From the Earth to the Moon

[Lensman]

Originally Posted by SCEtoAUX

Not a "burner" account - I joined this forum for the first time today to specifically post about this awful release. I waited ten years for a HD BR release of this series - which is my favorite TV production of all time - and what I got was a rush job with over-saturated color correction, digital noise removal, missing production music, and cheap crap CGI outsourced at the last minute in order to cash in on the recent moon landing anniversary. If you don't think these new VFX shots aren't poorly done, get your eyes fixed - they don't even utilize motion blur.

I had a feeling this would be the case when I saw the inexplicably low price of the blu-ray set. The only good release was the 4:3 dvd original set and that's years out of availability AND my set has a bad disc!

[PeterTHX]

Originally Posted by SCEtoAUX

Watching the first episode now via iTunes - it's awful.

Well, this is the Blu-ray thread and someone with the Blu-ray disc says it looks fine.

So I'll go with the disc opinion and not lower bitrate streaming (my copy is preordered anyway).

[goshikisen]

At the risk of sounding sceptical, is there anyone who didn't join bluray.com yesterday who has seen the BD transfer and is willing to share their opinion? I've been waiting for this release for a while and I've found it a bit strange that there has been almost no information about the BDs made available other than a cover shot and a basic feature rundown. I'd have liked to see a screenshot or two to get an idea of what it will look like.

[Indiana Jones]

Originally Posted by goshikisen

At the risk of sounding sceptical, is there anyone who didn't join bluray.com yesterday who has seen the BD transfer and is willing to share their opinion? I've been waiting for this release for a while and I've found it a bit strange that there has been almost no information about the BDs made available other than a cover shot and a basic feature rundown. I'd have liked to see a screenshot or two to get an idea of what it will look like.

Screenshots from the trailer can be found on the previous page and they seem pretty accurate to what I have seen of the Blu-Ray thus far, the OCNs really were not in the best shape and seeing what they have been able to extract from it is quite impress just wish they had also released it on UHD as they future proofed the project by finishing it in 4K with an HDR pass.

As for the new visual effects there are a few that look a bit off but there are some that are clearly a huge upgrade when compared to the original SD shots, images of the Earth and the Moon are superbly detailed though.

[Lensman]

Originally Posted by goshikisen

At the risk of sounding sceptical, is there anyone who didn't join bluray.com yesterday who has seen the BD transfer and is willing to share their opinion? I've been waiting for this release for a while and I've found it a bit strange that there has been almost no information about the BDs made available other than a cover shot and a basic feature rundown. I'd have liked to see a screenshot or two to get an idea of what it will look like.

That'll be me then. I've just watched episode 1.

It's adequate but no more than that. If you ignore the cropping then it's much better than the 2 dvd transfers; most of the film component is quite good although some is TERRIBLE. There's an exterior sequence of the Whitehouse that is bad beyond reason; VHS bad! However, a lot of the live action has great detail and some grain but the source appears very variable in terms of noise. There are transfer encoding errors, for example during Scott and Armstrong's Gemini mission Scott is severely corrupted by horizontal data corruption for a second.
The cgi is weird. It's very borderline cheap as reported and sometimes looks OK and other times looks video game cut scene on the cheap.
It absolutely IS Atmos.

I'd give it 6.5 to 7 out of 10.

LG Oled 65"
Yamaha Atmos receiver.
OPPO 205.

[Filmmaker]

Originally Posted by drn211

Loss? Why not keep disc 5 from the previous set?

Never got around to buying the previous set.

[thorr]

If the effects and colors are really that bad, I may have to go through this scene by scene and correct the color, and replace the effects with upscaled effects. Also where important information is cut off at the bottom, change the aspect ratio for those scenes. I have been having some pretty great success with Topaz Gigapixel for AI upscaling. It is hit or miss, but really works great for some things, and not so much for other things. Here is an example scene where I upscaled it from the 4x3 DVD.

Original DVD


Topaz Gigapixel upscaled:

[Geoff D]

It's a mixed bag is this. Two episodes in and the framing (still a bit too tight in close-ups) is the least of my quibbles. There's a lot of DNR being applied here and there with sharpening on top, not on the whole thing but certain shots look very, very processed indeed. And I'm not talking about stock shots of historical video or the handful of janky SD upscales that I've spotted thus far, but lots of 'regular' shots like when Kevin Pollack arrives after the Apollo 1 fire and he looks at Stephen Root, both of their angles look like boiled crap, and there are plenty of little moments like that in these first two episodes.

