Blu-ray

Monitor fiasco update

I received a call today from the extremely helpful Mark at Dell technical support. (Seriously, this guy has been busting a gut trying to help me, which can’t have been easy given that, due to some sort of screw-up, the company has no record of my previous communications regarding my ongoing problems.) The long and short of it is that a third monitor will be delivered to me on Monday and the second one will be uplifted.

In other news, the “pinching” I previously mentioned as occurring in three of the panel’s four corners has begun to recede. No, it’s not completely gone, and it’s still quite noticeable with a black background in a dark room, but it currently looks considerably better than it did as little as five or six hours ago. This is most heartening to me, and suggests that such problems will eventually fade once the screen has been allowed to “settle in”. Of course, dead pixels (or stuck pixels that have been given a rigorous work-out with the likes of JScreenFix) can’t be fixed, but this does mean that, should Monday’s arrival suffer from the same pinching effect, I won’t immediately be panicking and calling up tech support. This allows me to concentrate solely on faulty pixels, and I’ve come to the conclusion that, should monitor #3 suffer from a single dead or stuck pixel in a relatively inconspicuous place, I’ll put up with it in return for an end to the hassle.

(Incidentally, it’s perhaps worth pointing out that the monitor I was using this time last year, the Sony MFM-HT205, had a single red stuck pixel fairly close to the centre of the panel. It actually took me over a year to become aware of it, and only because my brother, bless his perceptiveness, pointed it out to me.)

Here’s hoping the old adage of “third time’s a charm” turns out to be true.

PS. I showed my mum The Descent on BD tonight (my first gala screening of the new Australian release from beginning to end). She thought it was great. Then again, I’m not entirely surprised, because according to my dad I inherited my taste for horror movies from her.

Update, February 21st, 2009 at 08:12 PM: I’ve just noticed that the problem is now once again as bad as it has ever been. It appears to begin to show itself after the monitor has been on for a while and just gets progressively worse. Initially, it looks absolutely fine, but within a short space of time the issues begin to assert themselves.

The bird with the bungled audio

As you may know, Dario Argento’s first film, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, gets its high definition debut in just under a week’s time, courtesy of Blue Underground’s upcoming Blu-ray release. Screen captures and a review have now appeared at DVD Beaver, and I’m afraid it’s a case of good news and bad news.

On the plus side, the screenshots (which are, admittedly, somewhat over-compressed as is the DVD Beaver standard and therefore not a 100% accurate representation of the final product) suggest a very fine video transfer with the natural grain structure intact and a pleasing amount of detail. The DVD was so filtered that it always felt as if you were watching the film through a misty window, so it is a pleasure to see these captures looking so crisp and defined. All of the extras from the previous 2-disc DVD release have also been ported over.

On the downside, what hasn’t been ported over is an audio mix that is in any way representative of Argento’s intentions. Gone are the 2.0 mono English and Italian tracks that were on the DVD. In their place, as with The Stendhal Syndrome, are an array of redundant encodes of the same surround remix. Note to Blue Underground: if you are going to include a DTS-HD Master Audio track, you do not need to also include separate Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital tracks of the same mix. It’s pointless, a waste of space and only causes you to have to pay more in licensing fees. It really sticks in my craw that the original mono tracks were discarded in favour of these space-hoggers, particularly given the twaddle Blue Underground spewed about not having enough space left for the original audio.

A classic that never was

So my copy of the upcoming Blu-ray release of The Silence of the Lambs was dispatched from MovieTyme today. At the moment, my brother is in the final stages of his work on the upcoming Mondo Vision DVD of Andrzej Zulawksi’s L’important c’est d’aimer, so I’m currently used to seeing (and hearing) Klaus Kinski ranting (in either French, German or English) on a more or less daily basis. During one of his fine tirades, we ended up speculating as to what The Silence of the Lambs would have been like had Kinski played the role of Hannibal Lecter. “Very different” is, I suspect, the answer. From there, I naturally began to wonder what the film would have been like had it been directed by one of Kinski’s most frequent collaborators, and populated by his regular cast. Here’s what I came up with:

The Silence of the Lambs
A film by Jess Franco
Written and produced by Harry Alan Towers

Soledad Miranda as Clarice Starling
Klaus Kinski as Dr. Hannibal Lecter
Herbert Lom as Jack Crawford
Christopher Lee as Dr. Frederick Chilton
Paul Muller as Jame Gumb
Lina Romay as Ardelia Mapp
Romina Power as Catherine Martin
Maria Rohm as Senator Ruth Martin

I’m still struggling to cast the all-important role of Barney. Can any Franco experts out there suggest a suitable actor?

