:)

I'm wondering if someone could convince folks like Martin Scorsese or Robert Harris to record a studio agnostic PSA about grain and the qualities of film as reproduced on blu-ray that could be attached to any release that is otherwise technically spectacular but has grain or other faithfully reproduced elements that may concern an average HD consumer.
As with OAR, I think it all comes down to education.

A fact that I'm personally pleased with PM, as even though I haven't gotten around to watching this movie on Blu-ray in its entirety yet, I've seen the movie numerous times in the past, so I ended up watching multiple scenes in the film, and it looked fantastic on my set.

~Alan

Oh well, the winter Olympics are only every 4 years and I get the impression that you like winter sports to a certain degree so I can understand your decision :)



He certainly has one of the most interesting jobs (imo) in the business and from what I have read it seems that he has good taste in westerns which is great in my book :thumbsup:



I guess that means that I get to look forward to some interesting older stuff from Columbia then, that sounds great! I hope that other studios will do similar things with regard to older titles.

I was in Nagano about a month before the 1998 games just to check it out. I didn't stay over because the gouging had already begun :) This'll be my first winter games in HD, so I can't wait to check it out

tbh all the most loved classics will come to blu-ray and that,s about that really ,,, you dont take the next generation of home video and say ahh i dont feel like releaseing anything pre-1980 lets not bother ...
because thats why people love wb and moc and criterion because they give us what we want
maybe sally and bob next door dont want on the waterfront but there is a hell of a lot of people who do

Penton - Thank you for your detailed response. I'm pretty sure the answer will be yes but do you know if the Region A and B copy of the Ghostbusters blu-ray are using the same transfer?

I dont make purchase decisions based solely on picture quality or to show off my tv.. and of late all my purchases have been catalogue titles which i find truely amazing in HD..

Its good to know titles like this are as they are intended - otherwise its easy to misinterpret them as inferior products.

Cheers,
Mick

It's getting there, but not as much interest as I thought there might be.

However many responses we get, it's an interesting exercise.

The titles that are generally popping up are those that I would expect to have seen, plus one or two "not in a million years" titles!

M

I suspect part of the problem is that many of us want certain older movies released, but in many cases don't know off the top of our heads which studio released them.

Personally, I'm just exceedingly skeptical about the practical value/potential impact of such a poll. Home video software sales is not a new enterprise; the marketers know what they're doing. I think they're well aware that the enthusiast market wants more classics than we're getting.

I'M BACK, BABY (hold your applause... thanks to DM for pleading the case, and PM for being a mensch.... and Doc? WTF? Where the hell was the poll to bring me back? I mean, we're -gunner- fans together, no? ;) )

Completely understandable and, unfortunately, fits in with my pessimism regarding this push for HD for older flicks.

It's an old yarn, often told, but worth repeating - back when I dipped my toes in the HD format quagmire, and everybody was going on about CGI flicks and eye candy, I rented three films - Serenity, Unforgiven, and Goodfellas. I hadn't seen Serenity, but figured it'd be a reasonably decent representation of a low(er) budget CGI extravaganza.

Serenity looked about as good as I thought it might, with some issues, but I was super pleased with Unforgiven - the shots through the rain were just mesmerizing, the clearly delineated shafts of light from the studio rig above the rain towers.... But it was Goodfellas that sold me - it's a bit maligned these few years later, but that was my "subtle" difference disc. I had the DVD to quickly a/b, and as Marty uses a nice mix of closeups and wider shots, you could really see where things shined... I used the crane shot of the cars in one of the early chapters to see what type of difference could be made, and was looking at background elements (bricks, fenders of cars). It's in things like the clarity of the specular highlights off the chrome, the texture of the bricks behind someones head, that lack the "fuzziness" that an upconverted 720x480 image belies.

At a Tosh event pimping their TVs and new disc format, they had two 40" LCDs setup to showcase what was then the ultimate show-off disc, Fast and the Furious. Everything was all glossy and shiny, and people were wowed by how much better-er the HD disc was. I managed to take over the players for a couple minutes, and synch'd up my HD and DVD (from the same master) discs, and put them up on equally calibrated displays.

I was pleased. For me, there was a clear difference. Then again, I knew what to look for.

The crowd (Best Buy and Futureshop employees, salespeople for these sets - I weaseled in cuz of a connection) was a bit confused. What's the difference, they thought? They both look... OK. Why is there that noisy stuff on that side. "Grain", I said. I showed them how instead of being blocky and repetive it "swam" with a certain organic quality, that this so-called noise was integral to the original negative, and that we were finally seeing at home what we'd see in a movie theatre.

They got bored and walked away to something showing off Happy Feet, I think...

I have yet to see Ghostbusters on BD, but I'm sure that both sides are right - for the uninitiated, it's a "noisy" film. For those that are a bit more engaged in the history of film and the joys/challenges of grain in the capture and projection of movies, then it would be a happy thing to see this master capture an archive worthy representation of the original work.

