Sortie en DVD le 1 avril 2003



THE BEATLES ANTHOLOGY DVD BOX SET - TECHNICAL BACKGROUND




The Beatles Anthology DVD Box Set, released in North America on Tuesday, April 1, 2003, offers a spectacular audio and visual experience and marks a real step forward in music DVD. It features the original 8 episode Anthology series on 4 discs with an entirely new stereo and surround soundtrack with restored and regraded footage as well as an additional 81 minute disc of Special Features.





The new soundtrack from the original full length series released on VHS in 1996 has been meticulously recreated from original Beatles source material and mixed by a team of Abbey Road Studios' engineers. Analogue and digital technology was married to give authenticity to the sound and evoke the original master mixes in the new format. They used vintage and classic analogue equipment, such as the Fairchild compressors and Studio 2's echo chamber, combined with the state-of-the-art mixing consoles currently used at Abbey Road.





Three versions of the soundtrack are available on the DVD release to provide a range of high quality listening options: DTS 5.1 surround, Dolby Digital 5.1 surround and uncompressed PCM stereo. All in all the team created a massive 1760 minutes of new audio for the DVD Box Set.





The new soundtrack along with the restored and regraded footage have been incorporated into the finished DVDs by Abbey Road Interactive, who authored the discs and worked closely with Apple to create the elaborate menu designs. The design concept for the release is based upon the artwork of the original CD albums, expanded to make full use of the benefits of the DVD format. The main menu alone comprises between fifty and sixty layers of images to create the desired effect. This is four or five times more layers than is usual in a DVD menu and along with animated elements succeed in bringing the artwork to life to marvellous effect.





The footage in the Anthology series was digitally restored by Ascent Media using a combination of 'Archangel' (a real time restoration system) and Edifis 'Scratch Box' (a digital video hard disk recorder with integral paint tools). After digitally re-grading the footage, Archangel removed unwanted picture noise, film dirt and scratches in real time. Edifis 'Scratch Box' was then employed on a frame by frame basis to manually remove larger picture faults to produce a new master.