80% better

Audio update for 3 Musketeers of the West.

The lab in Paris fell through.  They wrote back and said the master was no good and that they would need to take the audio from the negative, and then they quoted us some ridiculous price.

Fortunately, our networking just keeps improving and we found a guy who improved some of the other vintage films that have been released in recent years.  He called Enid today and said the shipment was sent off.  We are looking forward to hearing what he calls "80% better".  That is SO much further ahead than anything else we have done.  If the price is right, we may even get the Italian track fixed up so it is good too.  The Italian track is no where near as bad as the English, but it could still use some attention.

Also, we are in the process of updating our artwork a bit to include a wonderful write up that Lee Broughton (of Westerns All'Italiana fame) sent over to Rick.

We should have it in the shape necessary to release pretty soon.  We keep hearing that this is a great film from everyone who receives a copy.  All the waiting has really paid off, as this is SO much more improved than what we would have released a year ago.  Would have loved to have things fall in place earlier than now, but better late then never.

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Audio track coming

We ordered the audio track of 3 Musketeers of the West from the lab in Paris a few days ago, now we just need to wait for them to send it off.

The lab in Paris has honored our rights to the film and they have agreed to transfer the audio from the negative for us.  We have sent off the money, so all we need to do now is wait.

Once that arrives we need to (1) sync the audio with the video, (2) encode the audio and video into DVD compliant files, (3) re-author the DVD, and (4) do our Quality Assurance tests.

When we receive the audio, barring any further complications, we should be only a few weeks away from getting the DVD into the labs for reproduction.  Steps 2 - 4 will take two days.  Step 1 is the only thing posing any real level of difficulty and time consumption.

I do not think it is far fetched to say that by the end of October we should be, at the very least, be taking pre-orders.

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Possibly found Eurospy negatives

We may have just stumbled on which lab has the negatives for Tiffany Memorandum and Fuller Report.

The Parisian lab that we found the negative for 3 Musketeers of the West might actually have negatives for these two films as well.  We are trying to get them to give us a definite answer one way or another.  This will be great, because the only one in office who has experience working with 35mm splicing is Rick, and he has had a lot of family issues the last few months that have kept him on the road a lot.  Plus, going from the negative should be a higher quality final product.

These two films have been simmering on the backburner for so long, that we have been getting complaints.  There is a lot of worked involved in releasing films in the quality we strive for.  We could easily release a cut version, taken from a 3/4" cassette or 1" tape and spit it out in a week or two... but the quality would be terrible and we don't feel comfortable releasing that on our label.  We appreciate your patience and we know that you have been waiting for a while to get these films.  Trust us, we are not trying to delay it any further than we feel is necessary.  We have sunk much capital into these films and we are determined to release them.

Every DVD is a learning experience for us.  We try to take all we learn and apply it moving forward.  We want to make Fuller Report and Tiffany Memorandum a step forward, not the status quo or, much worse, a step back.

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End in sight

Finally.  FINALLY, we have a working solution for the audio in 3 Musketeers of the West.

We got back word from the lab in Paris about the pricing for getting the soundtrack directly from the negative.  It is going to cost 243.00 euros, which roughly translates into 350 US dollars.  We will still have to sync up the audio to the video, but that will be a whole lot less of a problem than the poor audio quality we have currently.  We should know in a few days whether the Parisian lab will honor our rights to this film or not and hopefully will have the DAT tape in hand by the end of October.

We are also going to be unable to sell the DVD for 9.95 now after so much cost and effort.  What should have been a simple and fast project has become anything BUT simple OR fast.  With the end in sight now, there is a huge sigh of relief from the crew who have toiled so long in getting this DVD out.

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New DVD covers

We are doing some polishing to some of our old DVDs because of a pending retail contract.

We are in the process of redoing our DVDs for retail distribution.  We finally got into a distribution company who will be putting our products into retail stores around the US, and possibly even abroad.  They asked us to work up some different covers as they didn't think our old ones would sell too well.  A few of the covers were fine, but since we were redoing some we figured we would polish off all of them.

