Terminator 2 Diary - Back In The Vault


	In this exclusive section we will follow the development of Artisan Entertainment’s “Terminator 2: Judgment Day Special Edition.” In irregular updates we will keep you informed whenever new developments occur and new information becomes available, so make sure to check by frequently to keep up with the latest development on this highly anticipated title.

by Guido Henkel
March 3, 2000


	roducer Van Ling has been able to gather some experience creating titles that utilize DVD’s branching technology through his work on the aforementioned “Stargate” and “The Abyss.” “With every title you learn a little more,” he says, but also indicated

that it was still a very laborious process to create the correct branching stream for the two versions of the movie. Although the DVD specifications ask for the ability to interleave segments to quickly jump from one path to the other, the exact implementation of the feature still needs to be handled on a case-by-case basis.. To produce “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” Van is working closely with the folks at the Warner Advanced Media Organization (WAMO), a DVD compression center that also offers authoring and replication facilities.


	The first DVD release of T2 was originally created by Laser Pacific, who did a great job, especially considering the technological hurdles that had to be taken at the time. For the creation of the special edition of the movie however, Artisan Home Entertainment decided to bring in WAMO--mostly for their capabilities and experience in creating complex, multi-story-like titles, like what they had in mind for this project.


	“Joe Kane did his Video Essentials disc there,” Van remembers as one of the first DVD titles he was involved in. “At the time no one but WAMO was able to make this disc work according to its high end specs. When Artisan suggested WAMO do the T2 disc, it was great for me, because I already had a relationship with them.”


	ccording to Van Ling, the biggest challenge has been finding all the materials for the DVD. “In the middle of last year we started looking for materials,” he confides. “We began looking for elements and putting real ideas together.”


	“It was a bit of archeology,” he laughs, “sometimes to find what we were looking for. The main problem was that Carolco Pictures, the company that produced T2, had gone through many changes, and the film was now owned by Canal Plus, a French studio. Now, the problem in our case was not that we found too few elements, as you might expect, but rather that we found too many. All the material that we found needed to be sorted to locate exactly what we were looking for. To make matters worse, most of the material we found was mislabeled or not labeled at all. So, you picked up a reel that said “6-track” and it turned out it was a 4-track master only. Over time it became a real challenge to catalog, label and sort all these elements - but it was interesting.”

But that was not all, as Van recalls. “On top of that we had done so many different versions of T2 over time that it was hard to keep track of them all. Fortunately we did all our video work at Fotokem in Burbank, and when we went there they had about two dozen plus versions of “Terminator 2”. There were letterboxed versions of the theatrical cut, a pan and scan version, the special edition cut in

widescreen, one in pan & scan, a 16x9 transfer, a high definition transfer, PAL transfers, airline cuts, network TV versions and many more. And since movies don’t fit on a single D1 master tape, it is always split into parts. Then the sidebreaks for the special edition are obviously different than the one for the theatrical version because of the different running times, and so on. So you have over 60 master tapes in a vault to cover all of these different versions. I am sure you can image how challenging it was to find the right material for our needs.”

Fortunately the elements for the supplements were relatively handy. “I kept most of the material in digital form from when we did the Laserdisc,” he tells me. “So we had a lot of the still frame masters, and the pre-builds. Whenever possible we wanted to go back to the original source however, and it took some time finding out where the source material came from. I was very happy and fortunate that Artisan felt the same way and supported my efforts and the idea to take the time to do it right.”


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