Technology

How the West Was Won: SmileBox vs. flat

As an addendum to my earlier post on Warner's magnificent Blu-ray release of How the West Was Won, I have, by popular demand, included a few screen captures comparing the SmileBox version with the standard "flat" formatted edition. Superficially, the SmileBox version appears to demonstrate an increased level of sharpness, but in reality I suspect that this comes from an added amount of edge enhancement, and that there is no actual gain in real world detail. There is a small amount of haloing in some shots on both versions, but, in the case of the flat version, I'm not convinced that this was added digitally but rather is an optical or lens effect (don't quote me on that, though - I could be mistaken). Either way, the ringing is accentuated in the SmileBox version - check out the edges of hat brims in particular, not to mention the curves at the top and bottom of the screen in the SmileBox version.

Ultimately, I definitely favour the flat version, but others may disagree, arguing that the SmileBox version is a more faithful approximation of the film's original theatrical exhibition.

Example 1
(Left: SmileBox version; Right: flat version)

Example 2
(Left: SmileBox version; Right: flat version)

Example 3
(Left: SmileBox version; Right: flat version)

Example 4
(Left: SmileBox version; Right: flat version)

Example 5
(Left: SmileBox version; Right: flat version)

Warner accidentally releases really detailed BD

I often think that Warner tend to release the most underwhelming high definition discs of the lot. While Universal have put out some almighty cock-ups, they have also released some excellent-looking titles, particularly where there newer films are concerned. In contrast, a lot of Warner's material just tends to look above average, with virtually every title being afflicted by some degree of filtering, robbing the image of detail. (I actually laughed out loud when someone described Lions Gate's filtered MPEG-2 re-release of The Descent as having been "Warner'd".) Recently, however, I began to hear very good things about Warner's Blu-ray release of How the West Was Won, and decided I had to see for myself.

My copy arrived yesterday, and golly, yes, this is an amazing-looking disc. In actual fact, I can't think of a single other disc that demonstrates this level of detail. As is widely known, How the West Was Won was shot in Cinerama, employing three separate cameras filming in synchronisation, with the three resulting 35mm negatives being projected side by side. The result is a phenomenal level of detail which goes well beyond what the 1920x1080 resolution of full HD is capable of. This release contains two separate versions of the film, the first a standard "flat" presentation in a 2.89:1 aspect ratio, and the second a "SmileBox" version emulating the curved "wraparound theatrical experience". The latter is obviously only an emulation of the original experience, given that none of us have curved televisions or projection screens (if I'm mistaken, let me know!), so I ultimately found myself favouring the "flat" presentation, but it's nice of Warner to have provided both versions, allowing the viewer to decide how they want to experience the film.

Screen captures are included below. Marvel at the sheer level of sumptuous detail on display in them.

How the West Was Won
(Warner, USA, VC-1, 35.5 GB)

Dead format + cheap-ass discs = a fun night at the movies

Ever since the demise of HD DVD, the price of standalone players as sky-rocketed, while, at the same time, the exact opposite has happened to the media they play. Over at HMV's UK web site, a number of HD DVD titles, some of them very good, are being pawned off for silly amounts of money, starting at £2.99 per title. Always on the look-out for a bargain, I picked up Disturbia, an extremely derivative but actually rather enjoyable rip-off of Hitchcock's Rear Window, starring that annoying kid with the stupid name from Transformers and the new Indiana Jones film. I also grabbed A Mighty Heart (Angelina Jolie in blackface FTW!!!) and The Frighteners (a sort of half-way point between Peter Jackson's earlier adventures with over the top exploitation romps and his later obsession with poorly edited, overly long CGI reels).

Disturbia features a rather good transfer taken from a decent master, albeit one that has been excessively grain reduced. The grain can't have been that heavy to begin with, as facial features are, for the most part, still there, but it does mean that the image has a somewhat synthetic appearance, particularly in the opening sequence in which LaBeouf and his pops mash some fish and then, in a curious Karmic twist, get mashed themselves while on the road. Still, not bad at all for under three quid.

Disturbia
(Paramount, UK, AVC, 19 GB)

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Blu-ray impressions

Yesterday, my brother received his copy of the Blu-ray release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which provided our nocturnal viewing entertainment. This was my second time seeing the film and my brother's first, but I think our impressions were largely the same: it's entertaining, and its heart is in the right place, but you can't compare it to Raiders of the Lost Ark, probably my favourite action-adventure movie of all time. I'm not even sure you can put it in the same league as the first two sequels... although, that said, there is nothing as irritating in Crystal Skull as Kate fucking Capshaw in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Instead, we get a somewhat underused Karen Allen, but you know what? Kudos to Steven Spielberg and co for bringing her back as a romantic interest for Harrison Ford rather than going down the more predictable route of pairing Shia LaBeouf up with a younger woman. It's pretty unusual to see a romantic pairing between characters close to the age of drawing their pension in a Hollywood blockbuster, and dare I say it a tad more convincing than the alternatives.

