An Interview of Jeff Kleist...
Mecha-Man
SUPER DIMENSIONAL DVDs: An interview with AnimEigo's Robert Woodhead
(Before we get started, I would like everyone to head over to
http://tylordvd.hypermart.net/ and sign the petition to get The Irresponsible
Captain Tylor onto DVD. Apparently the higher ups at Right Stuf don't think it
will sell well. Jeff Thompson, a Right Stuf representative, said on the Tylor
mailing list that a petition might help, so prove him right men!)
Last weekend at Otakon I had the pleasure of talking to AnimEigo co-founder and
CEO, Robert Woodhead. After a grueling panel and playing "how are we going to
get these things plugged in" the day before, we took it easy on the Baltimore
Convention Center's 3rd floor deck. AnimEigo had just announced the You're
Under Arrest TV series in both sub and dub format on DVD exclusively, and
continues with the (to me personally anyway) more important restoration of
Super Dimensional Fortress Macross, to be released around the end of the year.
The results of their restoration effort are stunning, and AnimEigo well
deserves (even though Mr. Woodhead is too modest to admit it) the title
"Criterion of Anime."
Robert Woodhead
JK: How did the Macross Restoration Project come about?
RW: It all started about 18 months ago with an email from a fan that said,
"What would you say to the idea of doing Macross?" My response was basically
"You foolish fanboy! How could you even imagine that we could get the rights
for Macross when Harmony Gold holds all of the rights, and they've had it for
years!" And so, I sent off the email, and then I thought about it for awhile. I
thought to myself "What the hell, it's only a phone call", and I called up
Harmony Gold and talked to their head guy there. He said, "You know, it's
funny, but we were just about to call you! We've been thinking about having
someone release it, and so are you interested? So that's how it happened.
JK: So Harmony Gold was going to pursue a subtitled release?
RW: Harmony Gold was toying with the idea of having Macross released subtitled
by one of the anime companies.
JK: So Harmony Gold is not the demon we've been told they are.
RW: Harmony Gold has done right by us. We had materials problems, they helped
us out. They went the extra mile. We were able to do the restoration work
because of the fact that they put in a lot of extra effort, and they should be
commended for that.
JK: And I'm sure they will once the final product comes out. Has Harmony Gold
mentioned anything about Southern Cross or Mospeada (the 2 other segments of
Robotech)?
RW: Umm, I don't want to get into details, a lot of the fans have suggested
that we do that. My answer at this point is if Macross does well, than we
definitely want to talk to Harmony Gold about the other 2 series.
JK: What has ADV Films been like toward you since they picked up Robotech? In
some transcripts I've read it seems that they were completely surprised by the
acquisition of Macross, and were a tad miffed because they wanted to sub
Macross themselves. Apparently the contracts were in the works when you
announced Macross last year.
RW: I haven't read the transcripts, so I can't comment on that.
JK: Can you go into some detail on what Shin (Kurokawa) goes through when
restoring "scene:X"
RW: Well, first we retransfer the film, I mean HE retransfers the film.
JK: Because Shin does all the work .
RW: That's right, Shin does all the work, and I sit in front of the camera to
take credit! Shin went out to LA for a month, and CLAIMS that he spent the
entire month in the studio transferring about 1-2 episodes a day from Harmony
Gold's 16mm prints that they found at the bottom of their warehouse. Stored in
controlled conditions! Stored in actual air conditioned conditions for twenty
years.
JK: That can't be true, no company stored anything properly in the 80's!
RW: Well they did, and they couldn't find it for a long time! You know it's
like "Well we know it's around somewhere!" So he transferred it on a really
top-notch telecine, and doing color corrections. They would note all the film
errors they wanted to fix and go and fix them by digitally painting them out.
There are a lot of tools out there for digital scratch removal and things like
that, and now they've gotten something like 85% of the problems out. Now what
Shin is doing during the subtitle process is logging every single remaining
error down to the little dots of dust, and prioritizing them. Based on how many
people pre-order the set, Shin will have a budget to go back into the studio
and he's going to tweak out as many of these as he can afford.
JK: I believe this is the first time any anime has undergone restoration in
America
RW: Right, of course, this is one of the older ones, so it would benefit from
it.
JK: Right, many of the old ones like Castle of Cagliostro, Manga looks like
they did a new transfer. It was full of scratches. But if they did do a new
transfer, they didn't do it anamorphically for some silly reason.
RW: Well, I can't speak to that, we've done what we thought was appropriate.
The response to the Macross Project has been a lot bigger than we thought, so
we've had a bigger budget to go do cute geek stuff like this.
JK: That's why AnimEigo is considered the Criterion of anime, you don't look at
your wallet and as "how little can I get away with?" At least near as much as
the other companies.
