The lavish detail before my eyes

Tonight, Lyris and me watched his recently-acquired Blu-ray release of The Life Before Her Eyes, a film by The House of Sand and Fog's director, Vadim Perelman, in which Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood play the same character in two different time periods.

In addition to being a very good film, albeit one that knocked me for six at a certain point (not unlike, say, Swimming Pool), Magnolia's Blu-ray release has a really nice transfer. The bit rate is occasionally a little low for the material being thrown at it (check the mild artefacting around the text in Example 1), but for the most part this is an excellent encode of excellent source materials. I did spot some evidence of light degraining having been applied, occasionally causing facial details to smear slightly, but this is about as far from the horror of Dark City or Patton as you can get. Yes sirree, this disc gets the thumbs-up from me.

The Life Before Her Eyes
(Magnolia Home Entertainment, USA, AVC, 15.6 GB)

Additional Nightmare notes

My post from a few days ago on the new Blu-ray release of The Nightmare Before Christmas attracted some negative attention from a small number of people, including a fellow Blu-ray reviewer who accused me of "irresponsible sensationalism designed to stir up controversy". I'd like to take the opportunity to address some of the issues relating to both the disc itself and my post.

First of all, the reviewer in question feels that my post "blows any small issues with the disc way out of proportion" and "makes almost no mention at all that the disc actually looks pretty damn terrific". To some extent, I agree in principle with the latter point. The disc certainly does not look "pretty damn terrific" (then again, on certain occasions I have found this reviewer's impressions to be so far off the mark as to be laughable), but it does look pretty good for the most part, with a high level of detail in most scenes, solid compression and rich, deep colours. Admittedly, I neglected to stress these positives in my review, but here's the thing: I expect high detail, a lack of compression artefacts and an accurate colour palette in my HD transfers. So sue me, I'm an optimist and like to think, when I pop in a shiny new disc, that I'll get gold. Despite the number of times the studios have let their customers down, I still hope for the best.

As a result, when I notice flaws, I have a tendency to make them the focal point of my posts and reviews. That, to me, is not unreasonable. Of course it's important to accentuate the positive so that the studios can see that we appreciate a job well done, but it's even more important to call them on the boners they pull so they can take steps to ensure that the same things don't happen again. If you look through the various Blu-ray and HD DVD image quality reviews I've written on this site, I think you'll find that, if a disc looks particularly good, I'll be sure to shout it from the rooftops. I take the opportunity to point out problematic discs, but equally well, if a disc is flawless (or nearly flawless), I have a feeling that I'll be among the most vocal in my praise of it.

I can appreciate the need for balance in reviews, so let me take the opportunity to fill in the gaps in my previous post by summarising the situation.

The Nightmare Before Christmas on Blu-ray is:

- Colourful
- Well encoded
- Detailed in around 90% of shots
- Still the best film Tim Burton attached his name to
- When all said and done, the best representation of the film on optical disc

It is not:

- Flawless
- An accurate representation of its source materials
- Film-like
- Free of DVNR artefacts

Overall, it works out at around a high 7/10 in my book. No, it's not a "pretty damn terrific" transfer, but it's not exactly shameful either.

See the president get shot at in full HD!

Attention Disney, Universal and all other DNR bandits: here is film grain. It is not your enemy. Learn it. Live it. Love it.

Vantage Point
(Sony Pictures, UK, AVC, 22.9 GB)

Christmas comes early

My brother received Disney's recent Blu-ray release of Henry Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas today. This is a film that Disney initially got cold feet over releasing and so put it out under the Touchstone Pictures banner instead, only to reclaim it years later (quite probably after they realised what a money-maker it was).

Anyway, the disc has been the recipient of some extremely positive reviews. I'm sorry to report, however, that it is yet another DVNR victim. That's not to say that it's an awful transfer by any stretch of the imagination, but it's extremely inconsistent. Some shots are Dark City bad, but others are as good as, say, Corpse Bride, with most shots lying somewhere in between the two. Grain-sucking has been applied, but not consistently, so some shots retain their original grain, but the majority don't. For the most part, the grain reduction is not massively destructive, but some shots look extremely waxy, with the optical effects shots (basically everything with Zero, fire, glowing lights, etc.) looking particularly bad. Overall this could have been a lot worse, but don't believe the people who are claiming that this film is unmolested.