Do NOT get me wrongo, when this is on-song the detail and clarity are simply fabulous but the grain always looks "managed" to some degree and when it takes an outright detour into DNRsville it can get rather distracting. Well, for someone like me anyway. The ironical thing is that the fake grain in the new VFX shots looks FAR more natural than much of the fudged 35mm grain on display here, though the new VFX themselves can look rather cheap in terms of execution from what I've seen so far. As was mentioned by the 'new' fella, some of the spacecraft almost look like frozen images with a background passing by behind them, there's no kind of proper motion blur or interactive lighting on the object itself and it feels like some of it was cooked up in someone's bedroom.

It's been casually mentioned that this is one of those 'shot on film but edited on video' shows but there are a LOT of photochemical opticals here inherent to the original edit (indeed, the credits list a 'negative cutter') for things like fades and dissolves, there are several of the latter in ep 2. There are also a bunch of shots of David Andrews during the hearing at the end which were originally reframed in post, optically enlarged in the old-fashioned way complete with printed-in specks of dirt that just sit there.

Why am I mentioning the opticals at all? These things are part and parcel of how that era of film worked, you're going to lose detail and get softer-yet-coarser grain compared to the camera negative - but for this presentation they've decided to de-grain them so they end up looking very smooth compared to the first gen material and, again, the flip-flopping between good and meh can stand out more than it otherwise should.

Black levels can look a bit weird, they're quite thin and are sometimes shot through with a vibrant blue tinge, and the fades to black often look strange as well, the image fading down to what looks like well above black and then it just kinda hard cuts to an actual black screen. Spotted some gnarly banding in certain scenes in Ep 2 as well, though that's just as likely on the encoding itself (typical Warners, putting 4 hours onto one disc) rather than the mastering at source.

Basically there's definitely a bit of source-related quality loss BUT I'm not of the opinion that the supposedly poor "OCN" is at the heart of of it all, for if they'd left the DNR dial alone or used it in moderation then it wouldn't look half as uneven as it does.

Eh, it was only 20 quid so this isn't something I'm going to lose sleep over, and did any of it matter when Frank Borman did his 'failure of imagination' speech to the senate committee, or when the wives of the Apollo 1 crew gave Deke his astronaut pin? HECK no, that last bit got me all choked up and as we near the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landings it's only proper to also consider the sacrifices that got them there. (I watched the 'live' CBS report on the fire a few months back on youtube, even that was gut-wrenching.)

[trevanian]

Originally Posted by SCEtoAUX

Also, if anyone thinks I'm being too unkind about this, ask yourselves why Tom Hanks - the man who created this project and spent three years of his life on it - hasn't done an ounce of promotion towards it. Not one tweet. Not on interview. Not one media appearance. This is a rush-job cash grab by HBO. No more, no less.

Hanks & Moon landing anniversary go together likes peas and ... whatever Gump said. The fact he isn't out on talk shows recalling his feelings about original flight while mentioning this new release certainly seems to dovetail with the less than glowing descriptions thus far. It's very depressing, actually, I'd lbe interested to see what vfx supe Ernie FArino might have to say about how his end of things was (re) treated ... and for myself am holding off on this till I see a lot more screen grabs.

[trevanian]

Originally Posted by dervdude

FYI, the remastered version has also premiered on HBO Go and HBO Now today, if you want to preview it before picking up the Blu-ray.

Figures, I cancelled HBO a week ago.

[Indiana Jones]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

It's a mixed bag is this. Two episodes in and the framing (still a bit too tight in close-ups) is the least of my quibbles. There's a lot of DNR being applied here and there with sharpening on top, not on the whole thing but certain shots look very, very processed indeed. And I'm not talking about stock shots of historical video or the handful of janky SD upscales that I've spotted thus far, but lots of 'regular' shots like when Kevin Pollack arrives after the Apollo 1 fire and he looks at Stephen Root, both of their angles look like boiled crap, and there are plenty of little moments like that in these first two episodes.

Do NOT get me wrongo, when this is on-song the detail and clarity are simply fabulous but the grain always looks "managed" to some degree and when it takes an outright detour into DNRsville it can get rather distracting. Well, for someone like me anyway. The ironical thing is that the fake grain in the new VFX shots looks FAR more natural than much of the fudged 35mm grain on display here, though the new VFX themselves can look rather cheap in terms of execution from what I've seen so far. As was mentioned by the 'new' fella, some of the spacecraft almost look like frozen images with a background passing by behind them, there's no kind of proper motion blur or interactive lighting on the object itself and it feels like some of it was cooked up in someone's bedroom.

It's been casually mentioned that this is one of those 'shot on film but edited on video' shows but there are a LOT of photochemical opticals here inherent to the original edit (indeed, the credits list a 'negative cutter') for things like fades and dissolves, there are several of the latter in ep 2. There are also a bunch of shots of David Andrews during the hearing at the end which were originally reframed in post, optically enlarged in the old-fashioned way complete with printed-in specks of dirt that just sit there.