RW: Well, I don't think that's really a totally fair characterization of either
us or the other companies. The kinds of projects we tend to choose are ones
where this kind of work is necessary and expected. We tend to do things that
are more for the real collectors, the real otaku. I don't think it's anything
the average anime fan that just likes it and want to watch it. . We're more for
the hardcore guys who really appreciate it for what it is, and understand it.
We have to take our time and really get it right, because if we screw up, we're
really going to get yelled at!
JK: We can only look at the current Urusei Yatsura situation right now. All the
people on the AnimEigo mailing list complaining "My discs are bad and I can't
watch them! I'm going to jump off a bridge now!"
RW: That's not really a huge problem, I mean that was a manufacturing error, a
bolt out of the blue. It wasn't our fault! The manufacturer has taken total
responsibility in repressing all the discs at no cost to us.
JK: It's good to know you didn't have to blow your budget because they screwed
up. When you do get new movies into your catalog, and you hopefully do a new
telecine for them, will you do it anamorphically?
RW: Actually I was just having a conversation with a gentleman in the dealer's
room who works in film transfer in New York, and he was saying that for new
movies we should consider transferring them in High-Def and then down
converting them. It really depends on the project; it's kind of stupid to
transfer a TV show in widescreen when it wasn't widescreen to begin with!
People have asked me to do that! I really have no idea why!
JK: I think it's because these days shows like Babylon 5, Stargate SG-1, any
modern TV show is shot 16:9 and protected for 4:3. I don't think they
understand that most TV shows were not widescreen until very recently. I think
a lot of people, once they jump on the widescreen bandwagon believe that
EVERYTHING MUST BE IN WIDESCREEN OR ITS CRAP! They don't think about it. They
don't understand things like in camera matting for 1.85:1 movies, and Super35
(shudder).
RW: Only cinematographers understand that stuff! I've read some of the articles
on all the esoteric differences in film formats and it's just…bizarre.
JK: Well, Super35 is the work of Satan, it's all you need to know. What they do
is shoot 4:3, then chop off the top and the bottom and exhibit 2.35:1, in the
process losing 40% of the film's resolution.
RW: *laughs* What's really funny is when they pan&scan the special effects
shots like on The Matrix. Another example I've seen of this is Addams Family
Values in a bargain theater where the projectionist had not cropped it
properly. Especially with Thing, Since he was basically projecting it in 4:3,
you could see the guy's hand! And it totally blew the effect!
JK: I think that Peewee's Big Adventure is probably the most infamous with the
endless bicycle chain gag. But back to anime, do you hold DVD rights to the
Lupin the 3rd movies that AnimEigo has done?
RW: Yes I believe so.
JK: And since Manga appears to have gotten away with it, will you be changing
his name back to Lupin (AnimEigo has called him "Rupan" in the past)?
RW: No, our license with Toho specifically forbids that. They are quite adamant
about it.
JK: I guess since Monkey Punch (Lupin's creator) owns Cagliostro the license
must have been different?
RW: Yeah basically. The rights to the Lupin films can be a little confused at
times.
JK: That's right. My friends and I looked at each other and said "Wait, how can
they call him that? I thought there were big lawsuits!"
RW: The bottom line was that I don't think anyone was going to sue over it, but
it was the polite thing to do.
JK: From what I've heard, the grandson owns the rights to the original French
novels.
RW: Actually the estate.
JK: And they don't want him to be called Lupin anywhere.
RW: We actually did write a nice letter to the estate, saying that we won't
call him Lupin if you don't want us to, but if you do, we'll put in some nice
supplemental materials that will hopefully point people to the original books
so that people will buy them.
JK: Obviously they just don't want money. Typical Hollywood.
RW: Well, actually they're not Hollywood. It's the French estate.
JK: Well, people say that the home video industry is the only one where you can
jump up and down in front of the studio gates screaming "TAKE MY MONEY" and
they still won't listen.
RW: Well, we don't have that policy at AnimEigo.
JK: Well, you're not in Hollywood.
RW: This is true, we are in Wilmington (North Carolina) and that's a big film
area. A lot of Muppet movies get filmed in Wilmington. Dawson's Creek, a lot of
TV movies. All the Muppets from Space sets were about a mile from the old
AnimEigo offices.
JK: Can you tell us some about what the process has been with the Bubblegum
Crisis remaster, and what additional extras are being added?
RW: Well, we fixed the subtitles and all of those situations. We tweaked the
subtitles a bit to make them the best possible we could. You know, any time we
add to one of our projects we end up almost doing it from scratch because we
say "We can do better than that!" We added all the Hurricane Live music videos.
And we had about a GB left, so we scanned in about a thousand pages of
production drawings, some never before seen.
JK: The Otaku No Video DVD, which we can only assume is in the works, what kind
of extras can we expect to see on that? I believe that in Japan they had 2
karaoke tracks?
RW: I really can't say about that. It all depends on whether we can get extra
goodies from Japan. We might do something goofy like every time there's a
particular anime in-joke comes up, if you turn on the subtitle track, a little
animated Shin will come up and point to it!