Overall, it's a definite upgrade over the DVD releases (and that includes the very good anamorphic 1.66:1 release from Scandinavia, which trounced every other version), but, as is often the case, it's frustrating to think how much better it could have been. The massive irony is that, had this been a modern film made within the last couple of years, the technicians would probably have assumed that it didn't need any sort of digital "restoration" applied to it and, as a result, it would therefore have ended up looking far grainier.

Oh, and, in a further instance of tampering, the Touchstone Pictures logo at the start of the film has been replaced with a Walt Disney one. I'm not happy about that. It may not sound like the end of the world, but it's yet another example of the creeping revisionism that studios feel they can get away with inflicting on their movies. From there, it's a slippery slope towards modifications of the George Lucas variety.

The Nightmare Before Christmas
(Buena Vista, USA, AVC, 21.7 GB)

Update, September 2nd, 2008 10:19 AM: While watching the film last night, we both spotted a number of instances of the DVNR eroding picture elements such as characters' limbs. A comparison with the Scandinavian DVD revealed that this problem is new to the Blu-ray release (and probably also the concurrent standard definition re-release). An example can be seen at Lyris Lite. At least four instances were spotted in the course of a single play-through.

DVNR city

As "a pretentious arse [...] with no sense of humour" (it's fascinating the sort of things you can happen to find written about yourself on the Internet), it's sometimes difficult for me to tell whether something is meant to be a joke, so here's my question: is New Line's treatment of Dark City intentionally funny? That's certainly how it feels to me, and I certainly can't imagine any semi-competent technician actually thinking this looked good, but oh well. Take a look at the waxworks on display and judge for yourselves.

Then have a look at how one of director Alex Proyas' other films, the vastly inferior I, Robot, looks on Blu-ray, and weep.

Dark City: Director's Cut
(New Line, USA, VC-1, 20.3 GB)

Another day in bland collect-'em-up world

With the release of Diablo III still a long way off, many gamers are doing their best to find the Next Big Thing in the action RPG world to keep them entertained in the interim. A lot of people thought that might be Hellgate: London, designed by the creators of the first two Diablo games, but that turned out to be a disappointment for many. Others have looked to Titan Quest (which I can't say impressed me a great deal), which offered similar gameplay mechanics, this time in a world inspired by Greek Mythology.

Recently, a little game called Space Siege, developed by Gas Powered Games, came out for the PC. This is a game that sounds like great fun on paper: a slick, down-and-dirty ARPG pitting a solitary hero against hordes of aliens - a sort of heavily streamlined Diablo set in space. Its creative director - Gas Powered Games' CEO, Chris Taylor - also has an interesting pedigree, having masterminded a number of successful games, including Total Annihilation, Dungeon Siege and, most recently, Supreme Commander. Barring the latter, which I haven't played, his games have never done a great deal for me, with Total Annihilation's revolutionary use of terrain elevation and real-time 3D models (a rarity at the time in real-time strategy games) seeming to distract people from the overall blandness and homogeneity of the games design, and Dungeon Siege playing like a third-rate, dumbed-down version of Diablo with a few interesting tweaks in the form of party support and a dynamic character development system which automatically adjusted to the player's style of gameplay instead of going down the usual rigid class-based route. Still, despite not being particularly impressed by any of these games, I was more than willing to give Space Siege a go. After all, Diablo in space? Sounds like fun.

Then the reviews started coming in, basically summing up the game as bland, easy, dumbed-down beyond belief and completely, utterly generic. Undeterred, I downloaded the demo and had a go myself. Fifteen minutes later, having completed it, I promptly uninstalled it from my hard drive.

It's interesting, because one of the main criticisms levelled against Hellgate: London was that its developers were guilty of overreaching, setting their goals too high and over-hyping what was otherwise a pretty unremarkable game (which has always slightly confused me - were people expecting them to trumpet their game as "a middling game that doesn't aim too high" or something similar?). Space Siege's problem is the exact opposite: it's essentially a freeware casual game with lavish production values and an A-list price tag. Everything about it has been pared back to the barest minimum, resulting in a game that can't be accused of aiming too high because it doesn't seem to aim at all. There are no character classes, just a single generic hero with the mega-bland name of Seth Walker who gets access to a range of around ten guns over the course of the game. There are no stats or experience: instead, you level up at pre-determined moments and occasionally find a new weapon to replace your current one (you can't keep both). Effectively, the experience, loot and currency have all been homogenised into a single system of mechanical parts which are periodically dropped by fallen enemies, and in turn can be used at various stations to buy health, grenades etc. or upgrade your weapons and armour. It's all very flat and unimaginative, and the lack of a meaningful stats systems means that it's unclear what an upgrade of "+4 to armour" actually means in practice. It doesn't help that all of this is visualised in the form of graphics that are technically proficient but completely and utterly unimaginative, making Hellgate: London's oft-criticised monotonous environments look positively varied. In a sense, I suppose it looks the same as it plays, which is to some degree appropriate.

