Carl Th. Dreyer's Elsker Hverandre / Glomdalsbruden

[Pyoko]

Thought I'd post some impressions on the technical aspects of this disc available from DFI, containing two films by Carl Th. Dreyer: Elsker Hverandre (Love One Another) and Glomdalsbruden (The Bride of Glomdal).

The disc is region free but requires 1080i/50Hz compatibility. There are no on-disc extras, but a booklet with short essays on both films is included (in Danish and English.)

Glomdalsbruden is progressive with repeated frames to go from 17 to 25fps. Elsker Hverandre is instead interlaced with repeated fields to go from 20 to 25fps.

The most important aspect of the disc is that the digital scans used for the films are quite good. Both look very filmlike with a decent amount of detail and grain and no intentional digital tampering like sharpening or noise reduction.

Elsker Hverandre has scratches, dirt, damage and stability issues constantly throughout but I don't mind it all that much and it's a million times more preferable to an abomination like Children of Paradise. Glomdalsbruden in comparison is much clearer.

The bad thing is that the technical quality of the actual disc is not all that good, with the compression having some serious problems (the BD25 has about 10GB free space.) As you will see from the screenshots the main issue is that the darker portions of the image have a tendency to lose all detail and grain and turn into a sea of macroblocks. The compression quality also pulsates for a lack of a better word. One frame will look perfectly fine, then the next turns into mush, then after that it looks good again and so on. Here's an example with these being two consecutive frames:


The newly created digital titles also didn't make the transition to Blu-ray very well. On Elsker Hverandre they shift up and down likely because of some frame rate/interlacing conversion. On Glomdalsbruden they're still but the resolution has clearly been halved probably due to some pre-deinterlacing. Thankfully these issues are not visible in the actual film parts.

Lastly I will leave some screenshots. Overall a nice disc marred by technical issues, but watchable and I cut them some slack since they're not much of a distributor and this was their first Blu-ray.

Elsker Hverandre:



Glomdalsbruden:

[EddieLarkin]

Thanks for the info. Does that mean Glomdalsbruden is 1080p50? I wasn't even sure Blu-ray supported such an encode

[DukeOfPrunes]

Well that looks good, too bad about macroblocking and 1080i50.
Thanks for the details! Much appreciated

[Pyoko]

Originally Posted by EddieLarkin

Thanks for the info. Does that mean Glomdalsbruden is 1080p50? I wasn't even sure Blu-ray supported such an encode

It doesn't, technically the stream is still 50Hz interlaced. But if you do a straight-up conversion of a 1080p25 stream into 1080i50, during playback the two interlaced fields that make up each displayed frame will always be from the same original frame, so there is never any combing visible and the result is the same as the original progressive sequence.

[Zot!]

Thanks for the review Pyoko, I also own this disc and agree with much of your comments. I didn't however experience much of the macroblocking you mention. Perhaps your monitor has better black response, is there a particular screenshot where you think it is visible? There is the funky compression issue on certain frames, particularly with Elsker Hverandre. I was able to have a more stable image (particularly the titling, although Elsker Hverandre's titles still pulsate slightly), if I choose to display the image on a native 50Hz mode, rather than get my player to convert to 60Hz. I imagine this will depend on everybody's equipment.

All in all, I think it's important to note that both films look beautiful in motion and I recommend to anybody interested. For such a niche films, I feel that it is really quite a nice package, and presumabely the best they will ever look. I would be curious to see how it stacks up against the identical DVD release.