The screening went REALLY well – hopefully tonight’s will go over well too, although I won’t be there to personally crop the offending “breathing dead man” shot- I’m going to call up there and ask that they make an announcement before the film that they couldn’t mask their 16mm projector in that theater, and a few shots have extraneous picture top/bottom.

As for the video transfer…WOW!!!!!!!!!

We did a High-Definition transfer on a Spirit-Datacine (the BEST telecine machine there is- all major studio titles use Spirits, and so does Criterion- Criterion even credits that on their packaging) from a brand-new low-contrast print, and it looks stunning (Don May kept saying “This is the best looking video transfer I’ve been involved with”). The machine is a marvel – we were able to reframe the film up and down shot by shot, and even pan up or down (or zoom in or out) DURING shots, as well as correct exposure changes during shots! Having this much control over the image was a fucking blast – towards the end the colors get really saturated and warm – it almost looks like I.B. Technicolor at the end when the camera is panning across the trees during magic hour. The image is matted to 1.5:1, so it’s very minorly letterboxed (the same ratio as A CLOCKWORK ORANGE), although for the aforementioned “breathing dead guy” shot we matted to 1.66:1 and also utilized the “zoom” feature four separate times during the shot (try and spot the digital zooms when this comes out), so I guess this means it’s “multi aspect ratio”.