"Club Penton" - Ask questions to Hollywood insider "Penton-Man"

[Oliver K]

Originally Posted by PeterTHX

I wonder if it's because HTF has alienated everyone because of their stance during the HD wars. I know I rarely go there now because of it.

You should reconsider your stance for the Warner chat with George Feltenstein next week. As has been said before he is the one who pushes things forward at Warner and I would hope that he will also let us in on some classics that have been announced for some time now, like Raintree County and Ben Hur.

Regarding their stance in the format war: To me it did not seem they were leaning too much to one side but maybe that was because I was not firmly on one side for most of the format war and did not care for these things that much. But even if they did life is too short to hold grudges forever and HTF is a site with a high percentage of users who like the classics of the big studios so I go there quite often.

[micks_address]

Question re Blu-Ray tech - not sure if its the right place for it.. but last night I was watching Casino Royale Blu-Ray in anticipation of buying Quantum Of Solace this friday. Havent seen Solace yet as my cinema going has been curtailed a lot the last few years for various reasons so Blu-Ray is nearly always my first showing for movies..

Anyway to my question - we actually watched the first half hour of Casino Royale Monday night - so when i popped the disc back in my ps3 and hit play - it came back on at exactly the same point where we left off...

its a really nice feature and I know the ps3 only does this with non BD Java enabled discs. The thing is - will we ever see auto resume with BD enabled Java discs or is it just to much to hope for? I dont think I've ever used the bookmarking features that come with some discs..

Cheers,
Mick

p.s was away since thursday - pretty active/vocal thread since!

[yobrenoops]

I go home for an evening of games and photoshop, come back and 2007 has literally exploded over Penton's thread. Did someone hit 88 mph?

Either way, good to see Bill back and posting!

[Doctorossi]

Originally Posted by Anthony P

what you are missing is that MS did try "forcing a monopoly", more then once, trhey tried webTV, WMS and WMV-HD

I don't want to get back into this, but just to be clear, that's not something I'm "missing"; it's exactly what I was trying to point out! It's what I was trying to say that Jeff was missing. I think you'll get me, if you re-read my post carefully.

[Doctorossi]

Moving right along...

[Doctorossi]

Anyone have any early hints on packaging plans for the Alien series? Specifically, are we likely to see individual releases alongside a boxset?

[sharkshark]

ps. sorry, Doc, if this hurts your cause any more... but GO GUNNERS!!!

http://www.fanchants.com/football-so...ts/arsenal-fc/

[Doctorossi]

Originally Posted by sharkshark

ps. sorry, Doc, if this hurts your cause any more... but GO GUNNERS!!!

Sweeeeet... I gots back-up!

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by iceman

This is Penton's thread, so I let him decide, but I'll just make a quick reply to sharkshark........

This is a really busy week for me between normal daily workload and attending some of the GSCA expo, so that, compounded with the fact that this thread has been running at warp speed since one member here innocently asked about Amir ……I must admit that if some inappropriate posts on whatever topic have been posted in this thread, I just missed them.

I really haven’t had the chance to read many of the longer posts because of my limited time but, I’ll try to go back for the next 5 min. or so and comment and/or clean things up.

[Penton-Man]

Doctorossi, I don’t know if you realize that I am probably the most vocal Arsenal supporter on this forum (search my posts using the word Arsenal ). In fact, I believe that RAH once accused me of talking about soccer (i.e. Arsenal) too much, just to give you an idea in case you are a rather new member.

That being said, I would ask that you delete your post about the Spurs as I wouldn’t find that funny if I were a Tottenham supporter.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by PeterTHX

I wonder if it's because HTF has alienated everyone because of their stance during the HD wars. I know I rarely go there now because of it.

Well, past history aside, for whatever the reason for there not being a greater turnout on HTF for Schawn B's chat., I don’t think Schawn could have been given more of a compliment than a tip of the hat by Marty Scorsese at the very beginning of the Blu-ray, The Robe in which Marty specifically refers to him and commends him for a job well done.

[Penton-Man]

Later folks.

Yes, I will talk about the inappropriate use of trailers as a comparison indicator of the ‘picture quality’ of the movie itself (finished product) when I get more time……..so, everyone can stop with the PM’s concerning that matter.

Gotta run.

[Doctorossi]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

Doctorossi, I don’t know if you realize that I am probably the most vocal Arsenal supporter on this forum (search my posts using the word Arsenal ).

I had no idea.

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

That being said, I would ask that you delete your post about the Spurs as I wouldn’t find that funny if I were a Tottenham supporter.

Well, it was meant entirely in fun (all part of the game, you know), but in the interest of crystal-clear inclusivity, your wish is my command.

