The Perfect Storm

[iceman]

Warner Home Video has announced that they will bring the action hit 'The Perfect Storm' to Blu-ray on July 22nd. This is the latest Warner title that was previously only available in high definition on the now dead HD DVD format, but is now going to be released on Blu-ray. Video will be presented in 2.40:1 1080p VC-1 accompanied by a 5.1 Dolby TrueHD audio track. Extras will mirror the HD DVD release with three commentaries, three featurettes, a stills gallery, and theatrical trailer.

It's Halloween, 1991. Near Gloucester, Massachusetts, the six members of the Andrea Gail, a swordfishing boat, head out to sea for their last trip of the season. Unbeknownst to them, a shockingly brutal storm is slowly gaining steam. Before the National Weather Bureau has a chance to inform the crew of the impending danger, it's too late. The resulting battle with three merging weather fronts--an unheralded natural disaster--is grueling and tragic. Based on the true-life best selling novel by Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm stars George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Diane Lane and is directed by Wolfgang Petersen.

https://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=1204

The Perfect Storm Blu-ray

[tommyboy81]

YES! YES! YES! YES!!!!!

One of my Favs

[BluBirdOnMyShoulder]

Great movie, def. a buy for me

[Storm]

Gotta have this. Been waiting awhile on word.

[nycomet]

I have never seen so much smoking in any other movies aside from "Perfect Storm" and "Pulp Fiction." Although "Friday" was up there too.

[Marcusarilius]

Originally Posted by nycomet

I have never seen so much smoking in any other movies aside from "Perfect Storm" and "Pulp Fiction." Although "Friday" was up there too.

Thank you for not smoking. The perfect Storm will be super nice on BD!

[Grubert]

Originally Posted by nycomet

I have never seen so much smoking in any other movies aside from "Perfect Storm" and "Pulp Fiction." Although "Friday" was up there too.

I'd say Wild at Heart* beats it easily. Not to mention dozens of 1930s-40s movies (especially crime/noir movies).

And anyway, fishermen and other seafaring people in general usually smoke like chimneys.


* Note of warning: Wild at Heart not only features smoking, but also nipples.

[JasonR]

In TrueHD!! That's going to be so awesome!!!

[SilverFireshot]

Awesome. I realy liked this even though I know quite a few that didn't.

[alexakajeff]

Finally!!!

[onehothemi]

I remember watching it in the theater, and literally got motion sickness, can't wait to see what it does with 120hz on an xbr5... should be interesting. no pizza that night i guess.

[KenThompson]

Yeah, the dud got a 3.5 star at HDDigest for pq but the sound was much better. Lets hope Warner doesn't give us the same crap.

[mikenike]

Seems like the Blu-Ray scan is correct: there is no lossless audio.

Click here to read it at hidefdigest.

[Gamma_Winstead]

Originally Posted by mikenike

Seems like the Blu-Ray scan is correct: there is no lossless audio.

Click here to read it at hidefdigest.

no buy for me then. just a rental.

[brett_day]

it's really honestly not that great of a movie! It is watchable but it is by no means a great movie! Should sound fantastic though. Might be worth a buy just because of the way those 40ft waves will sound crashing down on the boat!

[lgans316]

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...2#post14356292

Originally Posted by sperron

You can see that The Perfect Storm was derived from the same master as the HD DVD. The aliasing is still there. They just covered it up by filtering the movie. If you look closely, you can still see the aliasing artifacts where ever there are sharp hoizontal transitions. Instead of being sharp aliasing, it's now sharp aliasing that has been run through a softening filter. The final outcome looks like a blend between aliasing and color fringing.

[Grubert]

Well that's disappointing.

[MikeCL]

man the review here was right about this movie at first I thought it was my set since I had turned the softness down to 0, but I moved it up to 35 and I still see some softness

[HDTV1080P]

The Perfect Storm Blu-ray

The Perfect Storm is based on a true story and stays very faithful to the historical fishing vessel known as the Andrea Gail and the 1991 Perfect Storm . This Perfect Storm movie shows how dangerous commercial fishing is for both the Captain and his crew. This movie is ideal for those that like to watch movies about real life natural disasters and heroic people on fishing boats like the Andrea Gail that try to survive. The Perfect Storm film also shows the real life historic events of the United States Coast Guard during the 1991 Perfect Storm. The United States Coast Guard will rescue people stuck in hurricanes out at sea and this movie shows the U.S. Coast Guard in a very positive light since they risk their own lives to save anyone lost in ocean waters near the United States. This Perfect Storm movie is rated PG-13 and contains some profanity like the word “G-D” used several times. The f-word is only used once since this is a PG-13 movie. This Perfect Storm movie had a budget of 120 million dollars and made over 328.7 million dollars in box office sells.

Video quality comments

This Blu-ray disc is a dual layer disc with only 28.4GB used out of 50GB. This is disappointing since the extra features and 1080P video with several audio tracks are squeezed onto a small 28.4GB worth of space. Also the Perfect Storm film might have only received a 2K master scan from the original film negative but that would need to be verified. Perhaps sometime in the future the Perfect Storm movie might receive a 4K or higher scan of the original film negative with a higher bit rate VC-1 or MPEG-4/AVC encode that fills up the entire 50GB Blu-ray disc instead of the low bit rate VC-1 1080P encode we have now. I was disappointed that the combined video and audio bit rate for this Perfect Storm movie was between 15Mbps -21Mbps during the fast action scenes in the movie. I am use to other fast action movies that have a combined VC-1 video and lossless audio bit rate between 35Mbps-45Mbps. The Perfect Storm low bit rate 1080P VC-1 encode looks soft and lacking in fine detail in some scenes while other scenes with not that much movement contained excellent facial resolution detail. Color accuracy appeared to be good overall. I have seen the 480i DVD and the Perfect Storm 1080P Blu-ray low bit rate VC-1 encode looks much better compared to the old DVD version.