Why am I mentioning the opticals at all? These things are part and parcel of how that era of film worked, you're going to lose detail and get softer-yet-coarser grain compared to the camera negative - but for this presentation they've decided to de-grain them so they end up looking very smooth compared to the first gen material and, again, the flip-flopping between good and meh can stand out more than it otherwise should.

Black levels can look a bit weird, they're quite thin and are sometimes shot through with a vibrant blue tinge, and the fades to black often look strange as well, the image fading down to what looks like well above black and then it just kinda hard cuts to an actual black screen. Spotted some gnarly banding in certain scenes in Ep 2 as well, though that's just as likely on the encoding itself (typical Warners, putting 4 hours onto one disc) rather than the mastering at source.

Basically there's definitely a bit of source-related quality loss BUT I'm not of the opinion that the supposedly poor "OCN" is at the heart of of it all, for if they'd left the DNR dial alone or used it in moderation then it wouldn't look half as uneven as it does.

Eh, it was only 20 quid so this isn't something I'm going to lose sleep over, and did any of it matter when Frank Borman did his 'failure of imagination' speech to the senate committee, or when the wives of the Apollo 1 crew gave Deke his astronaut pin? HECK no, that last bit got me all choked up and as we near the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landings it's only proper to also consider the sacrifices that got them there. (I watched the 'live' CBS report on the fire a few months back on youtube, even that was gut-wrenching.)

In the remastering extra they mention that the 250 new effects shots were outsourced to two different companies and given that some of the new shots IMO actually look pretty good (that shot of Freedom 7 plunging through the atmosphere before the chutes deploy) while others are of a much lower quality, certainly reminds me of what happened with TNG Season 2 when it was outsourced to HTV-Illuminate.

[Geoff D]

Aye, some are decent enough but some are like the sort of cheapy recreation you see in documentaries.

[Indiana Jones]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

Aye, some are decent enough but some are like the sort of cheapy recreation you see in documentaries.

The CG vomit in episode 4 is another pretty bad shot not just because it doesn’t look that good but they got the timing wrong so it can be seen floating up before Boreman is sick, on the plus side the new shots of the Earth and the Moon are very nice as is the shot of Apollo 8 coming round the moon as the sun appears.

[AmishParadise]

Here's a glimpse at the back portion of the cover art for those interested.

[Warbler]

A pity. I was really looking forward to getting this and watching it. I've never seen it before. But the treatment, as described above, given this blu ray is inexcusable. The studio and the producers of this bluray should be ashamed of themselves. They should know by now how handle DNR and to do the special effects so badly(again if the above is accurate) and probably so very unfaithful to the original. It is just not acceptable. Shame.

[Lensman]

Originally Posted by Warbler

A pity. I was really looking forward to getting this and watching it. I've never seen it before. But the treatment, as described above, given this blu ray is inexcusable. The studio and the producers of this bluray should be ashamed of themselves. They should know by now how handle DNR and to do the special effects so badly(again if the above is accurate) and probably so very unfaithful to the original. It is just not acceptable. Shame.

Hey, whilst this release is slightly disappointing PLEASE DO watch this series if you've never seen it before. Even with the caveats we've described it's still a superb production and you WILL enjoy it.

[Warbler]

But I loath giving studios my money for bad releases. I feel like I'd be telling that I approve of this. Plus I can't help but think that if we all got together and refused to buy things like like this, maybe studios would finally get the message and stop doing releases like this.

[ShinyDiscs]

I bought the original signature DVD edition and started watching it again a few weeks ago, but gave up half way through because on a 65” screen and 4:3 ratio it didn’t look great.

Cracked open the UK Blu-Ray edition this evening and found it a huge improvement. OK, they could have done better, but I’d take this over the DVD set any day. That cost me something like USD80 as I recall. This new set cost me £20.

It’s a great series so if you haven’t seen it it’s a steal at the price. Nit-picking over the quality of the FX or saying “Don’t buy to teach HBO a lesson” seems to be pretty ridiculous to me. I’m happy with my purchase, especially for the price. Purchasing it if you haven’t yet seen it seems a total no-brainer to me.

[Warbler]

Originally Posted by ShinyDiscs

Nit-picking over the quality of the FX or saying “Don’t buy to teach HBO a lesson” seems to be pretty ridiculous to me.

Why? and this doesn't seem like nit-picking to me, not if the release is accurately described above.

[njwiv]

Digital copy appears to be VUDU only. Very disappointing. Hope this is not the new normal for HBO.