[Living Near Shamu]

Penton, thanks for answering all of our questions. I was recently reading Engadget's timeline of the now deceased war and saw Warner's Total HD disc introduction.



Do you remember what was your impression of this at the time and was Warner really thinking it could save the day (and consumers)?

Note: This is not to rehash the format war, but rather all the bickering in the past 2 days made me research a bit about what went wrong and whether something like this can be avoided next time. After all, its not everyday that companies lose $1B and this may skew a future disagreement.

[Jeff Kleist]

I can't speak for Penton, but most of us saw it as what it was: An attempt for WB to have their cake and eat it to. They were still dominated by Steve Nickerson's regime, and this was a way to ship a single SKU to stores, something they were hoping Paramount would buy into, and any other future companies that went neutral. They were pitching a "can't they exist together long into the future" angle. Since it's based on DVD-18, which WB had a good stake in developing, it would be a future revenue source for WB in royalties, as well as helping those in management on the HD DVD side hang on longer and hope Toshiba could buy their way to victory in the interim.

As far as I know, outside of a few test samples they were never able to make it work in any appreciable quantity, the drastically different discs just didn't want to go together, and the different fault tolerances didn't make it any easier. Paramount going red with no other neutral studios in sight pretty much scuttled the financial possibilities behind the concept, because they couldn't get dedicated THD lines without a constant flow of discs

[Anthony P]

I can't speak for Penton, but most of us saw it as what it was: An attempt for WB to have their cake and eat it to. They were still dominated by Steve Nickerson's regime, and this was a way to ship a single SKU to stores, something they were hoping Paramount would buy into, and any other future companies that went neutral. They were pitching a "can't they exist together long into the future" angle. Since it's based on DVD-18, which WB had a good stake in developing, it would be a future revenue source for WB in royalties, as well as helping those in management on the HD DVD side hang on longer and hope Toshiba could buy their way to victory in the interim.

As far as I know, outside of a few test samples they were never able to make it work in any appreciable quantity, the drastically different discs just didn't want to go together, and the different fault tolerances didn't make it any easier. Paramount going red with no other neutral studios in sight pretty much scuttled the financial possibilities behind the concept, because they couldn't get dedicated THD lines without a constant flow of discs

I also think the HD DVD team thought it could take the sales pressure off of them, since things where turning in the company and HD DVD # where low compared to BD. If you release seperate titles and 90k sell in BD and 10k sell in HD DVD it does not look good and makes it hard to argue for HD DVD. But if you sell 100k of the combos, can anyone know what % are played in a BD player and what % in an HD DVD?

[Jeff Kleist]

They never actually released a THD disc. That was just the sample they were showing around

[Eastkhan]

Hi everyone, I'm a new member but been following discussions, never had the chance to post.

As a noob I will be asking questions rather than giving insights, guess I lack the knowledge most posters have here, even besides people like Penton, Robert Harris, everyone here knows his stuff

Sorry for disrupting the old format war discussion , I just read the recent blu-ray.com review of "The Adventures of Robin Hood",

https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/movie...45&show=review

"There are two schools of thought about noise: 1. get rid of it without sacrificing the soul of the picture and 2. leave it in to allow audiences to get as close as possible to the source material. Studios invariably go for the cleaner approach for Blu-ray, and as long as the picture is not totally DNR'ed, it has paid off. The Adventures of Robin Hood is a prime example."

I really had a hard time understanding it.

Is it really so and is it really that exact so that studios "invariably" go for the cleaner approach? & what does "cleaner approach" mean?

Is Noise and Grain referred as the same thing here? Are they same?

I thought De-noising and De-graining are not the same thing, grain is high frequency information and noise is...digital noise?

so why would anybody want noise in a film (referred as the second thought of school) to be as close as possible to the source material? they'd want grain, though (I hope).

Robin Hood might be a good release but coming from a studio with degrained masters like Warner, does it really pay off to go "clean without much DNR" & do all studios opt for the "clean" approach as described rather than the second?

Sorry if I gave headaches with the first post

[MerrickG]

HD-DVD should have won. Amir and rdjam said so.

[Anthony P]

They never actually released a THD disc. That was just the sample they were showing around

I know, sorry if it came out otherwise. What I meant is that I am sure inside WB all the reasons for THD that you gave where given, but I am guessing that the HD DVD supporting sub group must have been able to see the benefit of one SKU for FUD reasons. WB dropped HD DVD because the disks where not selling anywhere near as well as the BD counterpart. If THD did make it to market, it would have been the perfect camouflage for disk sales. no one would be able to say what % of sales where BD and what where HD DVD. Don't forget that the guy pushed some HD DVD only (like Casablanca) in order to prop up the HD DVD disk sales.