[Released] Stephen King’s The Stand Uncompressed Laserdisc Audio

[alleycat]

The 1994 Mini Series of Stephen King’s The Stand was released on Blu Ray with a 1080p remaster, much to the surprise of the Director who did not think it was possible. The video is a huge improvement over the DVD but unfortunately the audio is the same AC3 track from the DVD, likely to keep the disc space low to maximise the video bitrate. I managed to get hold of the laserdisc and sent it to williarob who kindly captured the uncompressed audio (massive thanks to williarob!). In order to fit this onto the discs I have had to compress the video slightly. 

• 2 x BD25 with menus, pop up menus and resume (I went with 2 x BD25 instead of a BD50 as they tend to be much more expensive, especially printable discs)
  
• Uncompressed 2.0 English Audio
  
• Audio Commentary track
  
• English, Danish, Finnish, German, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish subtitles
  
• Vintage Making Of
  

PM me for the links, contributing/long term members only please.

[TomArrow]

Nice! I considered to do such a sync myself for a minute, now I'm glad I waited. Do you have the audio synced at the native 44.1 kHz as well without resampling?

[alleycat]

Unfortunately not, I've got it as 48 khz in sync or 44.1 khz but not synced. There wasn't a massive difference between the two, a missing frame or so every 10,000 frames approx.

some times the audio matters, it matters more than the picture, thank you for adding the laser disc to a great show...

Nice job. Equally great would be to get rid of the updated effects shots they inserted into the Blu-ray version...

[alleycat]

I seem to recall the director saying on his podcast that due to the way they did all the special effects on video, anyone doing a blu ray release would have to redo all of the effects.

For that reason he thought it would never happen, so maybe the effects look different because they had to redo them, as opposed to them trying to improve them Star Wars style?

I don’t know any of this for sure I’m just guessing.

I'm not exactly sure how the effects were originally done, probably they were done on video in SD only. So when it comes to an HD release, they should either be upscaled or re-done with the goal of looking exactly as they have previously looked. Everything else is revisionism.

https://ew.com/tv/2019/09/19/the-stand-1...ck-garris/

In the video within this article, there are some comparisons between old and new VFX shots. You can see that the re-done shots look very different, with new CGI elements like smoke in the foreground that were not present at all in the original. To me, this really sucks. It distracts me when watching it, because I automatically ask myself why there are such CGI elements in a 1994 television production.

So ideally a version should exist where these shots are simply upscaled from the old SD DVD version. Also, if I'm not mistaken, the Blu-ray contains the end credits only one time, and not for each individual episode, which in an ideal presentation would also be fixed.

[pipefan413]

I'm not exactly sure how the effects were originally done, probably they were done on video in SD only. So when it comes to an HD release, they should either be upscaled or re-done with the goal of looking exactly as they have previously looked. Everything else is revisionism.

https://ew.com/tv/2019/09/19/the-stand-1...ck-garris/

In the video within this article, there are some comparisons between old and new VFX shots. You can see that the re-done shots look very different, with new CGI elements like smoke in the foreground that were not present at all in the original. To me, this really sucks. It distracts me when watching it, because I automatically ask myself why there are such CGI elements in a 1994 television production.

So ideally a version should exist where these shots are simply upscaled from the old SD DVD version. Also, if I'm not mistaken, the Blu-ray contains the end credits only one time, and not for each individual episode, which in an ideal presentation would also be fixed.

Man... even the colour grading is WAY different.

On the one hand it really highlights the magenta bias that, as far as I can tell from @PDB's CRT adventures, is intentionally built into a lot of these SD transfers to balance them on CRT monitors/TVs. So it's good that's removed because nobody's watching 1080p on a CRT. But it's *so* green most of the time. Jeezo.

I think I watched this on my projector right before that projector basically exploded so the colour was screwed up regardless, otherwise I'm confident this would have been distracting for me tbh. I didn't specifically notice VFX changes because I had never actually gotten round to watching my DVD copy of it but those are some pretty dramatic changes when you see 'em side by side.