It's reassuring to see that Ford has still got what it takes to portray an albeit slightly slower, more gristled Indy, still able to hold his own in the action set-pieces. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for Spielberg and Lucas, whose direction and script are the areas in which the film feels the most stale. There's a "going through the motions" feel to a lot of the material, and I suspect that, ultimately, neither of these men is the same person they were when they made the original trilogy. Meanwhile, the over-reliance on CGI, CGI-generated UFOs and, worst of all, CGI-generated comic relief animals, feels out of place in an Indiana Jones film. (Although I'll grant you that the UFOs portrayed in the film are no more absurd than the notion of a cup granting eternal life, as in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.) Still, I can't say it bored me for a second, and when the lights came up I certainly felt suitably entertained.

Transfer-wise, Paramount's BD is very nice indeed. I'm not sure I'd put it in the upper echelon of HD presentations, as it's not the most detailed image I've seen, and I'm pretty sure at least some grain reduction was done somewhere in the chain (it's odd that Spielberg apparently fought tooth and nail with Lucas to shoot this on film rather than digitally, because a lot of the time it's all but grainless), but there's nothing overly destructive to glimpse. Given the technological changes that have taken place in the last couple of decades (CGI and the use of digital intermediates, to name but two), it's unsurprising that Crystal Skull is, visually speaking, the odd one out in the series, but, regardless of Spielberg's cinematographic choices, the film looks great on Blu-ray and is another sterling effort from Paramount.

Oddly enough, though, I can't really say the same about the audio. We both felt that there was something lacking, and I think Dan Ramer's review at DVD File sums it up best:

The lossless TrueHD 5.1 is quite nice, but surprisingly unimpressive. All the right elements are there. [...] And yet, I came away with the distinct impression that the dynamic range is a tad lacking. I had to pump up the gain by 6 dB to attain dialog loudness parity with other BDs. And even with the gain turned up that high, the sound effects didn't have that visceral bite that satisfies. This is a wholly adequate track, but I expected a demo-quality experience.

 
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
(Paramount, USA, AVC, 34.1 GB)

Sleeping Beauty Blu-ray impressions (long post)

On Tuesday, I received my copy of Sleeping Beauty, the first of Disney's animated classics to make it to Blu-ray. A 2-disc set (plus an utterly pointless "bonus DVD" version glued to the front cover), this Platinum Edition was quite clearly an extremely cost- and labour-intensive undertaking, and you can read more about the process in a very interesting interview with Theo Gluck, Director of Library Restoration and Preservation for Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, as well as an interview with the considerably less informed Sara Duran-Singer, Senior Vice-President of Post Production at Disney.

Of course, what I'm sure everyone wants to know is how the end product looks. I'll make this simple right off the bat: if you want a general, non-critical response, go and read any of the multitude of reviews written on various web sites that give it ratings of 100% or 10/10 and call it the best thing since sliced bread. For a slightly more in-depth analysis, read on.

First of all, let's be clear about one thing: this is not the Sleeping Beauty that was released in cinemas in 1959. What I mean by that is that it is subject to the same degree of clean-up and revisionism that Disney has applied to the home video releases of its more prestigious animated titles since the Masterpiece Edition DVD of Alice in Wonderland in 2004 (I'm discounting red-headed stepchildren like The Aristocats and The Fox and the Hound, which were subjected to considerably less rigorous treatment). In other words, any trace of film grain has been scrubbed away, the colours have been altered (quite substantially, in some instances), and it essentially now looks like a film that was made in 2008 rather than 1959. Oddly enough, when something similar was done to Patton for 20th Century Fox's recent Blu-ray release of that title, cinephiles the world over were up in arms. When Disney does it to their animated films, however, there is a curious lack of uproar. Perhaps it's because, as an animated film, certain narrow-minded individuals don't believe it to be worthy of "serious" attention? I doubt that this is the case, however - a brief glance at any number of film-related forums will reveal dozens of people who clearly love the film dearly and are over the moon about this new Blu-ray release.

That's absolutely fine. I'm glad that people are enjoying this new disc, and have absolutely no problem with that. My concern is with the technicians at Disney, whose house practice of scrubbing the grain from their films goes completely against what I'm looking for when I pop a disc into my player. If a film never had grain to start with, then fine - I'm not expecting something like Ratatouille or Beauty and the Beast, both created entirely in the digital domain, to be sourced from prints (although, sometimes, I do think it would be nice). In the case of a film from the 50s, though, seeing something that has been processed to the extent that it no longer looks like it ever touched film is more than a little off-putting.

That said, for what it is, Sleeping Beauty looks very good indeed. Excellent at times, in fact. There is an extremely impressive amount of detail in the backgrounds, for example in shots 4, 8 and 9 below. The encoding is, for the most part, extremely good (barring a few isolated instances of artefacting). The expanded 2.55:1 aspect ratio (versus the 2.35:1 ratio of previous releases), greatly improves the image composition and reveals all sorts of details at the sides of the frame that were clearly intended to be seen. Unfortunately, barring the overly clean look, you also have to contend with the tell-tale side effects of such heavy noise reduction, mostly in the form of mangled outlines: take a look at the spears in shot 2, or the owl's eyes in shot 7. For a particularly destructive example, gawp at the mess that is shot 5 - by far the worst-looking few seconds on the disc and something that is, mercifully, the exception rather than the rule.