The one relatively original idea in the entire game is its system of cybernetics upgrades, in which Seth can choose to replace various body parts (e.g. eyes, arms, legs) with various robotic equivalents, which improve his abilities but in turn reduce his "humanity" rating. I'm told that the absolute ultimate is a cybernetic brain, but that in practice even this barely changes the gameplay one iota, beyond slightly altering other characters' reactions to him and resulting in a slightly different ending. As the inimitable Jeff Green (one of my favourite gaming journalists) said in his review at 1UP:

I went full robot, taking the ultimate final step: a cybernetic brain, which -- all told -- reduced my humanity to 5 percent. Fully expecting a dramatic or even traumatic change in my character (would I still be speaking the same heroic-yet-wooden dialogue?), I discovered that the game barely acknowledges it. In the final cut-scene, I saved the world...and apparently lived happily ever after as a robot.

If a bland, derivative, completely unimaginative and over-simplified point and click action game pitting a witless hero against hordes of witless space mutants sounds to you like a good use of your $50 and a fine way of passing the time before Diablo III's release, knock yourselves out. Myself, I think I'll just play Diablo II some more.

Could you shake that camera a bit more, Mr. Bay?

At the time of its release, Transformers was the fastest selling film on any HD format, shifting 100,000 copies in its first day, for a total of 190,000 in the first week. As such, it's fair to say that this would be a large number of people's first introduction to high definition, so it's probably a good thing it looks as great as it does. That's not to say it's perfect: in terms of compression, the action-packed final half-hour is something of a struggle for the encoder, whether because of disc space or bandwidth limitations, but by and large it looks excellent. I suspect that it may have been pre-filtered just a teeny-tiny bit, but this is still a sterling effort from Paramount and one that would belong in every HD enthusiast's collection if the film itself wasn't such a heap of dung.

Transformers
(Paramount, USA, AVC, 25 GB)

The only waxiness here is in Rowan Atkinson's facial expressions

Mr. Bean's Holiday seems like a slightly odd choice for a day-and-date high definition release. Even stranger is how good it looks. If I were to use the words "demo material", you probably wouldn't normally expect me to utter this film's title in the same breath, but, honestly, I think I would. It has exactly the same look two other Universal 1.85:1 releases, Children of Men and Eastern Promises, and by that I mean that there is a small amount of filtering going on, resulting in a very slight loss of detail and some ringing, but nothing overly wondering. I wonder if Universal have two different algorithms for their day-and-date releases: one for 1.85:1 movies (slight filtering) and one for their 2.39:1 ones (no filtering). I'd have to investigate more 1.85:1 titles in order to be sure, but it honestly wouldn't surprise me at all.

Mr. Bean's Holiday
(Universal, UK, VC-1, 16.1 GB)

Things can get a little hazy in the Bayou

For a catalogue title from Universal, The Skeleton Key actually looks pretty decent, probably due to the fact that it was taken from a Digital Intermediate rather than Telecine source. It does look a little soft at times, but I'm inclined to attribute at least some of this to the way in which it was shot: it certainly has the "Panavision look", where things tend to appear smooth rather than pin-sharp. Certainly I don't see any of the ringing that normally shows up in Universal's filtered titles. Unfortunately, the image has at some stage been subjected to a fairly intensive noise reduction pass, sucking out the grain and resulting in some trailing artefacts. Still, as far as catalogue releases go, this is a pretty reasonable one, and one that I'm inclined to look upon more favourably in light of recent developments regarding Universal's Blu-ray ports.

The Skeleton Key
(Universal, USA, VC-1, 16.7 GB)

Machine built to perfection

By brother picked up the US Blu-ray release of Alex (Dark City) Proyas' I, Robot today, and I have to say I'm extremely impressed by the image quality: this is definitely the best disc I've seen from 20th Century Fox so far. Pin-sharp, naturally grainy and without a trace of artificial sharpening.