The Constant Gardener Blu-ray impressions

This afternoon, I finally got round to watching Kinowelt’s Region B German Blu-ray release of The Constant Gardener, a great adaptation of the John Le Carré thriller that I previously saw back in 2006 on DVD. The BD is, I suspect, a fairly accurate representation of the source materials, which don’t exhibit a massive amount of detail, although this does vary on a scene by scene basis. What also varies is the grain retention: some scenes exhibit a naturally grainy veneer, whereas others (such as Example 2) appear noticeably noise reduced (pay attention to Ralph Fiennes’ face). It’s unclear at what stage this was carried out, but given the inconsistency I have reason to assume that it was done selectively at the DI stage. Meanwhile, compression is adequate, although certain wide shots do exhibit a degree of blocking (as in Example 6). An acceptable if slightly problematic presentation overall. 7/10

The Constant Gardener
studio: ArtHaus/Kinowelt; country: Germany; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 29.2 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 32.54 Mbit/sec

Blu-ray review: Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist

Charming and unabashedly entertaining, Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist may seem like an unexpected choice for one of my favourite films of 2008, but, truth be told, it made more of an impression on me than many of the year’s supposedly more “important” contenders. Sony’s Blu-ray release is largely excellent, with a decent A/V presentation and a fine array of extras.

I review the recent Region ABC (US) release of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Sony Pictures’ latest celebration of illegal music sharing.

Review at DVD Times.

Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist Blu-ray impressions

In a world where depressing, “serious” movies tend to get all the kudos, it’s sometimes difficult to shake the impression that feel-good films tend to get overlooked. The other night, I watched 21 Grams, which wasn’t exactly a laugh a minute, so it made for a nice change of pace tonight to sit down to Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Sony Pictures’ latest film to celebrate the joys of music piracy. This was very much a blind buy, but one that paid off: I can’t remember the last time I found a movie this damn enjoyable. On paper, there’s not really all that much to it - two misfits bond over their love of indie music and go on a night-time jaunt across New York City to locate a missing and intoxicated friend - but it left me with a great big smile on my face and warmed the cockles of my black and cynical heart.

Sony Pictures’ BD is very good, albeit with the caveat that the bit rate appears to have been decidedly inadequate given the film’s naturally grainy look, coupled with a lot of jittery, hand-held camerawork. The overall bit rate - just over 40 Mbit/sec - sounds pretty high on paper, although in reality much of this goes to the three Dolby TrueHD audio tracks, one Dolby Digital 5.1 track and two 2.0 commentaries. That leaves around 26 Mbit/sec for the video itself, which should have been enough, but the amount of mosquito noise on display suggests that whoever encoded this put it on what is known about the HMS Whimsy as Very Fast Mode™. It’s a nice-looking image overall, considerably more pleasant in motion than in the static screen captures below, but it’s a shame it doesn’t look perfect, as I believe it could have done. 9/10

Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist
studio: Sony Pictures; country: USA; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 25.1 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 40.17 Mbit/sec

Just arrived…

Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist (Blu-ray, Sony Pictures, Region ABC, USA)

Note: this is part of a new feature I’m trying where, instead of waiting ‘til I’ve done an in-depth examination/viewing of a disc before posting about it, I’ll notify you about any new additions to my collection the moment they land on my doormat. That way, if there’s any interest, we can get a discussion up and running about it as soon as possible.

Bigger, blacker, better

In a previous post, I mentioned ordering some goods from eBuyer, the process of which was somewhat less than smoothing sailing. I’ve now been using them (or rather, it) since Monday, and think it’s now high time I revealed its identity. So here it is: I bought a new monitor for my computer, a Dell Ultrasharp 2709W.