There is a final point that I would like to make: the issue of the colours. As with the Platinum Edition DVD of Peter Pan, there has been some amount of debate as to the colour timing of this release. A comparison with previous releases of the film (such as the one performed by Chuck Pennington at the Golden Age Cartoons Forum) reveals major differences, and often not for the better. Look at the various different versions of the shot of Aurora and the three fairies (the first one in Chuck's comparison): the 2008 DVD release, which is derived from the same master as the Blu-ray version, looks noticeably "off", particularly in terms of Fauna (the green fairy)'s outfit. Put simply, the colours clash and don't "read" properly. Contrast this with the previous releases, all of which look more natural. For an even more egregious example, take a look at shot 5, previously discussed above: there is far too much similarity in the different shades of blue in Merryweather's costume for the image to read properly as a whole. Compare this with the 2003 DVD release, where there was proper delineation between the different shades of blue, making the image much easier to look at rather than a mish-mash of clashing hues.

Now, Disney staff have been quick to point out in interviews that the original animation cels and backgrounds were used as a reference during the colour timing. However, I rather fear that they have missed the point here: essentially, they are neglecting the fact that the artists specifically chose colours with an eye towards how they would ultimately look when printed to film, which is obviously not going to be the same as how they look on paper or an animation cel. Warner did exactly the same with their Looney Tunes DVDs, with equally problematic results. A couple of comments on the subject can be read at Cartoon Brew. Says Eric, in the context of the Looney Tunes DVDs:

Maurice Noble [stylist and co-director on many of the Looney Tunes cartoons] once explained to me how he would over saturate the colors in a character or a scene to compensate for the inferiority of the film. Once on film, the color would be toned down to about what he intended. This is where you could run into a problem during restoration.

This is followed by a post by Jeff Kurtti, a film historian and authority on all things Disney. What he says is particularly pertinent to Disney's art practices:

The true reference point for restoration is a primary color film positive source, not the original animation art.

Studios such as Disney did extensive color testing on cel set-ups to determine how paints, backgrounds, and exposures would affect the final film image, many of the animation art colors are purposely distorted in order to "read" correctly on film. (There is a selection of camera tests like this on the "Snow White" laser disc and Platinum DVD.)

Alice (of Wonderland fame) on cels, for instance, has decidedly green blond hair, in order to "read" on film as golden yellow.

(Emphasis mine.)

Ultimately, my overall impression of this transfer is that, flaws aside, it is a very good one. It could have been a great one. However, thanks to Disney's revisionism practices, it falls shy of perfection, meaning that, as good as it is, there are a number of moments that will take observant viewers out of the film itself, which I'm sure we will all agree is never a good thing. Overall, I'd say that the massive improvement in detail makes this a more than worthwhile upgrade over the previous standard definition releases, but it's frustrating thanks to the number of things that have gone wrong along the way. Take a look at the captures below and judge for yourselves.

Sleeping Beauty
(Buena Vista, USA, AVC, 17 GB)

NB: thanks to Lyris for providing some of the screen captures.

Carrie Blu-ray impressions

Today, I got to check out my first ever MGM Blu-ray disc in the form of Carrie. As you may or may not know, 20th Century Fox has, as of 2006, taken over the distribution of MGM's titles on home video, so it is their logo that appears when you hit "Play", and, I suppose, ultimately their responsibility. Fox received a lot of flack in the earliest days of Blu-ray, for their excessively high RRPs ($40 for every title, even catalogue ones), their favouring of the outdated MPEG-2 codec and their tendency to lose a substantial amount of bonus material during the DVD-to-BD transition. (Of course, some might counter by pointing out that, out of all the major studios releasing titles in HD, Fox is the only one to have included lossless audio on every disc right from the get-go.) To cap it all, Fox disappeared off the face of the HD map for the better part of 2007, citing concerns over weaknesses in the format's copy protection. With the arrival of the new and improved (and supposedly impenetrable) BD+, Fox rejoined the fray... only for BD+ to be cracked within the week. Oddly enough, I don't feel a shred of sympathy for them.

Anyway, Fox have made some improvements to the situation, gradually transitioning over to AVC instead of MPEG-2, and generally doing a better (but still well away from perfect) job of including the extras available on existing standard definition editions of films. And, of course, they haven't done another disappearing act since the BD+ debacle turned out to be little more than hot air.

Unfortunately, for all the gains made by Fox, the people in charge of putting together their MGM titles are still labouring under the misconception that we are living in the dark ages. Bare-bones, single-layer, MPEG-2 discs devoid of all extras are the norm - in fact, I can't remember the last MGM title to carry anything more than a trailer. And that's assuming the discs come out at all - two years down the line, I'm still waiting for The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. Ultimately, the MGM crew give the impression of treating HD as little more than an afterthought, and it's because of this (and the lack of film I would actually want to buy from them) that have held me back from investigating their output at all until now.

