L'important c'est d'aimer is out now

These everyday household items got together and made a lovely child.

OK, more like a couple thousand of them. But they're all lovely, I promise.

No longer do our friends in the NTSC territories have to put up with grubby standards conversions if they want to check out this classic of French cinema. And no longer does everyone else have to make do with watching a green, mucusy, DNR'd version which runs one frame per second too fast. In fact, barring a Canadian VHS, this will be the first time anyone outside of Parisian arthouse cinemas will have heard Georges Delerue's musical score undistorted since the 1970s. Or the hideous German release which looks like someone rubbed vaseline in the telecine gate (sorry, but it seriously is awful).

You can buy the standard edition, which has the DVD and a booklet, and some lovely packaging - or...

You can buy the limited edition package, which comes with a leathery-style finish (it's fake, don't worry, the only things killed were the souls of the people at StudioCanal servicing after I harassed them constantly asking for video fixes), a soundtrack CD, a bigger booklet, a numbered certificate of authenticity, a little card I wrote explaining how to set your TV up correctly, and these poster card reproductions. I spent a good few days Photoshopping the scratches out of the one in the middle.

Both versions came out in the USA two days ago (only on Amazon.com so far), so people should be receiving their copies right about now. Greencine seemed to like it! Oh, and both versions have the original French soundtrack, with new English subtitles approved by the Director himself, and also, because I still had some disc space left over, the English and German dubs, which I included for comedy purposes (plus, we had them, so why not use them?)

The encoding quality on this release is way, way better than the accepted standard on SD DVD. For a start, it's not been lowpass filtered (blurred), because this cheap trick is absolutely not necessary with a high quality encoder (and even without, it's questionable). Second, there is no film grain reduction, because even the better processes to remove film grain create an unpleasantly plasticy-looking result. Lastly, it was encoded with Cinema Craft SP2, which boggles my mind with its quality. There are just about no visible compression artefacts in the entire film, thanks partly to the fact that CCSP2 lets you fine-tune the quantization characteristics on a scene-by-scene (frame by frame) basis, and thanks partly to the fact that it must have been written by super-geniuses.

I actually started out using a different encoder for this film, but the combination of grain and entirely hand-held camera movement (and unfiltered detail) proved to be too much for it. No amount of messing around with the quantization matrices or changing the GOP structure (the placement of frames within the MPEG stream) created a result that I was totally happy with. Still better than other DVDs, but still not a good enough facsimile of the film. Cinema Craft SP2 came at a hefty priced, but saved our backsides.

Going through player bank testing right now... L'amour Braque.