Bonus material

The Theatrical Trailer for the Perfect Storm movie is in 1080P with a VC-1 encode. Of course the 3 commentary tracks are all 1080P since they all use the same Blu-ray video file. All the other bonus material is encoded at 480i using VC-1 (Bit rate for 480i SD materiel was at a high VC-1 bit rate). It should be noted that all the bonus features including the commentary tracks are 2.0 Dolby Digital English. Also if one owns a A/V receiver they should set their Blu-ray player to bitstream since all the bonus features are encoded with Dolby Prologic matrix information. My Pioneer A/V receiver automatically detected the Dolby Prologic matrix encode flag and went into the Dolby Prologic IIx mode. This allowed the voices to be directed to the center channel with a mono matrix surround sound information sent to the rear speakers. It added depth to the 3 audio commentary tracks. I found all 3 commentary tracks to be very interesting with the Author Sebastian Junger commentary track to be the most interesting. This title deserves a 5 star for extra features out of 5 just for the 3 very well done factual commentary tracks.

The Perfect Storm Blu-ray contains a lossless audio track with 5.1 discrete channels and 1 matrix channel that allows consumers to hear the movie in 7.1 surround sound

The sound quality of this Blu-ray disc was outstanding. When placing the Blu-ray disc into your Blu-ray player the movie automatically starts and plays the lossy English 5.1 Dolby Digital EX soundtrack. Warner should have designed the Blu-ray to automatically play the Dolby TrueHD soundtrack but instead one needs to manually switch the Blu-ray to Dolby TrueHD if they have the equipment to play Dolby TrueHD soundtracks.

Blu-ray players do not have a Dolby Prologic IIx decoder feature or DTS Neo X decoder feature when converting lossless and lossy soundtracks to PCM. So for the best sound quality it is better to bitstream lossless and lossy soundtracks from a Blu-ray player to a modern A/V receiver so that the Dolby Prologic flag or DTS Neo X flag is not lost.

The Perfect Storm Dolby TrueHD 5.1 lossless audio track is encoded with a matrix Dolby Pro Logic IIx channel that can be extracted from the discrete lossless Dolby TrueHD bitstream. For example when I tested both a Pioneer Elite SC-57 and Pioneer Elite VSX-33 A/V receiver in the STREAM DIRECT mode they both automatically detected the Dolby Prologic IIx flag and up-converted the 5.1 lossless Dolby TrueHD soundtrack to 7.1 surround sound. The normal 5.1 channels were discrete and rear back speaker 6 and rear back speaker 7 contained matrix surround audio information. Listening to the up-converted lossless audio track in 7.1 surround sounded excellent. The movie with wind and rain had a lot of depth and the subwoofer produced excellent bass during the hurricane scenes. Of course a discrete 7.1 soundtrack would sound better but the 5.1 discrete soundtrack with the added rear Dolby Prologic IIx matrix channel was a nice bonus to create an up-converted 7.1 surround sound information.

In the future some discrete 7.1 Blu-ray lossless movie soundtracks might be encoded with Dolby Pro Logic IIz or DTS Neo X to offer an up-converted 9.1 or 11.1 surround sound experience.

For additional audio language tracks 640kbps 5.1 Dolby Digital EX with matrix Prologic information can be found on the English, French (Quebec), French, German, Italian, and Spanish audio options. One Spanish track is 192K 2.0 Dolby Digital with Dolby Prologic information. This Blu-ray also contains 18 different subtitle languages options.

[Bluyoda]

Originally Posted by coolmilo

I made the mistake in buying Perfect Storm. The picture looks no better than and upconverted DVD. I am also having audio problems and so I plan on returning it tomorrow. I am back to cancelling all my Warner pre-orders. I will wait for the reviews before I buy Warner movies. What a shame.

Originally Posted by riverbelow

Maybe its coz I got the australian version....but my Perfect Storm Bluray looks awesome and is a huge upgrade visually over DVD upscaled! Both in clarity and minimizing film noise (just naturally). And also AQ is intense and simply draws you in.

Take it from me, as one who watched the DVD at least once every few months between 2002 and when I got this on bluray.

Its well worth it, especially if you own it on DVD and are a fan..double dip somewhere where you only pay 10$ for good value

I bought the triple pack for $9.99, and I am really pleased.

After reading all those horrible reviews, I thought it would be a total let-down, and only worth it for the VFX commentaries, but The Perfect Storm
looked fine, despite the usually problemtaic VC-1 encode, and low bitrate.
I was very pleasantly surprised.

Detail was pleasing, contrast stable, black levels deep, and colors natural.
I only spotted 1-2 instances of banding, and not even out on the ocean, but in the bar scene with Michael Ironside.

The movie was much better than I remembered.

ILM's work on this was KILLER!!!!

The lossless audio isn't as good as Twister, but still pretty sweet.

Definitely way better than the DVD. I mean, come on!

Film: 4
PQ: 4
AQ:4,5