Anyway, Carrie - how is it? Well, one thing's for sure, the specs are typical MGM - MPEG-2 encode, single-layer disc, no extras apart from a trailer, DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 remix, alongside the original mono mix. For the latter alone MGM immediately gains points over the likes of Warner, who routinely omit the original audio of their films in favour of distracting remixes. That's the strongest point in this release's favour. Otherwise, there's not much praise that can be heaped upon it, although we need to bear in mind the source materials: the image looks rather diffuse and murky, but then I doubt that Carrie ever looked razor-sharp to begin with. Grain reduction is evident in places, although not consistently, and at times the grain does look reasonably natural. It's definitely no Patton or Dark City, that's for sure. It's unclear what the source material is - Lyris suspects a print rather than the original negative - but, if this is the case, it's difficult to know whether going back to an earlier generation would have resulted in any appreciable improvement to the perceived image quality. It's a tough one overall, and I doubt that it's going to impress anyone (the "I want everything to look like a Pixar movie" crowd will complain about the grain, and the "I want films to look like film" lot will probably be equally unimpressed, albeit for different reasons), but I've seen plenty of high profile titles subjected to extensive restoration work which look a lot worse. It's certainly no worse than a lot of the shovelware put out by Universal.

Carrie
(20th Century Fox/MGM, USA, MPEG-2, 18.5 GB)

Well, slap my face! The Omen looks great!

So yeah, I ended up shelling out for the no-holds-barred 4-disc super-duper The Omen Collection, containing the original three films and the dreadful remake, instead of staying sensible and just picking up The Omen on its own. The original reason for this was that the 4-disc version was an announced with a release date of September 9th, while the single-disc version ended up being put back to October 7th. Being an impatient bugger, I decided to splash out on the earlier but more expensive release. Ultimately, of course, the 4-disc set ended up being delayed too. Still, for better or for worse, the package arrived today, and, once I'd finally finished the latest draft of my PhD's literature review, I wasted no time in cracking it open and investigating how the films looked.

"Very good indeed" is the answer. I guess the fact that my hopes for the image quality of this film on Blu-ray were not exactly high says a great deal about what a pessimist I've become. Now, before anyone asks, I'm not one of those people who believes that older films can't benefit from the HD treatment: nothing could be further from the truth. It's simply that, in my experience, older films are not always treated with the care and attention they deserve. Imagine my surprise, then, upon discovering that The Omen has been granted a rich, sumptuous, film-like transfer exhibiting few of the artefacts one tends to associate with catalogue titles that haven't been treated appropriately (and Fox, it has to be said, have been prime offenders in the past). It manages to stay crisp and detailed and with a pleasing amount of grain left intact - although it does have the "sharp but slightly diffuse" look of films from that period that were shot anamorphically and with the use of lens filters. Rest assured, though, that it's a pleasant kind of diffuseness rather than the ugly sort you get when the detail has been sucked out digitally. Essentially, it looks completely natural. No Patton, this!

To briefly sum up the other titles, Damien: Omen II looks noticeably softer than the first film, but I suspect it always looked this way. In any event, the original DVD release had the same issue in comparison with its two counterparts in SD. Detail does improve as the film goes on, but it never "pops" and almost looks unfocused at times. The Final Conflict, meanwhile, is a lot closer in terms of its overall look to the first film, although, in our brief run through it, Lyris was quick to draw my attention to some noise reduction artefacts in one of the darker scenes. More details on these titles once I've had a chance to watch them properly.

As for the remake, well, I don't plan on watching it any time soon, but from the brief glance I took at it, it looks to be a pretty good presentation of a recent film. It was one of Fox's first Blu-ray releases, and features an MPEG-2 encode on a BD-25, with the mild compression artefacts you'd expect. It also, surprisingly enough, exhibits less detail than the original Omen, but I suspect that this has more to do with the cinematographic choices than any tampering at the mastering end.

So, thank you, Fox, for transferring the original, a true classic, properly and not Pattonizing it. I never expected it to look this good and, as a result of my expectations being exceeded considerably, I now have a big smile on my face (although the fact that I've reached another milestone in my PhD work might also have something to do with that). And, as an added plus, the original mono tracks (and 2.0 surround for the third film) are present and correct in addition to lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1 remixes.

The Omen
(20th Century Fox, USA, AVC, 22.5 GB)

Mother of Tears Blu-ray impressions

Mother of Tears recently became the first Dario Argento film to get a high definition release (well, discounting his Masters of Horror episode Jenifer, put out by Anchor Bay last year), having been released on Blu-ray by French label Seven Sept. I ordered a copy, and it arrived today. Unfortunately, as I suspected would be the case, it's coded for Region B only, which is less than thrilling for Region A people such as myself. It also insists on enabling French subtitles whenever you select the English audio track, but neglects to provide you with a means of turning them off again (this "feature" afflicts a number of French DVDs and BDs). Luckily, those of us in PC-land who are armed with a copy of AnyDVD HD can easily correct both of these errors.

The disc is a single layer BD-25, and the film has been treated to a VC-1 encode. Unfortunately, while there are some nice things about the transfer, there are also a number of problems. Chiefly, the image appears to have been quite heavily noise reduced, resulting in waxy facial features and textures, with some edge enhancement added on top to give it that unnatural, digital look. It's not a dreadful transfer by any means, and it's a noticeable step up from Optimum's DVD, but, as I always say, saying a high definition release looks better than a DVD is about the most back-handed compliment you can pay it. Screen captures are, as usual, below.

Mother of Tears
(Seven Sept, France, VC-1, 16.7 GB)

How to treat your customers with respect

A big round of applause to Polish developer/publisher CDProjekt for actually giving their customers the respect they deserve. While Electronic Arts continue to shaft consumers with draconian digital rights management, CDProjekt have not only gone on record encouraging the rest of the PC games industry to abandon DRM altogether, they have also seen fit to reward people who bought their RPG The Witcher by providing a massive revision of the game completely free of charge.

