Thank you for your input. This is very informative. I'm not sure I understand it all but you seem to be saying that there are ways to avoid most defects of PAL to NTSC transfer such as ghosting, and most defects of interlacing and that's fine. You also confirm that some standalone progressive DVD players eliminate some of the drawbacks of interlacing, which I always suspected.

A few points though:

(1) Would it be too much to dream of another HD revolution that would reconcile once and for all all formats instead of perpetuating divisions and adding to them? There was PAL (with its unnatural speedup of 24 fps films) and NTSC (with its 3:2 judder) and now there is Blu-Ray and HD. Imagine a day when the new video standard would be perfectly adaptable to every frame rate from 16 fps to 30 fps or what have you without judder of any kind and allow perfect transfers from one system to the other and from one region to the other? It seems to me the digital domain makes all things possible but maybe I'm just dreaming here...

(2) The resolution loss created by pictureboxing is ridiculously small compared to its benefits and especially compared to what is "sacrificed" in any enhanced widescreen format wider than 1.66:1. The amount of black screen space created by pictureboxing is truly minimal by comparison to all those other ratios - which would also benefit, IMHO, from slight, occasional pillarboxing (heresy!). So, to me, it's not a very important loss, compared to the benefits for the vast majority of viewers. I played last night the Fox Sunrise by Murnau (genuine progressive scanning in 24 fps, BTW) - my favourite film of all time -, which had to be pillarboxed because of its narrower Movietone format and I still cursed the fact that my TV set masked to the top and bottom of the picture for lack of pictureboxing...

(3) There are so many good things about the Kino Metropolis, namely the digitally restored picture, the newly-recorded original score and the painstaking recreation of the original storyline from the remnants of the American "dumbed-down" version that I think it is really bad form to quibble. The bottom line is the (pictureboxed) Kino R1 Metropolis looks extremely good on NTSC DVD playback - whatever the transfer method used - and, as I mentioned before, the documentary talks about special effects animation using 25 drawings per second, which means, logically, that the film itself was meant to run at 25 frames per second, even though the NTSC DVD runs at 24 fps. The perfect synchonization of the recreated original score also confirms that the film is playing at the expected rate (on NTSC DVD). If this music had been speeded up, it would sound like it's a whole semitone too high, which I don't perceive. I have no point of comparison except the feeling of "extreme edginess" I get from listening to a film like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in one of its incarnations on DVD in a 1/25th speedup, a feeling I didn't get from the Kino Metropolis, which sounds "just right". In other words, we North Americans can listen to the score in its "natural" state whereas our European cousins have to listen to it in an enervating PAL speedup, along with a speeded up image.

Also see this Wikipedia article ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(1927_film) ):

My pet theory: Lang shot the action scenes at 18 fps and the animation at 25 fps - for higher resolution - and meant the film to be projected at 24 fps, to speed up the action scenes - which was considered artistically acceptable at the time - and keep the projection time within commercially reasonable limits. To no avail eventually, as it was amputated of 25 % of its running time in the "simplified" American export version (the only one that survived), which eliminated Rotwang's motivation for the creation of the female robot, dumbed down the plot twists and eliminated most references to sex, politics and religion (pretty much as Akiva A Beautiful Mind Goldsman and Ron The Da Vinci Code Howard would have done if given the chance :D).

Baracine, I'm telling you that there's no comparison between Kino's and Masters of Cinema's releases of METROPOLIS. The MoC is far superior, and you'd be far more likely to "quibble" if you compared the two. The fact of the matter is that the Kino is a PAL->NTSC port, which means that you're not "seeing the best available version of this film," as you put it in an earlier post. As much as you obviously love these films, you're doing yourself a major disservice by not going multiregional.

As far as the pictureboxing is concerned, I wonder if you ought not to get a better viewing system. Based on your comments, it sounds like your current set-up suffers from severe overscan.


By the way, thanks to Manono! Lots of helpful information there.

I'm sure the PAL version is fine. It does have 2 discs and I wonder what extras we North Americans may be missing on, although a point-by-point comparison of the two editions seems to confirm that both sets offer exactly the same features. But it does have a PAL speedup, which means that's its action and music have an "unnatural" 1/25th speedup (higher by a whole semitone) compared to the normal (and intended) recording speed of the film score and the intended 24 fps speed of the image, which already feels "too fast" for some. I also like the transfer, which shows absolutely no negative artefact on my system(1) and is nicely pictureboxed.

