JZ1276

My understanding is there are 3 cuts of Terminator 2. The theatrical, the Cameron approved extended director's cut, and another extended cut with an alternate ending which Cameron had nothing to do with. I know all 3 cuts are on the Skynet BluRay edition but are they all on a single disc WITH bonus material? I'd imagine with all that content crammed onto one disc the picture quality must suffer.
Which version do most people favor? Theatrical or director's cut? Thanks!

hanshotfirst1138

The theatrical cut is the once Cameron prefers. It's the shortest of the three, though of course some critics will still tell you that it's a little bloated . The extended version is rather interesting, other scenes flesh out the characters a bit more, although they slow the pace a bit. The third cut is accessible via entering a code, it basically reinserts a little scene where the T-1000 finds the way to the mental institution, and a cheesy happy ending coda where Sarah is old and the actor who played John at the beginning is seen aging with children sans the scars on his face. It's nice if you want to use it to pretend that the other sequels never happened (which I understand ), but it's rather too neat, and Cameron chose not to go with it because he preferred the darker ambiguity of the the original ending.

Solid Snake

That alternate ending is so horrible. That thing has aged very bad.

Inhumans99

The Sarah is old ending is not the greatest, however, the cut that adds scenes that show the T1000 glitching out at times after all the abuse it has incurred is actually a great cut. If T2 is on cable, I sometimes let it play in the background while I do other stuff, but if I were to put in the blu ray I would choose the extended cut.

To me, the extended cut is like the version of Aliens that has the scene where the guns are set up in the corridors to auto fire on aliens, it is just my go to cut of the film (I will always remember being slightly confused that I could have sworn the gun scene was missing from Aliens when I saw it on tape, and then having it confirmed that the TV airing had scenes not in the theatrical cut). That is what spurred me to buy the hideously expensive LD Aliens set so I could watch the extended cut, a rare time when a TV airing of a theatrical film was superior to what was on VHS.

Josh Z

Not exactly correct. Cameron said that the theatrical cut is his preferred version of the movie for viewing in a theater. The extended cut is the best version of the movie for home viewing without time constraints.

The alternate ending version was put together as a joke. It wasn't intended to be seen as a legitimate version of the movie. That's why it's only available on either DVD or Blu-ray as a hidden easter egg supplement.

JZ1276

What about my question regarding pic quality? Does anyone have this disc? 3 2hr+ films with bonus content on one disc? Or is it two discs?

Ringmaster

The quality is great IMO. The cuts are seemless branched and the bonus content is sparse. Most of the extras has to be accessed through the net with your Blu Ray player and the blu ray itself. For the low retail price, it's worth it.

popegregFKAgoblin23

Sorry to hijack this thread, but I was going to watch the first Terminator last week and I thought I had picked up the 2013 remastered release, but I never did.

So I just have the older BD edition and then I remembered that I passed on the remaster due to the teal issue. My question is, should I just buy the tealified remaster or not? Thoughts please.

rocket1312

Based on what I've seen/read, I think the color timing on the remaster is actually closer to the intended colors than people realize. It's not perfect, but to me is secondary to the lack of original mono audio. That's what kept me from buying it. Eventually I just bought the remaster and made my own custom disc by adding the mono audio from the laserdisc that some kind soul synced to the BD and uploaded to the interwebs.

Solid Snake

Damn.

So how does that process work out? Just ripping the video from the BD and transferring it to a BD that you've already put the audio on (or vice versa), and then what?

rocket1312

Well I don't think we're really supposed to discuss specifics here, but there are plenty of guides out there on how to re-author a BD. Basically you're just adding an audio track to the existing BD structure and burning to disc. You can't choose it via the menu, but you can switch to it with the remote. It's pretty simple if you know what you're doing.

Josh Z

Movies made in the early 1980s were not inundated with teal the way modern movies are. That color grading fad started with the introduction of the Digital Intermediate process at the beginning of the 2000s.

hanshotfirst1138

Agreed. I might tolerate the teal, but the mono is a deal-breaker. Seriously, how how hard is it to include on the disc? Even lossless, it can't take up that much space, can it? If you want to be revisionist, just load the 5.1 remix as the main track and let interested parties switch to it. The people interested will switch to it anyway, and the average person won't care either way. How much effort does it require?

Evil ASh

The transfer is rather awful. Not because of excessive compression, but because of extreme DNR. Unfortunately there's nothing better out there at the moment.

Solid Snake

Yep. Jimmy C needs to get back to this film. And True Lies. And The Abyss. And T1.