The new version of the game, labelled the Enhanced Edition, is a direct response to community and critical feedback and contains a massive number of bug fixes, improved dialogue and animation, interface modifications and a host of other tweaks. The version on store shelves, which, as far as I can tell, will completely replace the original version once supplies are exhausted, also comes with a bunch of additional goodies including a soundtrack CD, a strategy guide book, a map and a "making of" DVD, but, for those who already own the game and don't want to buy another copy, most of this is available to download for free.

I applaud CDProjekt, I really do. I don't consider The Witcher a masterpiece, but the news that this new edition had been released was enough to prompt me to crack open the DVD case again and give the new and improved version of the game a whirl, and I'm definitely well on the way to sinking in several more hours of play-time. I also think that, if more companies took this attitude instead of looking to screw their fans at every opportunity (EA, I'm looking at you again), we would see far less piracy. Case in point: the DRM restrictions placed on Spore were intended to reduce the number of people playing pirated copies, but an unauthorised DRM-free version of the program was available on the major P2P networks before the boxed copy was released, and the irony is that those who download a bootleg for free will have a far more hassle-free experience than those who actually fork out for a retail copy.

Or, to use another example, Mass Effect. Like a growing number of EA-published games, the PC version features SecuROM DRM. I tried out the Xbox 360 version last night, and could really see myself getting into it. Unfortunately, I'm a died-in-the-wool PC gamer at heart and, try as I might, I simply can't get used to controlling the game with a gamepad (I believe that the ideal control system in most cases, but particularly for first- and third-person action games, is a keyboard/mouse combo), so ideally I'd like to pick up the PC version. However, thanks to SecuROM, I won't be doing this, so EA can consider themselves to have lost a sale to me because of their automatic assumption that anyone interested in playing their games is a filthy rotten pirate. Sucks for both of us.

Update, September 26th, 2008 05:40 PM: I've just discovered that another EA title and one of my most anticipated purchases of the year, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, will also feature the same DRM implementation and sneaky rootkit shenanigans as Spore and Mass Effect. In their immense magnanimity, however, EA have decreed that customers will be allowed to install the game not three times but a whopping five. How generous of them! I'm sure I'll eventually come across some means of playing it, but I certainly won't be installing a retail copy on my machine.

I have a new toy

Today, I found myself in possession of an Xbox 360 Arcade System. If you've been reading my brother's blog, you'll know that his Xbox 360 recently died a tragic death. It came back the other day after being repaired after Microsoft refused to service it (apparently it didn't have enough red rings or something), sounding like a vacuum cleaner thanks to its new cooling system, which we both agreed wasn't ideal for watching movies: until it pegged it, it doubled as both a games console and our HD DVD player.

With prices of standalone HD DVD players having gone through the roof after being discontinued, I decided that the only semi-cost-effective solution to having a way of playing my 60+ HD DVD titles was to pick up a 360 myself. I ended up getting a reasonable deal on the Arcade package, which gives you five free mini-games, plus a retail game of your choice (I went with Mass Effect, which I haven't checked out yet), and it arrived today. The timing was, though I say it myself, impeccable, as Lyris' 360 died yet another death within two hours of the new system's arrival.

The irony of the situation is that I've never bought a single console game in my life, and yet I now own both of the current generation of games consoles. (I hear there's a little thing called the Wii as well, but last time I checked there wasn't very much software available for it that actually qualified as what I would call "games".)

It's Keira Knightley HD Screen Capture Day aboard the HMS Whimsy

...well, not really, she just happens to appear in both the films I've put under the magnifying glass. First up is King Arthur, a rather mediocre cash-in on the whole medieval war epic craze by Jerry Bruckheimer and friends, which arrives on Blu-ray with rather odd transfer that virtually defines the word "inconsistent". Its "look" seems to change on a virtually shot by shot basis, going from noticeably edge enhanced and undetailed to completely natural-looking and razor sharp, and from virtually grain-free to extremely rough and grainy. Sometimes the grain is extremely clumpy, other times it looks very natural. This often happens multiple times within the same scene, and I'm at a loss to explain it.

The bottom line is I just don't know what to say about this disc. Sometimes it looks stunning, other times it looks quite disappointing, and everywhere in between.

King Arthur
(Buena Vista, USA, AVC, 32.1 GB)

Up next is Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, an even worse film but one with a considerably more consistent transfer. Actually, this one is pretty close to perfect. Some very mild compression artefacts are visible at times, but broadly speaking only if you're scrutinising for them. The only other flaw in this transfer is a very odd moment in the final third of the film, just before the sword-fight which takes place on a water wheel, where, for a single shot only, the entire image suddenly seems to drop to a lower resolution with lots of visible jaggies. Actually, it looks a lot like the Weinstein Company's train-wreck of a BD for 1408. This shot lasts for less than a second and is easy to miss, but I spotted it the first time I watched the film and thought "What the hell?" It's really the only negative thing I can say about this otherwise stellar disc, and it lasts for a fraction of a per cent of the running time. The rest of the time, it looks like this:

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
(Buena Vista, USA, AVC, 32.1 GB)

Film on Blu-ray in "looking like film" shocker

On Saturday, I received my copy of The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration on Blu-ray, containing all three films in the series, the transfers for the first two being derived from new restorations carried out by Robert A. Harris, arguably the best man in the field of film restoration. The Godfather Part III, intriguingly enough, is the best-looking of the bunch on Blu-ray, although to what degree this is due to the state of the elements, the way these elements were manipulated, or Coppola's original aesthetic choices, is unclear.