Now, obviously, we're talking about two films produced in different time periods, with different technical specifications (Telecine-sourced for Dark City, digital intermediate for I, Robot), but this is much closer to how Dark City should have looked than the version released recently by New Line, mangled by their noise reduction machine of waxy faces.

I, Robot
(20th Century Fox, USA, AVC, 26.4 GB)

How to lose your credibility in 113 minutes

Today, after waiting what seemed like an age, my copy of the US Blu-ray release of Doomsday, Neil Marshall's newest film, reached me.

Unfortunately, after a promising start, this film proceeds to completely ransack any sense of self-dignity. It's essentially a string of pastiches of different genres, and as a result has no credibility or identity of its own, jumping from futuristic sci-fi to post-apocalyptic urban warfare to Lord of the Rings-esque medieval romp to Gladiator-inspired arena games to Mad Max-style car chase, all leading up to a confrontation between our heroine and the impossibly throaty-voiced David O'Hara wearing an outfit that left me fighting the urge to start singing "We are the Men in Black..."

I suppose it held my attention throughout, so at least I wasn't bored, but I couldn't take any of it seriously, and the impression I'm left with is that someone handed Neil Marshall a cheque for a rather large sum of money and told him to do whatever he wanted. Which is sort of admirable, I suppose, and I do to some extent admire his "fuck it" mentality, throwing in whatever he felt like. Ultimately, though, I couldn't take it remotely seriously and was left with the impression that I was watching a movie written by a teenage boy with no concept of how to maintain a consistent tone or even string together a semi-coherent plot. By far the best thing about it was Rhona Mitra, who manages to retain a level of credibility even when everything around her is going to pot. Overall, though, Marshall really dropped the ball with this one, and is making the masterful The Descent look more and more like a fluke by the minute.

It also doesn't help that, a few days earlier, I'd watched another "post-apocalyptic" Britain film, the infinitely superior 28 Weeks Later...

...actually, you know what? Read Lyris' review. It's much funnier than mine.

As if to rub it in, the transfer, one of Universal's first Blu-ray releases, is a sterling effort, looking natural and generally flawless, with no visible compression artefacts or any signs of digital tampering. Oh yeah, and the building visible in the final shot is my place of work, which is sort of neat, I guess. Too bad it wasn't in a better movie.

Doomsday
(Universal, USA, VC-1, 21.9 GB)

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 beta initial impressions

As I've stated before, I've not always been a fan of the Command & Conquer series of real-time strategy games. In the mid-to-late 1990s, the RTS landscape was dominated by two key players, Westwood Studios and Blizzard Entertainment, with Westwood's Command & Conquer games pitted against Blizzard's Warcraft (and later Starcraft). While I know that many gamers were able to enjoy both, the majority seem to have come down firmly on one side or the other, and I was a staunch loyalist of the Blizzard camp. For me, their games were always more intuitive, tactile and polished, offering an overall more pleasant experience. In contrast, I tended to find Westwood's games more finicky, frequently suffering from mushy, indistinct graphics, control issues and a general lack of a meaningful connection (a typical Command & Conquer game tended to consist of cranking out as large an attack force as possible and rushing the enemy en masse, whereas Blizzard's games tended to stress quality over quantity, forcing the player to make strategic decisions about which units to build).

Times, however, have changed. Westwood Studios is no more, and the last RTS Blizzard put out was Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos in 2002 (with an expansion set in 2003). The publisher of the Command & Conquer games, Electronic Arts, established their own studio, EALA, to continue development of the franchise, beginning with the rather poorly-received 2003 spin-off Command & Conquer: Generals. In the meantime, while Blizzard arguably continued to dominate the RTS market, particularly as far as E-sports are concerned, several other franchises emerged to compete, muddying the waters somewhat and meaning that the old C&C/-craft binary no longer existed.

In 2007, the Command & Conquer series was resurrected with Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, which, coincidentally or not, was the first one I genuinely enjoyed. I picked up a copy of the game in April, and then snagged the Kane's Wrath expansion set in July. Since then, both have remained on my hard disk and have been played rather obsessively. I'm not sure precisely what EALA did, but they managed to turn my thoughts on the franchise around completely, allowing me to enjoy their game in a way that I never could with Westwood's efforts. (This turnaround, incidentally, mirrors my experiences with the Tomb Raider franchise, which I believe improved exponentially when Crystal Dynamics took over from Core Design.)

