The Shield on Bluray ; Why Sony should consider a release

[frenshprince]

Hi there,

I've read here https://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=3343, that The Shield serie is not bluray compliant for Sony, because it was shot on 16mm.
I can understand that, but disagree on their general comments.

I own the PAL and NTSC DVD edition of the complete show, and objectively think there is a lot of improvements to hope with an HD edition.

Let's take a look on all the benefits of a Bluray release.

Picture Quality
DVD video compression is mpeg2.
Results are not so great today, especially on movie with difficult photography.
Also, with four episodes on disc, compression bitrate is quite low, and you can see a lot of artefacts.
Particularly when you have a 1080p display.
AVC Bluray compression offers much better results, and more respectful to the original work.

Framerate and content
The Shield was shot on film 24p.
Unfortunately, NTSC DVD are in interlaced (29.97).
Which means that picture quality is not really close to the original, and with a lot of judder.
Unbearably to me.

Fortunately, PAL DVD are in progressive.
That means that picture quality is faithfully, and totally judder free.
It would be perfect, except that PAL DVD Edition has two major issues

1) Since PAL video are in 25 frame per second, video and audio are accelerate (4%) to fit PAL standards.
It's not really a big deal for video quality, but it is for audio.
Because, everything seems to go faster, with a different pitch tonality, and actor sometime seems talk with helium voice. Musics sound unatural as well.
I guess, if you don'k know actors original voice, you could live with that.
I can't.

2) Pal DVD are censored.
Not only for hardcore scenes (like the famous scene with Aceveda in season 3 ), but also for duration.
For exemple, season 5 final episode is 12mn shorter than original.
A lot of important scenes are cut off, because the french brodcaster had only a 45mn case on air for the shield, so he didn't make the dubbing for the entire episode.
Unbeliveable, but that's why I bought the NTSC DVD Edition.

Audio
Not really a big improvement to hope here, but PCM 24 bits track is always good to get.

Subtitles
DVD subtitles are only in four colors.
Which generates low quality and aliased text.
Bluray subtitles are far better, and more pleasant to read.

So let's resume :
Better compression, original framerate, uncensored, uncompressed audio, better subtitles.
Exactly what we need for this incredible show