What is clear is that this disc constitutes the new gold standard to which all film-sourced transfers in high definition should aspire. I was floored by how good this disc looks. As a broad rule, I've tended to find that the best-looking titles released in high definition are invariably those sourced from a digital intermediate rather than film elements, with film-sourced materials generally either being treated poorly (see many of Universal's back catalogue titles) or simply having less available "resolution" to begin with due to the inherent shortcomings of a process which results in reduced quality with each subsequent generation. The Godfather Part III, however, is up there with the best of the DI-sourced transfers. I can see no evidence of any sort of tampering - the grain is wonderfully reproduced, the detail is excellent, and (a rarity, I've found, in film-sourced transfers) there is no artificial edge enhancement or ringing to be found. This would be a definite 10/10 were it not for the fact that the compression seems slightly dicey at times - strange, given that the bit rate is approaching 40 Mbit/sec more or less throughout.

Still, a phenomenal achievement throughout and one that has raised the bar as far as transfers for catalogue titles are concerned.

The Godfather Part III
(Paramount, USA, AVC, 44.3 GB)

There's an excellent article on the restoration process at the American Society of Cinematographers web site.

Site update

It occurred to me today that, with all the Ren & Stimpy screen captures I'd been posting lately, my main news page had been getting pretty cluttered. More crucially, I'd imagine it was starting to take a long, long time to load all these images for people with slower connections. With that in mind, I've decided to make use of Movable Type's "MTEntryMore" tag for posts with excessive numbers of images. Basically, what this means is that, in order to view the full post, you'll have to follow the link to the individual entry page (e.g. this one for Ren Needs Help and Ren Seeks Help): on the index, category and monthly archive pages, you'll just see the first few paragraphs of text followed by a clickable link to the individual entry. I appreciate that this might be a bit of a pain for visitors with faster connections, but it should lighten the load for those whose Internet connections aren't up to the task of quickly crunching through over 400 jpegs.

I've edited all the Ren & Stimpy posts to take this new feature into account, and will be applying it to any future posts that I feel warrant it.

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I know kung fu, doop-dee-doo!

My copy of the Blu-ray release of Kill Bill Volume 1 arrived yesterday while I was at work. We watched it in the evening to put my brother's beefy new sound system through its paces: finally, uncompressed PCM 5.1 support aboard the HMS Whimsy! It was my first time watching the film in a while, and I have to admit that, although I still got a lot of enjoyment out of it, it went ever so slightly down in my estimation. While more or less everything in the House of Blue Leaves and beyond is top quality entertainment, I must confess to finding quite a lot of the stuff along the way plodding and overly focused on banal dialogue. In that regard, it has something in common with Quentin Tarantino's most recent film, Death Proof, which had a great final half-hour but meandered along for its first 80 minutes obsessing over trite conversations that I'm sure sounded very cool and absolutely fascinating to Tarantino but left me clock-watching. Kill Bill is a significantly better film overall, but it definitely suffers from similar flaws.

Seeing the US cut of the film after being used to the Japanese cut for so long was a bit of a shock to the system. In particular, I felt that the switch to black and white during the showdown with the Crazy 88 didn't really work, and ended up making it overly difficult to see what was going on (which, from a censorial standpoint, was presumably the aim all along). I also missed all the little moments of blood-letting that had been snipped away here and there: I'm not what you'd call a gore-hound, in the sense that generally speaking a movie has to be more than deliriously violent to keep me entertained, but remembering what was present in the Japanese really made me miss it. I hope Universal gets round to releasing this film in HD in Japan - or, better yet, the Weinstein Company finally puts out The Whole Bloody Affair, which they and Tarantino have been promising for god knows how long.

Image quality-wise, Volume 1, as I expected, looks more or less exactly like Volume 2 - which is to say very good, but sadly not perfect. Once again, temporal noise reduction is evident throughout, reducing the grain and giving the image a somewhat digital look. I also spotted a handful of instances of the NR causing artefacts, mostly in the anime sequence, where some of the black outlines of the animation ended up being ghosted from one frame to the next. Most of it is fairly minor, but it does baffle me that this was done in the first place. After all, the animation was created entirely in the digital domain, with the grain that is present in the final composite having been added artificially. Since the technical crew had complete control over the grain in this segment to begin with, why add it and then reduce it? Unless, that is, the NR was added specifically for the Blu-ray release (or the master from which it was derived) after all rather than at the DI stage. Ah well, at least detail is, for the most part spot on, and, NR aside, there is no other obvious digital interference, barring a smattering of what looks to me like edge enhancement in certain shots in the snow garden outside the House of Blue Leaves.

Oh, and can I just say that the PCM 5.1 track kicks major derriere? I haven't compared the compressed Dolby Digital 5.1 track yet, so I've no idea how big a difference the uncompressed PCM format makes, but it certainly gave me a new appreciation of the importance of having a decent home audio system.