The total effect on your humble servant is this (considering I have five years of piano training and speeded-up film scores give me hives):

http://www.vwenthusiast.com/yabbse/a...omer-drool.gif
(total ecstatic satisfaction)

As to modifying my system to eliminate overscanning, here's the lowdown. I paid 3 500 $ CAN for my Toshiba widescreen rear-projection HD-ready progressive-scanning-capable TV a few years back when it was state of the art. In DVD progressive-scanning mode, it shows the maximum area of a 4:3 picture left and right (albeit with jagged edges) but still overscans vertically. I have just acquired a progressive scanning DVD player and am not about to replace it. When I bought it, there were no DVD players with gradual zoom-out capability on the local market and this will be my next purchase eventually. By that time, however, things might have changed dramatically and, assuming the Blu-Ray/HD wars are over, there might be another system on the horizon. So, for many people like me, pictureboxing is a gift from heaven.

Thank you, nice people at Criterion!

(1) What ghosting there may be in the Kino version is all but invisible during playback unlike, for example, the Image Phantom of the Opera which shows ballerinas with five to six legs in every single frame.

baracine-

Thank you for the response. I can't say anything intelligent about completely doing away with the different formats, and settling on one to be used worldwide. I'm pretty ignorant on the subject.

About the pictureboxing by Criterion; I don't know how much is considered too much. NTSC is already at a disadvantage when compared to the resolution offered by PAL DVDs. An NTSC 4:3 DVD when resized becomes 640x480 with a total of 307200 pixels. I just had a look at the Criterion Pandora's Box again, and with the black bars cropped away and then resized, I get a resolution of roughly 596x448, or 267008 pixels. 267008/307200=.87. So, if my figures are correct, the resized pictureboxed image is about 87% or about 7/8ths the size it would be if it hadn't been pictureboxed. Significant? I don't know. I guess one's view is colored by the equipment on which one views the DVD. With a widescreen TV set, I lose nothing from the sides, and because there's fairly little overscan on mine, I see about half of the black added above and below. So, if it hadn't been pictureboxed, I would have lost just a tiny bit of the picture. Selfish of me? Sure. But how many companies are pictureboxing (except perhaps opening credits sometimes). I do have some pictureboxed Miyazaki R2 anime DVDs and have seen a very few other pictureboxed silent film DVDs, but that's about all I can think of. I'm sure the other companies must have thought about pictureboxing their DVDs at some point, and rejected the idea.

About the Kino Metropolis and PAL2NTSC ghosting/blending/double images. Blending is one of my pet peeves. Even if you don't consciously note the ghosts (and your Phantom Of The Opera dancers example is one of the best on record), the effect is to soften or blur the image. I have a page on the DVD Beaver site with pics and a fuller explanation:

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/articl...DVD-part2.html

There's some discussion of silent films about 3/4 of the way down:
And it doesn't have to be so. Metropolis is on the DVD at 25fps, in spite of what everyone says. They're all wrong when they say it's on the Kino DVD at 24fps. It has to be 25fps (actually 24.975fps), because they used the same score as on the Moc/Eureka DVD, which runs at 25fps. That music isn't speeded up. It's not pitched a semitone higher as is common for PAL2NTSC conversions, as it was composed for the 25fps PAL DVD. In his comparison, Gary Tooze is absolutely correct:

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCom...etropolis2.htm

Even though he gets the DVD framerate wrong, I side with the DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) at this site who says in his review:
But the point is, they didn't have to blend it. I own this DVD of Keaton's The General:

http://www.amazon.com/General-Steamb...dp/B0000C23GP/

and it's on the DVD at 25fps, and it's not blended. It's hard telecined (the additional fields and frames added to go from 25->29.97fps are encoded into the video), sure, but it's not blended. Metropolis looks the best it ever has on NTSC DVD. It could have looked so much better. The MoC version is far superior.

Anyway, enough words. Sorry to be so long winded.

I am leaving the house for 6 hours. When I come back, I will count the frames on the R1 Metropolis.

Arguments for the film having been restored with a 25 fps projection speed and having a score recorded for 25 fps: None.

Arguments for the film having been restored with a 24 fps projection speed and having a score recorded for 24 fps - a.k.a. "sound speed": Wikipedia, DVD Savant, common sense and, mostly, the fact that no one would willingly speed up the action of a film which is already criticized for being "too fast" at 24 fps and the fact that all R2 DVDs speed up 24 fps films into 25 fps anyway as a matter of routine because of PAL limitations.