No, you’re not imagining things. I did buy a monitor already this year: a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo 3230T. However, as I started in my original post on that screen, I only ever saw this as an interim purchase. I picked it up primarily because of its ridiculously good price, but also because I wanted a screen capable of displaying full HD material to enable me to better examine Blu-ray Discs. While I stand by my initial impressions that, as monitors go, it’s a pretty reasonable one, “pretty reasonable” doesn’t really cut it for someone like me, who constantly seeks perfection in all things video-related and spends a lot of his time critiquing image quality. I previously mentioned that I’d been oogling Apple’s new LED Cinema Display, but quickly deemed it a non-starter due to its lack of PC-compliant inputs and, erm, power button. Following this dead end, I began looking into other displays and quickly found myself drawn to Dell’s Ultrasharp 2709W, for a number of reasons:

First of all, the idea of a 27” 1920x1200 screen really appealed to me. Most monitors of this size tend to have a native resolution of 2560x1600, which for me is less than ideal because, although the additional desktop space is nice, a really beefy video card and CPU are needed to maintain a decent frame rate in recent games at this resolution. 1:1 pixel mapping for HD content is also pretty high at the top of my list of requirements, which basically meant that any display I bought had to be either 1920x1080 (16:9) or 1920x1200 (16:10).

Secondly, an in-depth examination at display technologies review site PRAD revealed the display to have an insanely good black level for an LCD display, particularly as far as consumer-level computer monitors are concerned. It also showed that, with the right calibration, it would be possible to attain a reasonable degree of colour accuracy. In addition, a major requirement in any LCD display for me is a reasonable amount of backlight uniformity, to prevent some parts of the screen from being noticeably brighter or darker than others, and the 2709W scored very well in this regard. Finally, Dell has a “zero dead pixels” guarantee, which speaks for itself.

I’ve now made considerable use of the monitor and, while it has yet to be calibrated to anything more than my own subjective preferences, I have to say that I’m elated with it. I’m notoriously fussy when it comes to computer screens, having bought and returned (or punted) more than my fair share, and can comfortably state that this one is the nicest I’ve ever used. The S-PVA panel ensures an excellent degree of backlight uniformity (the major failing of the 3230T), the blacks are the deepest I’ve ever seen on a consumer PC LCD display, and the response time is, to my eyes, very pleasing. (The documentation quotes response times of 6 milliseconds grey-to-grey and 15 milliseconds white-to-black, but, as I always say, official technical specifications in such matters are rarely particularly helpful.) The unusually large screen size for this resolution (in PC terms, that is; were it a TV, there would be nothing remarkable about it whatsoever) is also rather nice (although I know that a few users have found the pixel pitch of 0.303 mm a little hard to get used to). On the downside, the display does suffer from around 36 milliseconds of input lag, but I can’t say it has bothered me so far, despite having played a lot of Warcraft III, Red Alert 3 and even a few matches of Unreal Tournament III on it. However, I do acknowledge that hard-core gamers, particularly those who play a lot of fast-paced FPSes and the like, are likely to be more sensitive to this than me. By way of comparison, my brother, testing out the monitor, noticed the lag when simply moving the mouse around the desktop.

Overall, this one’s definitely a keeper. If definitely needs to be calibrated properly - the wide colour gamut resulted in some eye-searing reds and greens until I dialled them down a little - but this is one display I have absolutely no qualms about buying, which is rare indeed for me. My 3230T will now migrate to my bedroom for use with my secondary machine, but the 2709W looks as if it can look forward to a long and prosperous life connected to my main system.

21 Grams Blu-ray impressions

Tuesday heralded the arrival of Alliance Atlantis’ Canadian Blu-ray Disc release of 21 Grams, the second Alejandro González Iñárritu film to make it to BD after Babel. So far, Alliance have released a bunch of titles on BD that aren’t currently available in any other country (including Sin City, A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Butterfly Effect), to date with all the extras stripped out. Still, if you’re not that bothered about bonus content - or (as is the case with 21 Grams) the film in question didn’t have many extras to begin with - then these releases are definitely something to be applauded.

Alliance have provided 21 Grams with a reasonably satisfying if flawed presentation. Unlike Babel, this film did not receive a digital intermediate, so the colour timing and other post production work were done in the lab, and the source used for the HD master is, naturally, a print. The grain structure is at times very pronounced, while on other occasions it is less noticeable, suggesting that, as with Babel, Iñárritu used a variety of film stocks. Unfortunately, the lack of space afforded to the encode means that the grain can tend to get a bit clumpy at times. Certain moments also look like they may have been grain reduced, but this is not consistent by any means, so I’m unclear as to whether an NR pass was carried out on a handful of select scenes, or the whole thing received NR and the scenes shot on grainier stock weren’t so noticeably affected. In additionm, some shots display prominent ringing which looks like the effect of deliberate sharpening rather than the natural halos that can sometimes occur optically. There is also quite a bit of block noise and posterisation in the shadows in certain shots, which can be pretty distracting. 7/10