We have a new, more eye appealing template that no longer has the solid, flat bars on the top and bottom.  We added icons to the back covers to allow quick and easy review of where the DVD can play and what format the film is presented in.  Along with that, we pushed the barcode up more, giving us some more real estate on the back cover.  We managed to free up almost all of the front cover space, only taking a small section of the top left corner.  We haven't passed the covers on to the distribution company yet, but I think you will agree that they are a vast improvement over the old covers.

The Last Gun

Not really too much different actually.  We were able to make the cover image larger, filling up almost the entire cover.  Instead of the generic font for the cover, we traced the title directly from the film.  Decided to add the original Italian name to the cover, to avoid confusion with another film named The Last Gun.  Added the producer and director.  back cover is more more elegant and it is not as crowded.  Added a few more images showing the other main actors as well.

From the Orient with Fury

This cover was not as good as it should have been.  Back when we released it, we didn't have a lot of art assets for the film and we could only work with what we had.  Now, we have some more to choose from and we decided to use part of our old assets and part of a flyer we dug up that had a rather stylish look to it.  The front cover features part of the flyer.  The original flyer had different text where we put "Ken Clark is Agent 077 in" and "From the Orient with Fury", but beyond that we only laid the other cast and crew information right on top of the image.  It looks SO much better.  For the back cover we used the theme from the front cover and created a background suitably featuring the city and Margaret Lee from the old front cover.  We moved the old Ken Clark cutout over a bit and the back cover was basically done.  Personally, this is my favorite cover right now.  It is not finished, but it is such an improvement on the original already.

Mission Bloody Mary

No one seemed to think the old cover for this film was bad.  But, we took advantage of our new template and used the extra space to provide a bit more information about the cast and crew.  The back cover was polished up a bit and looks nice and sharp.  It blends better with the DVD menus now too.

The Three Musketeers of the West

Not too much different from what we had before, just moved some cover elements around a bit and it made room to fit one screenshot image.  Just a note, we still haven't heard back from the lab in Paris about the audio track, but we are not giving up on it.  We are nagging them until they let us know the price so we can finish the project.

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Why the delay

We are ready to send this into the DVD replication lab, but we would rather improve the audio.

It has been too long since my last update about 3 Musketeers of the West.  I apologize for not taking the time to explain what is taking so long.

This project was suppose to be a nice, simple one.  Something that we could do in a month, two months max.  That was the plan on paper, but it has definitely not been as easy as it was on paper.

Audio

From day one, the audio has been a hassle for this film.  We got our original preview in late December of 2007.  The audio on that preview was absolutely terrible.  It was filled with distortion and had no depth to the sound.  Personally, it was torture to sit through the 10 minutes I watched.  We had to send it back to the lab and say that is unacceptable.  Another two months go by and another preview disc is finally sent to us from the lab.  Again, not good.

So, we scrap all around for every piece of material we have in house.  We sent them 3/4" tapes, a copy of our 1" tape, and a magnetic audio tape.  The audio came back much improved, but it still lacks so much.

We have been working on the English audio track and the Italian audio track (taken from the magnetic audio tape), trying to reduce the background noise.  Unfortunately, that background noise is quite loud.  The balance of getting the noise removed without distorting the audio is elusive for us (if it is even possible).

The version we have at the moment is not terrible.  It is just not great either.  The noise has been dramatically reduced, but the low volumes are VERY low and the highs are very loud.

We have some calls out to see if we can get an audio track from SOMEWHERE that is in good shape.  We have contacted a few of our contacts in Europe to see if they can find it in any labs or with any private collectors.  We are going to give this some time and see if our search pulls up some better results.  We would be very appreciative if anyone can find an audio source for us, so if you have this film in your collection and the quality of the soundtrack is good, please let us know.  That would either give us a good source to work with or at least a direction toward where a good source can be found.

I will post some audio samples when I get a chance.  It would be nice to hear what your thoughts are about how the audio sounds.

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