Kill Bill Volume 1
(Buena Vista, USA, AVC, 29.3 GB)

The spirits without

I picked up a couple of Blu-ray discs yesterday in a sale at Zammo that I probably wouldn't otherwise have bought were it not for the fact that they were on sale in a "2 for £20" deal. (Anyway, I was in a buoyant mood because I'd just received a large sum of money that had been incorrectly taken off me in taxes over the past twelve months of so, and felt like treating myself.)

One was Tekkonkinkreet, which caught my eye a while ago because it's one of those rare anime productions that I actually think has a semi-interesting visual style. The other, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, is a film that I'm not a massive fan of - in fact, the only reason I tolerate its soulless, stilted, so-called "realistic" visual style is the knowledge that the various imitators it spawned (e.g. Robert Zemeckis' butt-ugly The Polar Express and Beowulf) are a whole lot worse. Still, I kept hearing about how good the BD transfer supposedly was, so eventually I got fed up waiting for it to become available for rental and decided to plonk down the cash for it.

Anyway, I took a look at it tonight, and yes, it's a very good transfer. Not perfect, but still really impressive. My purchase of the standard definition DVD release, back in 2001, actually marked something of a special event for me because it was the point at which I started becoming aware just how many DVD reviewers were full of the proverbial. Put simply, the glowing 10/10, A++ and 100% ratings for image quality didn't match my own impression of it being overly filtered and riddled with compression artefacts. But I digress. The Blu-ray release is about as far as you can get from the DVD as you can get, although a small amount of filtering has been applied and is present throughout: check the light ringing around the text in the final capture below. It's fairly minor, but it means that the disc does just fall shy of perfection. I wonder why they thought it was necessary to do this.

Oh, and, as a side note, I do like that, despite the film never having touched celluloid, someone was thoughtful enough to actually try to make it look like film by adding a sheen of grain to it. The illusion is actually quite effective and goes some way towards making the motion captured CGI visuals look slightly less clunky and fake than they otherwise would have.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
(Sony Pictures, UK, AVC, 25.2 GB)

An ode to B-movies that looks oddly glossy

Last week, I ordered the recent US Blu-ray releases of both volumes of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. I'm sure I said at some point that I wouldn't buy Volume 1 in high definition unless it was the longer, gorier Japanese cut (which most people know as the version which includes the House of Blue Leaves fight scene in full colour, but which in fact also features increased bloodshed and some additional tweaks here and there), but that doesn't appear to be anywhere on the horizon at the moment. Anyway, the image quality of my Japanese DVD of Volume 1 is so god-awful I decided "to hell with it" and ordered the cut American BD.

Due to a delay in dispatching, Volume 1 hasn't arrived yet, but Volume 2 turned up yesterday while I was at work, and I took a look at it last night. The bottom line is that this is a good transfer and one that I suspect is an accurate representation of the master. I say this because I seem to recall that, at the time of the films' release, Tarantino stated that he wasn't entirely happy with the look of the DIs (digital intermediates) prepared for them, feeling that they were too clean and failed to successfully recreate the gritty texture of the films he was aping. (I'm afraid I haven't been able to dig up a source for this - sorry.) I have a feeling that the cleanness he complained about was in fact the level of temporal noise reduction that has been applied to the material. It's not the horrible waxy kind you see in the likes of the Dark City BD, and as such doesn't really show up to a great extent in the captures posted below, but it is noticeable when in motion, giving the image a slightly synthetic look, with textures and facial details tending to drag a bit. The closest equivalent I can think of is Flightplan, also from Buena Vista and also with the NR applied at the DI stage (a fact confirmed independently on IMDB and by my brother, who noticed the artefacts when he saw the film at the cinema).

What's particularly interesting is that, on certain occasions, particularly the extended Pai Mei section, the NR is either turned off completely or at least lowered to an acceptable level, which I take as further evidence pointing to this having been done at the DI stage rather than some inept technician simply flicking a switch when the Blu-ray transfer was being encoded. (At the risk of sounding like a jerk, most people in the encoding business don't seem to want to invest the effort required to approach things on a scene-by-scene basis, unless their name happens to be David Mackenzie and they work on DVDs of Andrzej Zulawski films.) The result is that the Pai Mei sequence is the best-looking part of the film, despite the fact that I get the feeling Tarantino shot it with an eye to it looking like the roughest, lowest budget segment.

So, overall what we have is a reasonably pleasing-looking disc that has a slightly synthetic feel to it but is, ultimately, a massive upgrade on the rather mediocre-looking standard definition release. For the most part, all 1080 lines of resolution are being put to use and many scenes feature a per-pixel level of detail. It's too bad about the NR, but, if my suspicions are correct, then nothing much can be done about that short of going back to the original camera elements and redoing all the post production work.

Kill Bill Volume 2
(Buena Vista, USA, AVC, 35.8 GB)

Top-rate film gets third-rate treatment

Much to my surprise, I discovered yesterday that one of my favourite films, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie, had, without my knowledge, received a Blu-ray release, courtesy of Canadian label TVA Films.