21 Grams
studio: Alliance Atlantis; country: Canada; region code: A; codec: AVC;
file size: 18.1 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 20.84 Mbit/sec

Hannibal Rising Blu-ray impressions

This evening, before we sat down to watch the UK Blu-ray Disc release of Hannibal Rising, my brother said to me something along the lines of “You’ll enjoy this, but it isn’t a Hannibal Lecter film.” He was absolutely right. Getting any pleasure out of this shameless cash-in penned by Thomas Harris himself requires you to forget what came before it… or rather after it, given that this prequel purports to show us the making of a madman. Try as he might, Gaspard Ulliel fails to convince us that he could possibly grow up to be Anthony Hopkins (or Brian Cox, for you Manhunter aficionados), and certain events call into question what happens later in the series:

Highlight below to reveal spoiler text:

So, it doesn’t really fit in with Hannibal, The Silence of the Lambs or even Red Dragon. What the film does do, however, is function rather effectively as a black comedy. I’m not sure how intentional the humour was (probably not very, all things considered), and if you hated the wryness of Hannibal you’ll absolutely loathe this, but I certainly wasn’t bored for a second. It ultimately boils down to little more than a rollicking period piece slasher movie, with the dapper Young Hannibal (that was the film’s working title, by the way) slicing and dicing his way through a cavalcade of loathsome individuals, not one of them with a single redeemable bone on their bodies. In that regard, the film clearly takes the easy way out by failing to provide us with any moral quandaries. At best, it’s a minor distraction, and if you compare it to any of the previous entries in the series, it understandably falls flat, but in my opinion it’s not the turkey the mainstream press have made it out to be.

Unfortunately, with their BD release, Momentum have continued their tradition of espousing a fondness for MPEG-2 video and lossy audio. The transfer is actually reasonably pleasing, with an acceptable (if not stellar - it’s definitely filtered) level of detail and accurate blacks (I actually feel compelled to point this out after the overly grey Butterfly on a Wheel, viewed previously). Alas, there are some occasional but quite prominent compression artefacts (see Example 7 for the worst instance I could spot), and the quantisation noise introduced by the MPEG-2 encoding prevents the grain from looking entirely natural. Finally, a handful of moments appear to suffer from reduced detail and a distracting amount of ringing (see Examples 3 and 6). These moments, which I suspect are the result of monkeying around at the DI stage, don’t last for long, but they do mean that the overall image is rather inconsistent. 7/10

Hannibal Rising
studio: Momentum; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: MPEG-2;
file size: 17.4 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 19.18 Mbit/sec

Butterfly on a Wheel Blu-ray impressions

If there’s anything good to have come out of the fact that Zammo has gone into administration, it’s that the branches that are still open are flogging their remaining goods at cut rates. Books, clothing and posters are all going for 50% of the advertised prices, and there are some fine deals to be had on DVDs and BDs as well. In the case of the latter, I picked up the UK release of Butterfly on a Wheel on Wednesday - a blind buy that didn’t pay off. (I also snagged Donkey Punch and George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead.) This suspense thriller stars Gerard Butler, he of 300 who’s good at looking constipated and emitting gutteral roars (in 300, it was “Sparrrrtaaaaaaa!”; in this film, he just bellows “Aaaaabbyyyyy!” a lot), and Pierece Brosnan, who is under the misconception that growing a couple of days’ worth of stubble and putting on a horrendously overdone Northern Irish accent makes him seem menacing. Unfortunately, it’s nothing more than a bland and improbably plotted piece of glossy, slickly-produced twaddle that should have gone straight to TV… and indeed it did in the US, where it was released under the title of Shattered. After we watched it (on Friday), my brother turned to me and said “This is the worst film I’ve ever seen on Blu-ray.” Had I had the presence of mind, I would have reminded him that we also watched Norbit, but I guess my brain had been turned to mush by preceding 95 minutes of tedium.

Oh well, at least it’s got Maria Bello in her pants. Actually, screw it, even that isn’t enough to save this train wreck.