Kane's Wrath came with a free key to enter the beta test of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, the third instalment in the spin-off Red Alert franchise. (While the vanilla Command & Conquer series takes place in the future, the Red Alert games operate in an alternate reality Cold War scenario in which Hitler never came to power and the Soviet Union emerged as the dominant adversary to the Allies in Europe.) My account was activated this morning, and I've spent most of the day getting the hang of it. (Normally I'd be at work, but we're all on strike today over a pay dispute.) The beta supports only online play, without any means of learning the ropes before jumping on to the Internet and invariably taking a savage beating from more experienced players. Four maps are provided, as well as all three playable factions: the Allies, the Soviets and the new Empire of the Rising Sun (i.e. Japan).

Whereas vanilla Command & Conquer has always offered a semi-realistic take on the world, the style of Red Alert is altogether more exaggerated, with units that range from your traditional infantry to armoured bears who can be shot out of cannons and parachuted into the enemy base. Much like the franchise's famous FMVs, all of this is done in a firmly tongue-in-cheek manner, resulting in a rather silly but nonetheless engaging experience. Visually, the colour palette is a good deal more saturated than that of Tiberium Wars, and accordingly the unit and building designs are more exaggerated, looking chunkier and more toy-like. Lower-grade units such as infantry are still a bit too small on the screen, making it difficult to distinguish between, say, a Peacekeeper and a Javelin Soldier (a long-running complaint I have with these games), but otherwise the design is bold, striking and richly saturated.

Otherwise, the mechanics are largely the same as those of Tiberium Wars. The unit names and designs may be different, but the basic principles are more or less unchanged. The biggest monkey wrench comes in the form of the added emphasis on naval combat. Many buildings and a few units as well can be placed on both land and sea, which gives the gameplay an added dimension. I still haven't quite got the hang of it (naval combat was always my weakest point in RTSes like Warcraft II and Age of Empires), but it seems fun and adds a degree of variety to the tactics that are available to you.

Right now, certain aspects of the gameplay do feel rather unwieldy, although there's nothing here that can't be changed with a bit of balancing and polishing. The controls seem a tad unresponsive, a combination (I suspect) of lag on the beta server and the fact that, like Tiberium Wars, the frame rate has a forced cap of 30 fps (words cannot express how much this irritates me, especially in a fast-paced game like this). Likewise, the interface looks and feels somewhat clunky, which is odd given that it's virtually identical to the one used in the previous Command & Conquer games. That aspect of the art could, I suspect, do with a bit of a polish to make things feel a bit more finished. Also, it may just have been my experience, but currently the Allies feel somewhat underpowered in comparison to the two other races. So far, the only game I've won while playing as them was against a complete beginner who hadn't even managed to build any troops before I steamrolled his/her base, whereas I had considerably more successes while playing as the Soviet Union. I haven't tested the Empire of the Rising Sun to any great extent yet, although their heavy emphasis on mechanical, "Transformers"-like units it's really to my personal tastes. Oh, and I've experienced a fair number of crashes and connection failures, but that's par for the course with unfinished software.

Overall, what I've seen looks fairly promising. Tiberium Wars definitely has a slicker, more polished feel, and it's unclear whether this discrepancy is down to the fact that Red Alert 3 is still in beta, but I'd hazard a guess that, with just over two months to go before release, there won't be any major changes made to the core mechanics between now and then. On balance, therefore, while the saturated, exaggerated world of Red Alert 3 appeals more to my tastes than the more realistic, sci-fi-oriented Tiberium Wars, I could see myself sticking with the latter in the long run.

JESUS CHRIST WHAT A HORRIBLE TRANSFER

After the Escape from New York Blu-ray scandal broke, I knew I just had to see the disc for myself. Of course, the screen captures were pretty damning in their own right, but there's something about seeing it in motion that makes it all the more "real". Thank goodness for LoveFilm, who dispatched it to me yesterday. It was waiting for me today when I got home from work, and my goodness, it is, if possible, even worse than I expected.

