VIDEO:
I had very high expectations going into this move for a number of reasons. First, I had waited to watch it for so long in HD, I expected an “A” list title to receive the “A” list treatment. Second, with a “newer” release I expected an upgrade over the mostly catalog titles that I have been reviewing lately. Unfortunately, I was let down in a big way.
The encode is done in a VC-1 1080p presentation, that is extremely starved in the bitrate department, and boy does it show. From the opening scene, compression issues arise in the backgrounds as well as the foreground. At first, I thought it might possible be grain, until I got up from my seat to get about 2 feet away from the screen and I was greeted with what looked to be “mini-macroblocks”, which from my normal seating distance shows up as video noise. I then popped up the bitrate meter on the PS3 and was astounded to see a bitrate of 7.9 Mbps! That is damn low for HD content, and frankly, I’m not surprised that it didn’t look worse! From this point on, I was on the lookout for this type of phenomenon, and it appeared again quite frequently in the presentation in low light situations. In one such case, DiCaprio and Connelly are speaking on the porch of an orphanage, and the camera pans back and forth between the two of them, out of about 5 sequences of each character, the video noise only showed up in one of them! Why were the other 9 OK and the other one it was present? Hard to tell, but I wasn’t that impressed.
Unfortunately, that isn’t the only thing that is wrong in the video department. Banding is quite evident in a lot of scenes, specifically in the skyline and in the setting sun. Fine detail is lacking at times, especially in the backgrounds of the forest on the longer shots where instead of seeing individual leaves, you are left with a more DVD like picture of the leaves blending into a green blob.
The highlights of the presentation though are the exterior shots, which have a tendency to be very lifelike, especially when there are close-ups of our main characters. Overall, I’m sure that many will enjoy this presentation on smaller displays, but on my 88-inch screen, there was more to dislike than like in this one. There was plenty of space made available on this disc for content since it is a BD50, but I have to wonder if having an uncompressed PCM track and a low bitrate VC-1 encode was the best choice on this one?
It's interesting in that the usual HD DVD zealots have nothing to really defend so they just fall back to faith that Warner did the best they could and blu-ray owners need to either shut up or give up Warner completely.
Josh Z is doing a good job of hedging his bets by attacking the bitrate meter and how everyone else can't read it right even though it's not accurate anyways.
I'm so sick of Warner, I absolutely dispise them. They used to be one of my top 3 studios on DVD. I'm not sure if I should pick up Rio Bravo and The Cowboys this week. It says a lot about a studio which caters toward a crap format like HDDVD.
I've been sick of them for some time. I just can't understand how a company can be so oblivious to the HD formats. The worst thing about all of this is they have so many great titles. I stopped buying Warner titles a while back and won't start until they do separate encodes AND deliver great PQ on BR.
Josh Z got totally oWned in that thread. I love it. The HDDVD tool got smacked so hard he ran crying with his tail between his legs. I can't believe this guy is even allowed to reivew Blu-ray titles on DVDTalk.com!
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Latest Warner titles showing weakness of HDDVD spec.
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