For what it’s worth, Icon’s all-regions disc is actually pretty good, albeit with an irritating audio sync issue which affects both the lossy Dolby Digital and lossless DTS-HD Master Audio tracks. The AVC encode suffers from little if any noticeable compression issues, and detail is, for the most part, quite pleasing. The whole image has been slightly pre-filtered, with ringing visible around high contrast edges, such the letterbox bars and the on-screen credits, but, while this is less than ideal, it doesn’t affect the look of the film as negatively as something like Kung Fu Panda. On the other hand, the blacks look quite milky, although it’s unclear whether this is a fault in the original photography or a problem specific to the transfer. (I’m leaning towards the former, since the black screen against which the first few credits are overlaid is “proper” black, unlike, say, Silent Hill, where the black level is off from beginning to end.) 8/10

Butterfly on a Wheel
studio: Icon; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 19.6 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 29.61 Mbit/sec

Blu-ray review: Domino

While the film itself is, to put it politely, an acquired taste, Warner and New Line have served up a better package for Domino on Blu-ray than we had any reason to expect. A solid package all round, it trounces the previous DVD release in terms of audio-visual quality and matches it as far as bonus content is concerned.

Prepare to have your eyes seared and your eardrums perforated in glorious HD as I review New Line and Warner’s recent Region ABC (US) Blu-ray Disc release of Domino.

Review at DVD Times.

Domino Blu-ray impressions

I wasn’t particularly impressed with Domino, Tony Scott’s loose biopic of real-life bounty hunter Domino Harvey, when I first saw it back in 2006. In fact, my overall recommendation as regards this giddy fever dream was “Save your money for real drugs.” That said, it’s not a film I forgot in a hurry, and, when it was released on Blu-ray last month, I found myself with a hankering to see it again. My copy arrived on Monday, and I watched it last night. Admittedly, I enjoyed it somewhat more than on my first viewing, but I still found the stylistic elements (particularly the self-conscious editing style and eye-searing contrast) irritating and the script muddled and of the patchwork variety. Despite this, though, it managed to hold my attention throughout, and on some level Keira Knightley is actually quite effective as the gun-toting bounty hunter with a silver spoon in her mouth.

As for the disc itself, I can’t say I was expecting a great deal, given that it is the joint product of Warner and New Line, who together hold one of the most dubious track records in the HDM world. Much to my surprise, therefore, Domino actually turned out to be a very impressive-looking release. It’s sometimes tough to rate image quality with a film as stylised as this, particularly given the deliberately unnatural colours and contrast, the rarely-static camera and the deliberate “degradation” techniques such as the introduction of colour bleeding (see Example 13). Still, my overall impression is that what we’re seeing here is mostly excellent and a faithful representation of the film’s intended look. Unfortunately, a frequent Warner shortcoming - inadequate bit rate - rears its ugly head here in the form of a smattering of compression artefacts (see Example 8 for the most noticeable instance). Otherwise, though, it’s all good. 9.5/10

Domino
studio: New Line/Warner; country: USA; region code: ABC; codec: VC-1;
file size: 18.5GB; average bit rate (including audio): 20.8 Mbit/sec

Monster Blu-ray impressions

A deeply underwhelming looking disc, this. Okay, so the film was never intended to look like a million dollars, but even taking into account the deliberately gritty-looking visual style, this is still a pretty grotty-looking disc. There may at some point have been detail in the image, but a significant amount of it has been eroded away by grain reduction, which, coupled with some ropey encoding, results in an unnatural, digital-looking image. Artefacting is especially prevalent in the shadows, resulting in an image that is quite unpleasant to look at a lot of the time. Daylight scenes generally fare slightly better, but even these don’t appear too hot thanks to the lack of detail, which prevents all but the close-ups from looking impressive. Frankly, it has the look of one of those muddy HDTV broadcasts that you can’t stop yourself from involuntarily shuddering at when you see captures of them at the AV Science Forum. 5/10

Monster
studio: EMS; country: Germany; region code: ABC; codec: VC-1;
file size: 18.54GB; average bit rate (including audio): 24.32 Mbit/sec

Suspiria goes Blu

Over at the High-Def Digest forums, it is being reported that Eagle Pictures will be releasing Dario Argento’s masterpiece Suspiria on Blu-ray Disc in Italy on March 11th. The source, as far as I can gather, is a product listing at online DVD store DVDLand.it, so it’s probably worth taking this with a pinch of salt for the time being (I haven’t come across it listed anywhere else). Still, if it turns out to be true, then, for me personally, this is some of the most exciting news to come out of high definition land in ages. Of all the titles in my collection that are begging for the HD treatment, I can’t think of any more deserving than Suspiria, undoubtedly one of the most stunning-looking films ever made.

