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the versions.” In a side-by-side process, Ling went though the entire theatrical version and edited the longer special version cut down to its original theatrical length. Scene by scene he had to put the theatrical cut back together, and in the process of doing so, he even had to go back and |
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re-telecine about 11 minutes of footage. It had been removed from the longer special edition cut of the movie and had to be prepared in order to be able to insert the shots back into the film at the same level of quality as the rest of the presentation. All of this was essential to achieve a consistent look across these two very different versions of the film so that on the DVD, viewers will be able to switch back and forth on the fly without noticeable differences. Another challenge that came with the seamlessly branching multi-story presentation came with the subtitles and the audio tracks. “Because we’re doing a multistory presentation, we also have to make sure the subtitles and audio tracks are moving along as well when you jump from one point to another. What makes that challenging is |
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especially the caption side. The company that provides the closed captions actually has to provide separate captions for the two versions of the movie and keep them as similar as possible. |
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from Anchor Bay. The transfer has been painstakingly reviewed and adjusted for the best possible presentation in home theater environments. The special edition of “The Abyss” will use the D1 |
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source as the master - as opposed to the D2 master that was used for the Laserdisc - and present the film in its original theatrical 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio. To ensure a maximum in quality for the DVD release, the entire transfer of the film, although certified many years ago already, has been re-submitted to THX for certification.
Although the entire film is coming from a D1 master, the end credits however, had to be taken from a D2 master for this DVD |
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“Theatrically we had to keep the running time down,” Ling explains some interesting facts about the movie. “Because of running length restrictions, the end credits were running very fast, lasting in their entirety for only 4-minutes. The crawl was only 2 minutes and we had to use multiple columns and really tiny text to get it all on the screen in that short amount of time. The credits were practically illegible even in theaters. When we finally transferred it to video, Jim [Cameron] decided that for home video, there’s really not a time issue any more. So we reworked the end credits to make them right.” As a result they re-shot all the end credits and redid the music. The text was now enlarged, the |
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scrolling was smoother, and the entire credit sequence now ran for 9 minutes. The home video version ended up having credits that are legible but run twice as long. “But even with DVD’s resolution you wouldn’t be able read the original credits,” Ling laughs. “So we re-used the longer but legible video credits for the DVD. We wanted to make sure that the names of all the people who worked hard on the movie were readable on the screen.” |
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