Before my absence in this thread, I had expressed concern about the bitrate and codec thread referenced here. Keeping the stats is a noble goal, I guess, as would be the myriad of Tier and PQ/SQ threads. But, like the much pilloried "screenshot science" often admonished here, there's a clear connection made between, say, high bitrate and a preferred codec and a subsequent quality disc. I simply do not think that the connection can be made except on a disc-by-disc basis, and that even "bitrate starved" formats were able to present gloriously cinematic presentations (Forbidden Planet, Grand Prix) whereas full 50gb, high bandwidth, lossless audio presentations of films that have been scrubbed of grain and tweaked for "pop" should not be celebrated as an accomplishment.

I'm not, for the umpteenth time, reflecting upon the format itself - not only has that ship sailed years ago, but in the end it simply did not matter to me. The film on a physical medium has always been the thing (give it to me again on 12" shiny disc and I'd be happy). This dip into HD by the studios could end tomorrow and I will have received some of my favourite films of all time in a presentation that I really do not think is going to be bettered any time soon. These are, finally, archive editions, the culmination of a home theatre hobby, the best we're going to get for (I think) decades to come.

That's why it pisses me off when they screw up a release like fav-whipping boy Patton .

There's a responsibility to get these things right from the studio. But there's also going to be a need for even more education on the grain "issue", and a real push from members of this community to support classic or older films on this format. There's a need from us to support things like Seventh Seal (a gloriously grainy black and white masterpiece).

I'm just not sure there's enough of us that do care about such things to make a dent in the grand scheme of things, and like HD audio formats before us, there's always the possibility of this format dying within half a decade.

The threat of only getting new releases of blockbusters on BD -would- be a death to the format, the dropping of classic titles that simply do not sell in numbers to warrant the care I reference above may in fact be inevitable once the studios exhaust some of their A-level classics only to find that they simply are not selling in numbers they expect (read: Close Encounters). For

I completely and entirely agree. The same argument was made on the opposite side - if (in crazyland) Warner had gone exclusive the other way, BD simply would not have been sustainable. Both formats would have either had to coexist, or have been crippled to the point of irrelevance (exclusive Warner/Uni/Paramount on one side, no Fox/Sony/etc. on the other side would not have, I think, been sustainable for long).

Thank God that didn't happen.

We now see consolidation of format, but a real lack of depth from certain studios in their releases. I've seen many a Warner bashing comment on this thread regarding their lack of lossless audio (something I too would like to see improve), without shouting from the tops of mountains in thanks for some of their tremendous catalogue releases. Hell, give me mono MP3 audio, if I can have North By Northwest look as good as it does!

2010 will be a turning point, with either a mass adoption by studios for a wide range of their releases, or the pulling back of all but the most lucrative titles that are bound to sell in numbers that warrant the effort. Nothing would make me happier to be wrong on this point, but I fear that more and more we're seeing the peak of this format with the decline around the corner, as opposed to us just now getting onto a real renaissance in the home theatre hobby.

A poll to bring you back?! Do you really want to go there? ;)

Welcome back, man! :rock:

Shark, I see you wanted your first post back to be short and sweet. :D

Pent-up thoughts on the Pent-on thread...


*cough*

Hell, I've got 2 weeks to go back over.... :)

...oh, and on the "Sony is doing right" front, my replacement Miles Davis set shipped, no questions asked:

Consumer Concerns: The Complete Columbia Album Collection | Miles Davis

It certainly has never come to this on the home video front, but it's pretty awesome to see them take responsibility for the mistakes on disc packaging and work to correct it. Companies don't often proportionally get enough credit when they fix their mistakes compare to our rants, so chock this one up as a win for the consumer...

Penton,

I can't believe that, in the mess and stress of this past fall and holiday season, I missed the stories on Sony's commitment to descriptive video service tracks. I sat down and enjoyed District 9 with some family without realizing that it had a descriptive track. It was while reading the review here on Zombieland, which I have preordered at Amazon and wanted to get an idea of what to expect on the BD, that I discovered that it had a descriptive track and that led me to do some Google exploring on BDs with such tracks which led me to the stories from back in September.

I would like to extend a belated, but extremely heartfelt thank you to you and all at Sony for taking this step. Also, if you know anyone at Universal, who have also now voiced a commitment to descriptive video service tracks on BD and DVD, please forward my thanks on to them as well. Disney included a descriptive track on Up on BD, DVD, and iTunes, so hopefully another major will be joining in here as well. I've said many times that if one major studio would commit to DVS, others would follow and now Sony has led the way.

Thanks so very much,

Chris

What the hell is a “mensch” ?
Is that good or bad?

Re.- The White Ribbon (a film which you reviewed at the Toronto Film Festival?)
In case you missed the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Language Film………..
HFPA - Nominations and Winners

And the American Society of Cinematographers nominations for best cinematography :) -
http://forum.blu-ray.com/2779790-post47.html

I might have to kick up the Zombieland descriptive track. The plainspoken descriptions have real potential to be hilarious on their own :)

What are you, meshuggenah?

It's good. :)

:)