My main concern at the moment, however, is the previous “Definition Edition” DVD of the film put out by Eagle Pictures. You may remember what it looked like, but just in cast you don’t, let me refresh your memory. That’s right: a horrible, ugly contrast-boosted mess, so blown out that several moments were rendered unintelligible. My big fear is that this same source will be used for the BD - and I think it would make sense to assume that this will be the case, as the Definitive Edition was created from a brand new HD master in 2007, and I doubt that they would revisit the film elements again so soon after that. Right now, I’m just hoping against hope that the contrast boosting was applied not to the HD master itself but at the standard definition down-conversion stage. Anyway, I’ve pre-ordered a copy and will keep you posted.

DVDs I bought or received in the month of January

• January 2, 2009: The Messengers (Region ABC UK, Blu-ray)
• January 2, 2009: The Untouchables (Region ABC UK, Blu-ray)
• January 2, 2009: Poltergeist (Region ABC UK, Blu-ray)
• January 2, 2009: Black Sheep (Region ABC UK, Blu-ray)
• January 5, 2009: Death Proof (Region ABC USA, Blu-ray)
• January 5, 2009: Planet Terror (Region ABC USA, Blu-ray)
• January 22, 2009: The 39 Steps (2008 BBC TV version) (Region 2 UK, DVD) [review copy]
• January 26, 2009: Peep Show: Series 5 (Region 2 UK, DVD)
• January 29, 2009: Shaun of the Dead (Region 0 UK, HD DVD) [gift]
• January 30, 2009: The Butterfly Effect (Region A Canada, Blu-ray)
• January 30, 2009: American Psycho (Region ABC Australia, Blu-ray)
• January 30, 2009: The Descent (Region ABC Australia, Blu-ray)

Another bonzer Aussie BD

Back in February 2007, Lions Gate released Mary Harron’s film American Psycho on Blu-ray Disc in the US, and a thoroughly cack-handed job they did of it too, delivering an image so processed that every single edge had masses and masses of ringing surrounding it, and all the actors looked like they’d been deep fat fried. To add insult to injury, Lions Gate encoded their horrible image in MPEG-2 on a single layer disc, and junked most of the extras from its DVD counterpart.

Flash forward just under a couple of years, and the film materialises on BD in Australia, under the auspices of Sony Pictures. Now, I try not to judge books by their covers, but come on: Sony or Lions Gate? Who would you trust to get the job done? I ordered a copy, which arrived yesterday, and we had a fine evening watching Bruce Wayne… sorry, Patrick Bateman… slicing and dicing his way through a variety of yuppies, hookers and bums. So, is the Australian disc an improvement on its woeful US counterpart? You bet it is. No, it’s not a stellar-looking title by any means, suffering from a degree of ringing and a slight diffuseness, but it’s a significant step up all the same. The upgrade to an AVC encode on a dual layer disc gives the film more room to breathe, reducing artefacting, while detail and overall realism are greatly improved thanks to considerably less ringing and noise reduction. By the looks of it, the same master was used for both discs, but Sony managed to restrain themselves from subjecting it to the added round of digital post-processing applied by Lions Gate. You just have to look at Examples 13 and 14 to see how much less distracting ringing there is, and Examples 6 and 8 to see how the reduced filtering makes subtle (and some not so subtle) improvements to the overall level of detail. Unfortunately, as with the Lions Gate release, a number of the extras are still MIA (the same ones, actually), but, in every other respect, the Australian release constitutes a major upgrade from the miserable-looking US disc… meaning that Lions Gate got pantsed by the Aussies twice in a row (c.f. The Descent).

(Screen captures after the jump…)

[Continue reading "Another bonzer Aussie BD"...]

Australia to the rescue

My copy of the Australian Blu-ray Disc of The Descent, distributed by Icon Home Entertainment, arrived today (along with some other BD goodies which I’ll hopefully get a chance to post about tomorrow evening). You may remember my post from a week ago which outlined the situation regarding this release and its rather dramatic colour palette difference from the US version put out by Lions Gate. So, how does it measure up? Given that the pressing of the US release which features the superior AVC encode is now extremely hard to come by, with the poorer quality MPEG-2 version having all but replaced it, is this Australian version, itself AVC encoded, an adequate replacement? The answer is “yes”… and then some.

First, some screen captures. There are so many significant differences between the two versions that I ended up with a large number and struggled to cut it down to a reasonable amount. Eventually, I settled on 20 images for each, down from approximately 70 beforehand (!!). Hopefully these give you some idea of the improvements made with the Australian release.