Quoth Lyris:

As someone who's authored and encoded DVDs, it is my opinion that the source looks like a processed standard-def studio tape (and not a very appealing one, either): that is, marginally better than DVD, but way below 1080p standard. The film grain structure (or what's left of it) is thick and clumpy, it looks undoubtedly SD.

If Optimum are reading this, I urge them to look into it. Did the master tape come from France? Could there possibly have been a language barrier issue? For example, if Optimum requested an HDCAM SR tape of "Escape from New York", the facility could have made them one, using a Digital Betacam tape as a source. Optimum receive the HDCAM SR tape and make a disc out of it, completely unaware of the original source material.

Escape from New york
(Optimum UK, AVC, 18.8 GB)

Grit, grime and zombies... oh my!

Copied and pasted from the previous post...

In terms of presentation, 20th Century Fox's transfer is very good, seemingly representing the varied source formats (35mm, 16mm, high definition video) accurately. There may have been a small amount of noise reduction, but nothing too severe. A few of the HDV-based shots exhibit some noticeable haloing, but I'm assuming that this was inherent to the source format rather than something intentionally applied for the BD release. Either way, only a handful of shots are affected. The rest looks excellent.

28 Weeks Later
(20th Century Fox, USA, AVC, 29.6 GB)

28 times better

Tonight, I finally got round to watching 28 Weeks Later on Blu-ray after much procrastination, and I'm glad I didn't just leave it to gather dust on the shelf. This is a much better film than its predecessor, 28 Days Later, which I always found rather overrated, mainly due to its cheap consumer grade video camerawork and clumsy "who are the real monsters?" themes. The sequel has these themes too, and it also has a lot of choppy hand-held camerawork, but it does both of them considerably better than its predecessor, and the fact that it's shot on film means that it no longer feels like amateur hour.

It's interesting that the director, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, is Spanish, given that one of his compatriots, Alfonso Cuarón, created a similarly effective portrayal of a post-apocalyptic Britain in the excellent Children of Men. Unlike Cuarón's film, however, 28 Weeks Later is unabashedly a horror film - grim, violent and pacey. I'm actually extremely impressed by the plotting, in that it was one of those films where I could never precict what was going to happen next, and it threw me in a loop on several occasions when it came to who died and who survived.

Robert Carlyle may get top billing, but to be honest his screen time is somewhat limited. The film truly belongs to his character's two children, played by Imogen Poots and Mackintosh Muggleton, both of whom are revelations, never once giving off the impression that they are actually "acting". Catherine McCormack also shines in a brief role.

In terms of presentation, 20th Century Fox's transfer is very good, seemingly representing the varied source formats (35mm, 16mm, high definition video) accurately. There may have been a small amount of noise reduction, but nothing too severe. A few of the HDV-based shots exhibit some noticeable haloing, but I'm assuming that this was inherent to the source format rather than something intentionally applied for the BD release. Either way, only a handful of shots are affected. The rest looks excellent.

Is this the new Traffic?

Over the last few days, a veritable shitstorm has erupted on the Internet regarding Optimum's recent UK Blu-ray release of John Carpenter's Escape from New York. The word of mouth was that this was in fact nothing more than a standard definition upconvert. Comparative screen captures seemed to confirm this, indicating virtually no improvement in detail over the UK Special Edition DVD release (and a rather unpleasant green tint to boot).

Optimum were swift to rebuke these claims, stating, in an announcement posted at DVD Times, that

We at Optimum always try to provide our customers with the best possible quality video from the best source available to us. All our titles meet the required line count to qualify as 'High Definition', i.e. 1080p or 1080i. Contrary to reports on some fan forums, we have been assured by our supplier that the original source for the Blu-ray of Escape from New York is HD. We have not released and we will not release films on Blu-ray from masters we know to be up-scaled from SD PAL. The quality of HD masters of older films can vary and we are sorry if you are unhappy with the quality of picture on Escape From New York Blu-ray. Should a better master become available for this or any other Optimum title then we will endeavour to publish it as soon as feasible.

Unfortunately, the evidence, to my eyes, would seem to be stacked against Optimum. I'm sure they were indeed "assured by their supplier" that the master handed to them was HD. Unfortunately, their supplier is Studio Canal, whose track record, in either HD or SD, is not exactly a shining beacon of light. Further faecal matter hit the fan yesterday when pictures emerged of a version of the film that has been broadcast on HDNet, blowing the Optimum release out of the water.

