoped to restore the scene to it's full colors but the negative had shrunk and faded so they couldn't do it.

Now it seems to me that they now could get the propor color-saturation from the negatives with some minimal digital color correction, but they WON'T! what gives...? They could use seemless branching to present an unrated cut as well as the desaturated r-rated cut. Aaaaaargh!!

I think the part in The Digital Bits' interview with Crisp where it is explained, is:

Interesting that they're doing all remastering work in 4K now...
"For some time, we have been scanning everything that we work on at 4K, regardless of whether it is a big restoration project or if we just need to re-master the film for Blu-ray"

Thanks Flexx , that's more explainatory than the other article. I feel much better knowing that only the desaturated negative dupe exists, and that they can't get it back to the original state even if they wanted, instead of the "we can do it but won't" attitude which was implied in the creativecrow article.

.

Sony has in the past sometimes underestimated the need for higher compression parameters on films with dense grain structure, such as Taxi Driver. They tend to target their encodes to average in the mid-20s, which is fine for a clean, glossy film or source. But that level invariably breaks down on close inspection for messy sources. I have to believe that much of the compression process has been reduced to the level of automation. Hopefully a major restoration like Taxi Driver had a technician go over the video encode by hand and tweak any problem areas for artifacts.

The very high bitrates in the 30s we often see on foreign releases has proved, to me at a minimum, that compression transparency and fidelity to the master is visibly improved over the Hollywood studios' typical practice of targeting averages in the 20s. Of course it still surpasses the studio, which I do not even have to name and everyone stills know who they are, that is targeting sub-20 figures on all releases now.

Actual screenshots: http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Taxi-D...5/#Screenshots

No compression issues. The CreativeCow article just got bad ones (deleted my relevent post). I knew Sony wouldn't let us down.

Blu-ray.com review is up.
Their screencaps kill the ones in that article. Seems to look excellent.

Wow. Just... wow. Looks absolutely *fantastic*.

Hello good day. This is a good movie too.


Regards

why cant all studios produce such good pq?

And a guy like Grover Crisp who knows what he is doing.

Agreed.

I wonder what's going on with George Feltenstein (sp?) at Warners. I used to read interviews with him back in the DVD days and they did great work on DVD. It really seems like they've fallen off a bit with Bluray.

I think WB do good restoration work. It's usually screwed up downstream, with horrible compression.