(Screen captures after the jump…)

[Continue reading "Australia to the rescue"...]

How on earth did that happen?

So far, the Universal titles that have made the jump from HD DVD to Blu-ray have been a bit of a mixed back. Broadly speaking, titles on BD that are sourced from a digital intermediate (DI) have generally at least been the equal of their HD DVD counterparts, if not actually bettering them (some, including Miami Vice, have benefited from the increased bandwidth and bit rates afforded by BD), while those taken from print sources (such as U-571 and the first two Mummy films) have suffered from an added layer of DNR, resulting in the not-so-hilarious irony that the versions available on a defunct format actually look better than those released on the winning system. This is not a hard and fast rule, but it has applied to most of the cases that have come under the microscope.

When I posted captures for the HD DVD release of The Bourne Identity back in December, I half-jokingly said that I’d taken these screenshots so I had evidence ready for when the BD version came out in January, probably looking inferior. Well, fortunately for all concerned, I now have to eat a slice of humble pie. You see, not only does the BD of The Bourne Identity not look worse than its HD DVD predecessor, it actually looks better.

Yes, in a curious twist, Universal would appear to have finally woken up and heard the criticism being hurled at them on account of their inferior BDs. The newly released BD of The Bourne Identity, available in The Bourne Trilogy box set, actually shows more visible grain and detail than its predecessor. Captures have been posted by Xylon at the AV Science Forum, and they show that, while not night and day, the improvement is significant enough to potentially warrant double dipping (although I personally will wait for the set to come down significantly in price). The increased bit rate afforded by BD’s larger capacity also means that noticeable improvements have been made to the compression on The Bourne Supremacy, while The Bourne Ultimatum, already a magnificent HD DVD, looks set to be at the very least its equal on BD.

All in all, this is very promising news, and I hope it means that we can now expect better from Universal on BD. I don’t doubt that they’ll continue to dust off grotty masters for some of their catalogue titles, but at least it looks like there’s now a good chance that they won’t look any worse than their HD DVD counterparts. Potential customers can buy with impunity: the Bourne BD box set looks like a winner.

Donkey Punch Blu-ray impressions

Last night, we watched a rental copy of Optimum’s Region B Blu-ray Disc release of Donkey Punch, a British horror movie from 2008. I didn’t really know anything at all about it going in, but I ended up being pleasantly surprised by it. Note that I’m using “pleasantly” in the loosest possible sense of the word, as in actual fact it’s a pretty nasty little movie that rarely pulls any punches and is the absolute antithesis to the PG-13 “horror” movies Hollywood tends to churn out over the summer. (It’s also considerably nastier than many of the so-called “torture porn”* R-rated Hollywood horrors, if only because psychologically it’s a whole lot more unpleasant.) I didn’t actually know what the enonymous “donkey punch” of the film’s title was, and for those who are in the same position as me, I’m not going to spoil it. Instead, I’ll just say that the film is tense, ballsy and unpredictable, and definitely worth a look if you’re tired of your horror movies always coming in one of the two approved configurations (PG-13 horror-lite or R-rated “torture porn”).

So, tarmaccing, huh?

Donkey Punch was shot using some sort of reasonably high-end digital apparatus, and this is readily evident in Optimum’s BD, which alternates between looking very good and not very good at all. The whole image has been slightly filtered, as evinced by the consistent ringing at the top and bottom edges of the 1.85:1 frame. Luckily, there aren’t many high contrast edges in the film, so this is less destructive than it is in, say, Kung Fu Panda, which I watched a couple of days ago and which suffered from exactly the same issue. Compression artefacts do show up on a number of occasions; see, for example, shots 3 and 5. By far the biggest issue, though, is digital noise. Shots which take place in bright light generally look very good indeed, but many of those that take place in the dark are afflicted by a large amount of pronounced interference, which looks nothing like film grain and gives the image a rather cheap, home-made appearance. It’s an unfortunate byproduct of the digital photography, which means that what we find on the disc is pretty much an accurate representation of the source materials (barring the filtering), but it’s not nice to look at. 6/10

Donkey Punch
studio: Optimum; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 18.5 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 26.76 Mbit/sec

* Note: I actually hate the term “torture porn”, but it’s in such wide usage that it seems to be the most straightforward way of conveying the sort of films I’m talking about.