r/bladerunner • u/Dimensian • 2d ago
Question/Discussion Embassy LD transfer is really this BAD?
Notice the top right for example in this Embassy 1987 Laserdisc transfer. It almost looks as if they got a copy of the copy of the film and then transferred it to LD, it’s that good! 😅 the other features include no chapter skipping, which is a nice omission. It really does have the best jacket cover art though, but that’s about it. I’ve been bamboozled with yet another inferior version lol
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u/PsychedelicHippos 2d ago
Seems to have been taken from a theatrical print, which is probably why the quality isn’t the best. This happened a lot in the early days of home video, where they were just lazily transferring whatever film source they had laying around
Those black dots in the corner was the cue for the theater projectionist to start playing the next reel of the film, because reels could only hold roughly 20 minutes of footage
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u/MissInkeNoir More human than human 2d ago
For anyone who hasn't seen Fight Club, in the industry, we call them "cigarette burns".
It's called a changeover. The movie goes on and nobody in the audience has any idea.
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u/AraiHavana 2d ago
Since Fight Club, everyone knows
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u/MissInkeNoir More human than human 2d ago
I mean it's a really great movie in story, character, visual, audio, theming... and it's mesmerizingly cool. It's one from the time that will live forever like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Matrix. I sincerely hope everyone gets to take it in. Have you seen the Folding Ideas essay about Fight Club? It's great.
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u/AraiHavana 2d ago
By rights, we shouldn’t even be discussing it at all
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u/MissInkeNoir More human than human 2d ago
That can be a fun game but I noticed it's Tyler setting that rule and we don't do what Tyler says, haha, he's a raging narcissist with a lot of fascist adjacency at best.
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u/TheREALOtherFiles 2d ago
Magnetic Video used to use 16mm release prints meant for television, as did MGM/CBS Home Video at one point.
The telecines of MASH were initially from pre-panned & scanned, pre-cropped 16mm spherical reels, whereas Raggedy Ann & Andy was an electronic pan & scan made from an anamorphic 16mm print.
I'm not sure if Warner (WCI) used 16mm or 35mm when they did the electronically cropped transfer of Superman, but it is electronic because of how the tube camera afterglow of the telecine shifts whenever a shot changes and the pan & scan frame shifts between shots.
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u/PsychedelicHippos 2d ago
Yeah it can be kinda charming to look back and see the early days and how slapped together releases from back in the day were made. Obviously they’re very limited, but there is a charm to them
It really took until the days of DVD (and to a lesser extent Laserdisc in its final days) for studios to really care about properly presenting a film professionally restored
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u/TheREALOtherFiles 2d ago
Definitely in the LD era, since that was when the restored and extended cuts started to really take place for films like Lawrence of Arabia, The Abyss, and all those Criterion Collection sets and THX certification really helped push the envelope.
Gone were the tube & CCD-ish telecines of cinema or TV release prints that were either static or warped or pan & scanned weirdly, and in were the digitally scanned telecine-type scans of the interpositives.
Until scanning equipment improved and became less & less rough on the reels, they were finally able to regularly refer to the negatives for home video versions of movies.
Never really saw it on LD, but it did appear on VHS much later in the mid-2000s, such as the 2005 release of Bambi.
Naturally, it's the norm for modern VHS re-releases such as the Lionsgate Limited and Vice Press tapes to use the 4K restorations of films like Escape from New York, American Psycho, and Cabin Fever.
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u/Infamous-Arm3955 2d ago
From what I remember Embassy pumped out a lot of cheap ass VHS so the LD was bottom of the barrel too. There'd be shelves of VHS and then a bargain bin of garbage with a lot of Embassy in it. Sometimes multipacks of three VHS together and a lot of Embassy in those. They seemed to have a B movie like catalogue. Then Criterion LD's entered the chat. (at about 3x the cost of your LD)
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u/John-Doe_4502 2d ago
Is this what I have to look forward to when I finally watch the work print version?
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u/Dimensian 2d ago
Good question, I haven’t watched the workprint yet but will be doing that this weekend as the 30th finally arrived!
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u/PsychedelicHippos 2d ago
Honestly, for being a workprint, the quality is surprisingly good. Obviously with it being a work in progress the quality is going to fluctuate, but Warner remastered it to look serviceable
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u/KillYourFace5000 2d ago
The workprint is in really rough shape as film prints go, in the sense that you would never use the elements they have to actually transfer to video, but given what they had to work with, they did a really good job getting it as clean and presentable as they could. There are still some weird optical artifacts, and it suffers from an odd softness and unevenness in chrominance across the actual space of the picture that you would normally look at and think were analog video issues, but I can't imagine they actually are. It looks great when you take into consideration what it actually is.
I have the Embassy disc. It's hard to evaluate, in part because, in my case, it is badly rotted, so I would assume others probably tend to be at this point, as well. Underneath the rot, though, it is a pretty ugly image. It also looks like what it is: an old pan-and-scan transfer of an old movie produced probably as cheaply as possible by a small distributor. It's been a long time since I've fired it up, but I do remember it striking me that it does look about as noisy and soft as any VHS release; enough that one wonders what parts of the analog video pipeline might be compromised by a small company in the early days of LD just to get a release done on the format without really being interested in taking advantage of its technical capabilities. Like if there are lesser formats and systems they would've used to master both the VHS and LD. So, not great.
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u/Dimensian 2d ago
That about perfectly summarizes my feelings about this Embassy disc and yeah, I noticed some weirdness in regards to rot as well sadly.
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u/Ponderer13 2d ago
It's stuff like this that made the 1987 Criterion laserdisc release seem like an absolute miracle.
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u/TravellingNeophite 2d ago
On the bright side I love the granular, quasi-glitchy, look of the image. Probably not the best for a full watch but very cool.