I can't believe we are over 1900 posts on this topic. Can we all agree that the film PREDATOR rocks and is a classic film. Now regarding what edition to watch is in the eye of the beholder. I personally am buying this one and keeping the other release as well. Hopefully after tomorrow this thread will die and we can all be friends again!
Just wait til they release the next film with a terrible transfer.
Whether from bad video compression artifacts like the first release. Or too much DNR like this current release.
A slightly funny review excerpt from Robert Harris
Quote:
What I'm thinking is that the new Blu-ray of Predator is not some heavy-handed hack job, where a tech took a pile driver to the grain and then fully cleansed what remained to the point of oblivion.
Rather, I beginning to believe that this may be an entirely new film.
Using only the original audio mix as a basis, it appears that either Pixar or Dreamworks Animation, may have been brought in to digitally create an entirely new image for the film, based upon the original photographic information.
I'm thinking this because Predator looks decidedly like Monsters vs. Aliens 3D, but of course not yet in 3D. That may be coming.
If this is what's occurred then the new product is rather beautifully rendered, lifelike, and potentially yet another new process.
The overall concept is brilliant. The more that I think about this, the more I need to return to Patton and Longest Day, as I may have erred in my appreciation of those Blu-rays.
and from Josh Zyber on another *INSERT BUZZWORD HERE* forum.
Quote:
Unlike most here, I have already watched the disc. Or, at least, the first 20 minutes of it, which was all I could take.
The opening credits scene with the helicopters flying in and the team riding in jeeps is a wash. It looked like crap on the old Blu-ray (barely a DVD upscale level of detail), and it looks like a different form of crap here. There's no net gain or loss there.
However, for the rest of the movie after the titles, the actors definitely look like plastic on the new disc. When the action moves to the jungle, the folliage is so smeared that it looks like motion interpolation has been turned on or something.
The old disc is inconsistent, but looks like a grainy movie. The new one just looks weird and not at all like film. It's a travesty, IMO.
best buy has this for sale for $ 14.99 good deal' got a look at this saturday via a friend i think it looks great far superior to the previous blu ray release extras are the same as the previous ultimate dvd edition plus the preview of predators
When Predator debuted on Blu-ray in April 2008, on a 25 GB disc, it featured a relatively low bit-rate MPEG-2 transfer, prone to excessive noisiness and compression artifacts. While the film has never been a slick-looking production, and though the 2008 version was certainly the best the movie had looked on home video up until that time, there was an outcry from videophiles who felt it could look even better. The solution, really, was simple: do a remaster, use a less antiquated encode, a higher bit-rate, and put it on a 50 GB dual-layer disc. 20th Century Fox complied for this new Ultimate Hunter Edition, but unfortunately, they've must've taken complaints about the film's graininess/noisiness to heart, because they've also slathered this re-release with an ungodly amount of digital noise reduction. Now, this is bound to be controversial. The vocal minority of so- called "grain-haters" will praise this transfer because there's no longer any evidence that Predator was shot on film—it now has a bright, glossy, smeary, plasticized sheen that's as far from filmic as you can get. And, it should be said, about as far from how Predator is supposed to look as you can get. This is revisionist re-releasing at its worst, and most film collectors —who tend to want films to look as close to their original appearance as possible—are going to be severely disappointed. I know I'm going to get hate mail, but I can't conscionably give this transfer any higher than a 2/5.
The texture of the film's grain structure has been stripped entirely from the picture, obliterating the finest details in the process. Arnie's face looks like a candle wax stump, oily and smooth. Carl Weathers' mustache seems airbrushed onto his face. The jungle might as well be digitized. Even the 20th Century Fox logo that opens the film appears soft, under a thick coating of Gaussian blur. This is easily one of the worst abuses of DNR to hit Blu-ray yet. What's frustrating, then, is that in most other regards, this transfer could have been a massive improvement. What's the point of a higher bit-rate if you're just going to scrub away the film's texture? Yes, the transfer looks clean, ultra-colorful, and bright—a good deal brighter than the previous release—but it also looks unnatural, artificial, unnecessarily tampered with. The good news—if you want to call it that—is that black levels are solid, compression artifacts are absent this time around, and edge enhancement is nowhere near as prevalent or overzealous as it is in other DNR'ed-to-oblivion titles. None of this really matters, though, when you're watching an image that looks like it's been rubbed down with Vaseline. I suddenly feel the urge to pray for the fidelity of the Alien quadrilogy box-set being released later this year.
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