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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Server issues

More details on the server issues that made our site vanish from the nets on June 19th, 08

The site is unreachable when trying to visit doradofilms.com.  My first thought, as I am the one who usually maintains the site, was the server was just having some downtime for maintenance or something.  I guess I should have looked into it further.

Next time I checked on the site, on the 20th, it was still down.  I spent as much time as I could spare that day trying to solve the problem myself.  After realizing it is beyond my control and nothing that could have been done by us, I contacted customer support for our web host.

I have been in touch with customer service over and over again the last few weeks.  They will say something in the lines of "ok, I did ... and please check your site in 24 hours" (or 12 hours, 4 hours, 48 hours, they have me check back in odd intervals).  The story has always gone, to date, I thank them for their time and for working on it and check back well after the alloted time.  And nothing.  Nada.  Zip.  Zilch.

I am posting this after setting up a temporary portal to the database and files.  I am checking the functionality of all of our website on a different server and we will likely transfer our site to a new webhost once the site checks out.  We here in the Pacific Northwest are generally patient, easy going, individuals... but there are limits to patience.  This is beyond ridiculous though and has cost us an untold amount of money and unfortunately came right when we were making a large push to get our products into chain stores across the nation (and of course, using this site to indicate what products are available).

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3MotW: Artwork nearing completion

Project is getting close to being all finished up. Just waiting for some material to arrive so we can wrap up the project and send it out for replication.

One of our hard learned lessons the last few years is that our efforts to create a new cover from frame stills is not always appreciated.  In fact, most people seem to prefer that we just use a poster for the front cover.  That does make it easier, time wise, for us.  It took us weeks to work up a cover, and any little flaw or mistake for a file would make the entire cover an object for criticism.  This way, we just need to actually find a poster that has some catchy artwork and then make it blend in with the cover.

Our front cover for Three Musketeers of the West is a locandina (13" by 28-ish" poster, vertically aligned) we found happily waiting for a home in an Italian store.  These style of posters are usually great for DVD covers, so we sent away for it.  We are getting it in to be scanned this week and with that file will be able to finish up the artwork.

We are also awaiting our DigiBeta from the lab in Seattle.  We are having them sync the Italian audio track to the video so we can include it in the DVD.

We should be in a position to give a release date once we receive the DigiBeta from the lab.  It has become our policy to wait until we have previewed the DigiBeta and see if we need to work on the video or audio to get it to release quality.  Keep an eye out next week for news on when this film will be released as well as what projects we are going to be pushing out next.

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Audio finally acceptable

Progress report on 3 Musketeers of the West.  We finally received a sample back from the lab with audio that is acceptable.

Some of us technicians sat down today to view another sample from the lab.  We decided this sample showed the audio was ok.  The audio had an odd sibilance, which we were sure was not on our print.  We had some 3/4 inch cassettes from the 80's and a 1 inch tape from the late 70's that were taken from this same print.  None of those tapes had the audio distortion.  Convincing the lab of that happened to be a difficult thing to do though.  Finally though, we can put this behind us and move on with the rest of the project.

One advantage of going through this hassle has been some new discoveries in our warehouse.  We found a few audio tracks in other languages.  On Monday we will be going through the Italian and French audio tracks to see if they have weathered the years well and if we have the equipment in house to work with them.  Some of the emails we have received from various western fans have stated they like to have the original audio track on the DVD as well as an English dubbed track.  Due to the way they shot and produced these films, neither of these other audio tracks may be the "original" audio shot on set.  We hope that having the additional languages is enjoyable nonetheless.

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A year of searching

Having spent over a year trying to track down the negatives, we have given up the pursuit and are resigning ourselves to restoring our prints.

Last February, I wrote about our prints for Tiffany Memorandum and Fuller Report.  That was over a year ago now, and yet the situation is still the same.

After countless phone calls and emails, we are no further ahead for either of these films.  If any lab in Europe does have a print or negative for these films, we sure can't find them.

That doesn't mean we are giving up on the films, it just means we now have to work at restoring our prints.  Each film has several scenes cut from them for promotional material or some other purpose.  Records were not kept for WHY the scenes were removed from the print itself, but it is a moot point now anyway.

For both Special Mission Lady Chaplin and From The Orient With Fury, we restored the cut scenes digitally.  This is a fairly long process, as we then end up with about a second of audio missing where the scenes were put back in.  This is the result of how the audio track is arranged on a 35 mm print.  The audio is gone at this point.  Which means we then need to fill those gaps with our "best guess" from the rest of the soundtrack.  For music that is not too bad, as usually the songs are repeated throughout the movie.  It becomes substantially more difficult when the scene was cut during a conversation.  This is where the bulk of the time is taken.

Another option, which we may use for one or both of these films, is to splice the cut frames back onto the physical 35 mm print.  This too presents it's own challenges, namely trying to go through thousands of feet of film to find where each scene was cut, and then meticulously gluing the pieces together so as to not distort the image or the sound after it dries.  This option yields the best result, as the audio track is then re-united and nothing is lost.  I personally have never done this before, so I can not say how long this process would take.  Knowing in advance that there are frames cut makes this the more appealing choice.  The other two films kind of surprised us when we saw that there were parts missing.

The last option would be to just create a "deleted scenes" feature on the DVD and give menu access to each cut.  We would add the scenes that are long enough to be worth watching.  This would be by far the fastest solution, but it strays from the way we prefer to get it done.

Leave us some feedback with what you think we should do.  If it is apparently preferred that we just release what we have that would make it easier for us to decide.

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