JK: That would be really neat!
RW: Yeah, like Pop Up Video!
JK: If you can't do that, do like what they did on The Abyss, and put the liner
notes on a subtitle track.
RW: I don't know about that, that would be a lot of work. We tend to like to do
goofy things that can be done with some computer programming like the Morse
code subtitle track like on UY, and on the next box we're going to something
like that as well. So that I can take one of our subtitle tracks and write a
program to mutate it into what it has to be. For example doing semaphore. A
little animated Shin-Chan madly waving (demonstrates).
...A little animated Shin-Chan madly waving...
JK: I guess you would just need someone to draw all the letters.
RW: That's right!
JK: And then you can put subliminal messages into it (laughs)
RW: I'm sure people are already checking the Morse code to make sure we didn't
cheat!
JK: You know these people must have a lot of time on their hands.
RW: Too much!
JK: (mockingly) You know, I was frame by framing and at 7:26 on the 23rd frame
there's a compression artifact!!!! I hear this all the time, people think
they're seeing artifacts when it's actually the source material or film grain.
RW: The multipass compression systems have gotten good enough that we almost
never find artifacts. Usually if there is one, it's a read error.
JK: You hear some of the LD diehards screaming about how it's compressed, and
they see artifacts all over the place. In fact there was one guy at I believe
A-Kon, who won't buy DVD, and if they won't give him lasers he wants it on
SuperVHS!
RW: Well, if these people are willing to pay the money, then sure. $10,000 a
disc in my pocket for the pressing and stuff, I'm quite happy to do a Laserdisc
version. The problem is that the LD market is dead, and the VHS subtitle market
is dying. And I've got to tell you, I've compared the UY DVD right next to the
D2 master, and the DVD actually looks better because the compression kills some
of the noise! A good DVD on a good TV looks really really good. The Matrix DVD
looks really really good. Now that's a dark movie with colors that DVD is not
happy with. I splurged and got a really nice home theater with a really big
screen and the line tripler, bumping the res to 1024x768 and running it at 72
frames per second, I've looked at frames on The Matrix, and it looks like film.
Oh yeah.
JK: Can you tell us how much a high-def transfer costs for quality like that?
They'll never tell us.
RW: Well, it's a big machine you feed the film in one end, and there's a
quality dial, $100/hr quality, $200, $300, $500, and the last one is written in
with magic marker and it says "Shin Kurokawa Quality" Like in Spinal Tap, it
goes to 11! It really depends on how much time you want to spend fixing things
that no one will ever see.
JK: Well, at least for me, doing that will make me think it was better. My
brain won't know why, but that's me. Here's an infamous one for you: Akira
Kurosawa's Ran.
RW: Haven't seen it, sorry.
JK: Well, it looks like someone took the VHS and smeared Vaseline over the
lens.
RW: That's too bad, it's a good film.
JK: So now you're doing You're Under Arrest TV, ADV now has the movie. Were you
looking at the movie as well?
RW: Yeah, but we have to say this is a cool project, here's what we can afford
to pay for it. And if a company can pay more money for it, then they should do
it!
JK: If you could do any series you wanted, even things already licensed, what
would you do?
RW: Oooh, that's a tough one….I haven't really thought about that…I would
say….I would have really liked to do a Miyazaki movie, and give it a really
good translation job.
JK: I wish! It's OK to rag on Disney, they hate me already.
RW: I really respect his work, I think Totoro is a fabulous film.
JK: What did you think of the Troma dub?
RW: My kids love it.
JK: I was just surprised to see the name Troma on it
RW: What I thought was tragic about that was their marketing plan. They only
opened it in select cities, but on a wide scale. Every theater in the San
Francisco Bay area had it. What they should have done was only open it in 2 or
3 theaters, and it would have been packed, and it would have gotten such
tremendous word of mouth that they could have gone wide. And I think that's a
shame.
JK: It's a shame when bad marketing kills good anime. Is there anything else
you want to add before we wrap up?
RW: Please continue to buy our products, and pay full retail price!
JK: Good enough!
Please do buy Mr. Woodhead's fine products! AnimEigo's web site is
http://www.animeigo.com.
- Jeff Kleist
Otaku No DVD Columnist
Click here to read last week's column: Space Battleship Yamato: Beyond Final
Yamato and in North America
"But who here hasn't wished that they could fix politics simply by jumping in a
giant mecha and going to Washington?"
Mecha-Man
Fory-san (who had a horrible time getting to sleep last night.)
Phil
Thanks anyways...
Mecha-Man <fort...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20000817141316...@ng-ci1.aol.com...
> I'm sorry...I meant to say with Robert Woodhead...Jeff's the interviewer.
>
> Fory-san (who had a horrible time getting to sleep last night.)
>
Mecha-Man
>Thanks anyways...
Oh, sorry everyone... ^^;