I was all set to pick up a copy... until, that is, I read the review at Blu-ray.com. Not only does it not feature English subtitles (not unreasonable, given that it is a French film and TVA Films services the predominantly French-speaking Québec community), it also features a 1080i transfer, with a very mushy, low detail appearance, which can be seen from the screen captures posted along with the review. (You need to register with Blu-ray.com to see them at their full 1920x1080 resolution.)

So, while I would love to own this film in high definition, and while I don't doubt that it constitutes a noticeable upgrade over the standard definition DVD releases, I'm going to exercise considerable restraint and bide my time until another studio comes along and does it justice.

The depths of insanity

I got home from work yesterday to discover a veritable storm brewing over at the AV Science Forum. The topic was The Descent, one of my favourite horror films of the last few years and also one of my favourite Blu-ray releases. The controversy surrounded what can only be described as the most baffling anomaly I have seen regarding the format so far: apparently, there are two separate encodes being sold, one AVC and the other MPEG-2.

Yes, I wasn't prepared to believe it either at first. Why on earth would Lions Gate go to the trouble of pressing two completely different discs of the same film? We're still no closer to finding the answer to this perplexing conundrum, but what we do know is that, thanks to the in-depth investigations of AVS poster msgohan, there is absolutely no doubt that two different versions are doing the rounds. Does this ultimately make any difference to the end user? Well, take a look at the captures below and judge for yourself. They show the same frame on each of the two different discs.

Now you can understand why people who were sold the MPEG-2 version are rightly aggrieved and demanding to know what on earth is going on. I own the AVC version and I too am not a happy bunny. After all, last Halloween I reviewed the AVC version and gave it a 10/10 for image quality, a rating I still stand by. However, the fact that there is no actual discernible way of knowing which version of the disc you are picking up when you purchase it complicates the review somewhat. My 10/10 rating, after all, most assuredly does not stand for the MPEG-2 encode, which not only features more noticeable compression artefacts, but has also been pre-filtered to remove grain and fine detail. Now I'm in the unfortunate position of having written a review that may or may not actually be valid on a case by case basis.

As msgohan quite rightly puts it:

Not at all what I expected. So much for a nice, fair codec comparison. The Descent has been Warner'd! What numbnuts at Lionsgate thought this was a good idea?

You can see a whole series of captures, saved as lossless .png images, comparing the same frames from both versions, here.

The first person who says it looks grainy gets a good hard slap

Way back last December, back when the ill-fated HD DVD format was still just hanging in there, I was pretty psyched when German distributor Senator Home Entertainment announced high definition releases of Planet Terror and Death Proof, the two instalments of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's ode to the B-movies of yesteryear. With US rights holders The Weinstein Company having disappeared off the face of the HD map, it looked as if Senator were our best chance of seeing these films in full 1080p glory.

Then Bob and Harvey struck. Apparently the Weinsteins didn't like the idea of these films appearing in HD in Europe before they had been given such a release stateside, so the release date was pushed back and back and back again. Then, of course, the HD DVD ship capsized, with Blu-ray editions remaining on the schedule; however, with the likelihood of them being coded for Region B only, they obviously wouldn't be of much use to Region A people like myself. Anyway, to this day they still haven't come out.

Thankfully, The Weinstein Company has finally got off its fat ass and announced US Blu-ray releases of both films. As High-Def Digest reports, they will be released separately on December 16th. No specs have been revealed yet, but I would imagine that they will mirror the currently available standard definition DVDs in terms of content - in other words, they'll be the longer extended cuts, and Rodriguez's Planet Terror will be in its home video aspect ratio of 1.78:1 instead of its theatrical 2.39:1 (when paired up with Death Proof, it was reformatted to match the ratio of its stablemate). Currently, the Japanese 6-disc release from BroadMedia is the only way to see both films as they were shown in cinemas, and by the looks of it the picture quality on the theatrical version isn't too hot.

I'm rather looking forward to seeing these films again. I rented the DVD versions of both earlier this year (these days, I'm rather reluctant to buy standard definition copies of major studio films that stand a good chance of an HD release), and liked Planet Terror considerably better than Death Proof, which was Tarantino at his most annoyingly self-indulgent, with only the killer final half-hour redeeming it. I'm definitely interested to see how the intentionally grubby, scratched-up look translates to 1080p, having only seen them in SD so far.

Quelle surprise!

I got home from work yesterday to find this waiting for me.

Now, before anyone gets a head of themselves, I need to point out that La Femme Publique is not actually shipping just yet. This is an advance copy that was sent to me by the good people at Mondo Vision, and a very nice surprise it was too. (Entering shameless self-promotion mode for a moment, it was also very cool to see my name in the "special thanks" section on the DVD credits screen.)

It's a very nice package overall, with a 24-page booklet including translations of materials from the French press kit and a new essay by Daniel Bird, as well as a handy little sheet that tells you how to set up your display properly (why more DVD releases don't include this basic information is a mystery to me). And, of course, that's in addition to the excellent transfer, exclusive interview and commentary with Andrzej Zulawski (his story about how he persuaded the 20th Century Fox executives to agree to the casting of Valérie Kaprisky is priceless), and, last but not least, the film's first ever English subtitle translation.

Permit me for one moment to sound like a shill, but, if you want a copy of the film and haven't ordered it yet, get yourself to Amazon.com and pre-order either the special edition or premium edition now.