Pompeii DVD

Sounds good.

Defninitely exciting news. I probably will be watching the original incarnation of the film also, then, more than the "director's cut." When you mean the concert footage is "chopped off," is it chopped off of the DVD frame or your TV? It would be a shame if we lost some of the movie, i'd be like pan and scan vertically!

I would think he meant that it was taken from the DVD frame.

An insult to the recording medium! How dare they just chop off part of a movie to make it "widescreen?!" I might be sticking to my VCDs........
I'm a little picky with video, ever since I learned I'm missing 2/3 of a movie watching it in pan and scan, and now with my widescreen TV, I don't have to worry about it.

I'm pretty sure, though I haven't seen the DVD, that the footage is chopped off on the VHS version, not the DVD version, watch the title screens before each song, see if you agree.

I think NNJ is right. Pompeii was a film made for theatres, not for TV, so I assume its original format was "wide" (cinemascope or whatever), not 4:3. Now I could be wrong though because I haven't seen the DVD yet.

Yeah, when I first saw the movie I remember seeing some of the words chopped off. Well, I guess I'll just have to wait for the DVD to decide. Though I'm not as excited anymore, now that I know the director's cut isn't much of anything.

In the director's cut of Pompeii, you can easily tell that part of the frame has been lopped off by looking at the the split-screen bits. I know the titles were a bit "too wide" in the VHS version, and that the split-screen bits were slightly cropped there, too. So perhaps the film was originally shot in widescreen, then cropped for video release in the 70's, and then they lost the original film in its native aspect ratio. That would be consistent with their inability to find any new footage for this new edition.

Actually, "fake" widescreen has become commonplace on new DVDs. Look at the new 2-disc A Hard Day's Night DVD. For some scenes, the original film couldn't be found so they had to use an old pan-and-scan TV transfer, clean it up, and crop it even more to fit in with the rest of the movie. At least for Pompeii they didn't also "fake" a 5.1 mix like Miramax did (from MONO, no less!).

At any rate, for the Pompeii DVD they corrected the "squeezed titles" in the original concert film (which, as I mentioned, is still in 4:3) by duplicating the old titles with a digital font and replacing them frame-by-frame. It looks just like the VHS, only cleaner and uncropped.

Unfortunately, the music is still a semitone too sharp.

Blast! That's one of the biggest reasons I wanted a Pompeii DVD. I would kill to be able to jam along on Echoes.

Ever heard of a capo?

Is it an entire semitone too sharp? To me, it sounds like it's not quite that far--to where it's stuck between notes.

Whenever I play with Pompeii, it is exactly one fret sharp.

Exactly? Shane, I knew you were good, but DAMN!

That's what Superbit does. They are a company who takes the original master for the movie and encodes it at the highest bitrate possible to ensure high quality video. So, in order to do that, they have to remove the special features. Otherwise, it would be the exact same thing as a non-Superbit encoding.

So "Set The Controls" is in F, not E?