Monday, 7 May 2018

Jules and Jim (1962)

The level of detail present on the old MK2 DVD (~2001) compared to the Criterion blu-ray is pretty astonishing. I only had access to an Italian DVD released by BIM Distribuzione (2006), but it's sourced from the early 2000s MK2 master.

The Criterion blu-ray booklet says:
The original monaural soundtrack was remastered in 24-bit from the 35mm magnetic and sound negative.
I hear nothing that suggests the DVD was sourced from inferior elements. However, there are some differences in content between the two: at 1:20:36 on the Criterion blu-ray, one line of phone dialogue is missing; at 1:24:24 (blu-ray timecode), an additional 'oui' is present on the DVD; and at ~1:38:00 (blu-ray timecode) there's some more dialogue missing. From 1:27:28 to 1:28:31 on the Criterion blu-ray the sound quality increases dramatically, since its high-end hasn't been sheared off here, and it sounds better than the DVD too. Looking closely at the spectrals, it seems this segment was spliced in from another source. Around 1:20:00 in (blu-ray timecode), there's a segment that also uses a different take of dialogue on the blu-ray, and with slightly different background music. There are also short segments without dialogue missing from the DVD throughout the film, and a number also missing from the Criterion blu-ray -- all imperceptible.

The old Criterion DVD sounds much worse than the Criterion blu-ray and the MK2/BIM DVDs, and appears to have been sourced from inferior elements. A couple years back I also compared the Hong Kong Panomara blu-ray to the Criterion blu-ray, and the Criterion definitely sounded better.

Should anyone want to synchronise the MK2/BIM DVD audio track to the Criterion blu-ray, know that it requires a lot of work to do properly. At first it might seem like the DVD is 'missing' more segments than the Criterion blu-ray, but if you analyse both tracks closely you'll find that there are many edits in the blu-ray audio that attempt to 'fill in' this information by looping sounds, which one would have to replicate.



The BIM DVD synced to the Criterion blu-ray:

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