To fix them properly.

rocket1312

I didn't say it was correct. All I'm saying is that it's my belief that it's closer to the intended look than people give it credit for.

hanshotfirst1138

Well, if it's any consolation to you, it'll probably happen before the OOT. But that isn't saying much. Cameron will be busy with Avatar sequels for a long, long time. The Vudu version of True Lies doesn't look too bad. There's a widescreen HBO Go version of The Abyss theatrical, but to my knowledge, there hasn't been any anamorphic version of the director's cut. I think Cameron regards T1 as done on BD, sadly. I suppose we could vainly hope that the T movies will get a little treatment for the new sequel, but I doubt it.

popegregFKAgoblin23

Ugh, another strike against the T1 remaster! I'm a huge fan of original mono and stereo soundtracks dammit. I always check the menus on older films. But I'm not sure I'd go through the trouble of doing what rocket1312 did,

That said, I think I'm going to order the remaster and do a comparison before deciding which version to watch.

Thanks, everyone, for the replies.

hanshotfirst1138

I'll be a little bit more tolerant of some multi-track stereo remixes-though apparently some of those are hack-jobs too (I hear that the Escape From New York remix, for instance, was bad), but don't get why it's so hard to include the mono. It must be on the film which your making the damn master, right? Wouldn't you need to have it to create the new track anyway? Of course, it's less insulting than the downmixes made my companies who apparently think that consumers are stupid. At least T1 doesn't insult my intelligence and omits that altogether. You'd think that that'd be even more work to put the downmixes on there. Goddamn Sergio Leone films....

zyzzle

Yes, the encode on the T2 Skynet edition is simply awful -- full of DNR and most detail and almost all the natural film grain has been scrubbed away into oblivion.

I think the best version of T2 is Hidef is the old German HD-DVD of the Director's cut. It doesn't suffer from as much DNR -- has a much better encode, although the bitrate is limited based on the fact the the 155-minute film has been put onto a 30 GB HD-DVD disc. Some also claimed that the audio suffers from a PAL -- NTSC conversion pitch issue, but it seems fine to me, does not sound sped up.

So, there's currently no perfect version of T2 available, although there certainly should be given the expense of the movie itself, and how easy it would be for Cameron to sit down for a couple of hours with a top-notch encoder and scan the OCN, with original color-timing and grain intact... It seems Cameron's sold out to the teal-maniacs and doesn't care to release a proper version of T1, T2, THE ABYSS, or TRUE LIES, however.

JZ1276

I will never understand why studios do this. I mean besides the fact that the A/V quality on Blu-Ray should always be excellent as a given, what makes studios fk up certain titles and not others?

zyzzle

Unfortunately, I think it really is an egoism problem: it boils down to the individual prejudices of the encoder who's been hired to do the encode of the film. Some rightous (and, WRONG) encoders think they "improve" the look of the film by removing all the grain structure and detail. They, erroneously, think that the masses "prefer" it that way, and so, the encode is slathered with DNR, and the film is irrevocably altered, and, not for the better. These wayward encoders, by the way, are probably mostly young Millenials who've never watched and appreciated 35mm film for its true merit, where the grain is a natural and essential part of the picture, the very essence of the filmic experience. They're used to a digital world, without grain, so they ruin our beloved films for us...

This rant isn't too far from the truth, probably. The encoder seems to wield too much power. There should be more checks and balances in place. All too often it seems a "bad" encode gets out when a mere second's glance by someone in the know, would get it sent back and corrected before the final master goes out.

We suffer for it, and it's getting very tiring in the Hi-def world these days.

RocShemp

Another problem is that lots of consumers do prefer their movies grain free. I remember when HD DVD and Blu-ray first came out while I was working at CompUSA. Among the demo discs they had at the time were xXx and Ultraviolet. Neither is really demo material but I remember customers bitching about the grain on xXx but praising the appearance of Ultraviolet and how it represented what they were looking for from HD. Then again, these same people assumed that all you needed to get HD picture was an HDTV which they hooked up to their DVD players via composite cables (I shit you not).

Heck, for all of us that bitch about the horrible transfer of the newer Predator BD, I've seen plenty more praising it for getting rid of "all that ugly grain".

hanshotfirst1138

I think it's something that immediately make people think that an HDTV is an expensive one that's good, because it contains something which lets them say "look at how this looks different!" It's the same reason my friend likes expensive TVs with the soap opera effect on, I think, that's how he defines a "good" expensive HDTV. The notion of using high-definition to replicate the way a movie looked and sounded in theaters is evidently foreign to them. And since they're the main market, well....

Celluloid is going to die. I get it. But if it is, can we at least preserve 120 years of an important aesthetic? Immediately, new technology means "let's retrofit the past," apparently.

:brick:

RocShemp

I personally look forward to higher frame rates. However, I wouldn't wish to alter 24 fps content via interpolation. If I'm going to watch something at 48 fps (or higher), I'd rather it be shot that way.