Batman (1989) (25th Anniversary Edition)

[Neomic]

Originally Posted by sarah_wentworth

i don't know anything about VC-1, MPEG 2, or AVC but is one of them the absolute best and why isn't the best one always used? if a movie is costing millions to make why not use the best one to make sure it looks as good as can be? just curious

AVC-MPEG4 is generally the only one used now days since it's far superior, but in the early days of Blu-ray, a lot of releases were just ports of their HD-DVD counterparts, which supported VC-1 and MPEG2, so a lot of movies from those days still use those same encodes ported from release to release.

Most movie studios don't bother re-encoding the master for AVC since most of those encodes fall under their (and sometimes our) "good enough" category.

As cool as it would be to get a new master for this film, I don't see it looking much better since it was made to look pretty drab in the first place. A new master might be a tad sharper, but unless you're watching on a large screen or have your television professionally calibrated, the difference probably wouldn't even be noticeable.

Then again, I could be wrong and a new transfer could be a night-and-day difference.