To quote Lyris:

The BD release screen grabs posted look very much like a Digital Betacam tape (or other unadulterated standard definition source) that has been scaled to 1920x1080 then processed. That would explain the SLIGHT gain in detail on the BD: it's not been low-pass filtered like the DVD will have been prior to compression. Since Optimum have denied that this is the case, we'll just have to say it's a poor HD release.

One thing doesn't change though: the review scores that this has received at some sites are cause for concern.

So, is Escape from New York on Blu-ray the new Traffic? I can't be 100% sure, but what I do know is that it's one sorry-looking disc.

This is a joke, I take it

Yesterday, New Line's US Blu-ray release of Dark City arrived from DVD Pacific, hot on the heels of my discovery that it had been molested by invasive digital tampering procedures. This is despite it receiving largely positive praise from most reviewers, but, as always, the pictures tell the truth that the words themselves do not.

Watching the disc tonight was a very unpleasant experience. This is not because I didn't like the film: on the contrary, I thought it was excellent, and have now added it to my "movies I can't believe I waited this long to see" list. My reason for not enjoying the experience was that, while virtually every shot in this film is an amazing, innovative piece of art, every single one of them is ruined by some form of digital meddling, whether that's grain removal, sharpening or softening. This film should look amazingly atmospheric and film-like, and all of that is removed by this shoddy, amateurish transfer. Whoever was responsible for it should be ashamed of themselves.

New Line's high definition output that I've seen has, so far, been problematic, to put it politely. That's three out of four discs (Dark City, The Golden Compass, Pan's Labyrinth) that have been ruined by utterly ridiculously levels of digital tampering, and another (The Orphanage) that has been taken from a source with a resolution lower than 1920x1080. The latter is not necessarily New Line's fault - it may simply have been what the Spanish production company delivered to them - but it does mean that I have yet to purchase a single disc from them that is anything more than deeply flawed. While Sony are doing everything they can to preserve the integrity of the films under their jurisdiction, New Line seem to be intent on fucking up the heritage of the medium by systematically mangling their catalogue of titles. I sincerely hope that the recent acquisition of the company by Warner Bros. means that any future releases are removed from the hands of the incompetent clowns responsible for this desecration of Dark City.

Go faster, my son!

After owning my current system for over two months, I finally decided, last night, that now was the time to start putting my excessive cooling solution to good use and overclock my processor. Back when I was putting the system together, I decided to go with an OEM 3 GHz Core 2 Duo, foregoing a quad core system in favour of a dual core system with a higher clock speed. There were two reasons behind this. First, and most obvious, was simple economics: a dual core system, particularly an OEM one, costs considerably less than a quad core system with a comparable clock speed. Secondly, although I do a bit of video encoding here and there, most of the applications I use (games, mainly) don't take advantage of multi-core technology anyway, meaning that, 99% of the time, I'd be unlikely to see any performance gains with four cores as opposed to two.

Anyway, last night, I cranked my 3 GHz system up to just over 3.4 GHz, and so far have had no stability problems. I'll be squeezing a few more megahertz out of it later today and intend to keep going until it gets unstable. It's quite amazing how long it's taken me to hop aboard the overclocking bandwagon, given my love of fast hardware, and given how easy it is to do these days.

Update, August 1st, 2008 02:17 PM: Up to 3.6 GHz now with no problems so far.

But... but... grain!

Paramount's HD DVD release of Babel features a stellar transfer (note: the MPEG-2 Blu-ray version is not reviewed here) which shows off the varied methods of photography to great effect. From the rough, 16mm Moroccan scenes to the 35mm anamorphic look of Tokyo, there's really nothing to complain about here barring some minor artefacting. Predictably, not all reviewers were quite so impressed, some of them labelling the abundant grain a "problem with the transfer" (morons), but I'll let you judge for yourselves using the images below.

Babel
(Paramount, USA, AVC, 25.8 GB)

These are the hands that ruined a movie

What the hell do you call this? Good grief, it looks like someone took a dump and sealed it between the two layers of this BD-50. This is one of the worst high definition transfers I've ever seen, and it reflects very badly on Disney that they thought it was in an acceptable state for release. I'm not convinced that any additional commentary is necessary on my part: just look at the pictures, as they do a more than adequate job of conveying the sheer awfulness of this disc.

Gangs of New York
(Buena Vista, USA, VC-1, 38.8 GB)