In case any of you Metropolis fans aren't aware:

http://forum.dvdtalk.com/showthread.php?t=434525

Ignoring the debate about what the "proper" speed of Metropolis should be, I thought this was a very interesting project, and let me view the film in a new and more accessible way.

Here's what this thread boils down to:I much prefer the 24 fps version - even if I draw the line at 25 fps!!! :D

I admit I was defeated in my attempt to count the frames of the Kino Metropolis. With my best efforts, I come up with anything from 18 to 42 "genuine active" frame advances per second. It's not the first time I've experienced this. If you try to count the frames of Joan of Arc (1948), a magnificent transfer of a Technicolor restored film from Image, in glorious genuine progressive scanning, you get 15 fps, then 30 fps, then 18 fps, then 49 fps, etc., all evening out at 24 fps in the long run of course, but impossible to keep track of because of the complicated pulldown method used.

So I can't prove anything by actually "counting the frames", but I will stand by my opinion that the film score on the Kino version sounds natural and that I would surely notice if it was a PAL-to-NTSC speedup. And I will never believe that the new film score has been recorded or encoded at 25 fps. I still believe the film was restored with the standard 24 fps speed in mind and that as usual, NTSC restores that correct speed while PAL distorts it.

I had both the MOC and KINO "Metropolis" discs (until I sold the KINO). The above posters are absolutely correct. One need not go frame by frame to see that MOC's is superior. If you're a big fan of this film, the MOC is the way to go.

Speaking of MOC, I wonder if anyone can shed light on the transfers of the Buster Keaton set? As I understand it, MOC ported the French interlaced transfer and somehow made it progressive (as well as improving the contrast, etc.). However, as the still shots at the Beaver I think clearly show, the progressive MOC transfer is softer than the interlaced French set from which it was ported. Although other improvements make the MOC appear better, on balance, I wonder if anyone can shed any light on this unusual result? Specifically, why does the French interlaced transfer appear sharper than MOC's progressive one?

... As much as I hate to admit I'm wrong, I was wrong. The Kino video is at 25 fps... I counted the frames during a falling water scene where every true change of frame is "catastrophic" and the count comes in at exactly 25 complete frames per second.

The implications of this are staggering: It means that the restorers could not resist the temptation of running the film at the video-perfect rate of PAL (25 fps) and that they could have ordered the film score to fit that rate of speed. I'm not saying that they speeded up the original recording but - which is in a way much worse - had it orchestrated to fit that already "too fast" film. The Kino version had no choice but to reproduce the 25 fps rate exactly as it was in the PAL version if it wanted to conserve the music at its proper original speed.

This would mean that, for once, the Europeans treated themselves to a PAL film that was too fast (they're already so used to that I don't think they drink coffee anymore) but that also had a film score that wasn't speeded up.

Unless of course the film score was recorded at the regular sound speed for theatre presentation, was speeded up for the PAL DVD transfer and is heard speeded-up on the Kino DVD as well and I haven't detected it because European and North-American symphony orchestras have notably different pitches and the manic nature of the film makes this speeded-up score sound natural to our ears.

Either way, everything is up for grabs and any theory is possible. I give up. I still think the Kino DVD looks good but I now look at it with suspicion. I just hope I won't be waking up in the middle of the night to count the frames again in the hope of coming up with 24 fps.

Before asking this question, I probably should've checked the MOC forum at criterionforum.org. Nick Wrigley has already spoken to the sharpness issue, as follows:
The slight sharpness differences you're seeing on some films are overwhelmingly caused by the fact that the MoC set was encoded progressively.

The Arte is interlaced, and is prone to looking slightly sharper *when paused* if you get a non-combed grab. For the MoC release, the masters had pulldown removed, were deinterlaced, and encoded progressively. This results in the slightly less sharp *still* grabs.

What is very important in such comparisons, but hardly ever discussed in DVD reviews, is what the DVD looks like in *motion* and how the encoding affects this. Interlaced discs can look sharp when paused, but have motion issues on certain displays which result in a blurring of motion as the interlaced frames are displayed. Progressive discs in motion usually look far more normal and smooth to the eye, and are far more pleasing across a wide range of different display technologies -- which is why we encoded this set progressively.

Sorry for the tangent into an altogether different release!

You are now ready, my son, to join the dark side and go multiregional....

NO... NEVER... I will never join the 25 frames per second Evil Ones!

http://homepage.mac.com/eliw/starwar...mpassion_1.jpg

Pandora's Box has made it to the number one spot of DVD Savant's list of the best DVDs of 2006 ( http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s2193pick.html ):

To which I can only add: :rimshot: