Seven Years in Tibet (Blu-ray) PQ Impressive

[Scorxpion]

link:

http://www.dvdfile.com/index.php?opt...=6097&Itemid=3

SONY and Disney are the best till now,they are doing marvelous AVC encoding


The Video: How Does The Disc Look?

Spectacular.

I wonder what it looks like reading these high-definition reviews; watching reviewers like me drown in streams of endless accolades as we “ooohh” and “aaahh” our way through these picture-quality parades. Well, trust me: from this side of things I’m doing my best to tone-it-down! The adulation that might seem overused from the sidelines is the natural expression that happens when one reacts emotionally to the images that only high-definition can produce. And films like Seven Years in Tibet are all about images: they are the film’s primary language and its most central force. Watching this film in 1080p on my friend’s JVC projector was like an ongoing adrenaline rush. Mountain vistas, forested landscapes, the richly textures tapestries and carvings in the Monastery: all of these things convey much, much more than “objective” visual information – they deliver an emotion IMPACT. Impact? Yeah, you know, the thing that movies do to you in the theater? That’s what high-definition can do on a wide-angle viewing screen at home.

Everything about the image of this 1080p AVC compressed 2.40:1 transfer is perfect (how often does that word get thrown around?). Color is spot-on accurate, and the film print beautifully conveys a full spectrum of color that, while warm, never seems to err toward red/orange flesh-tones or skew the palette in any noticeable way. I saw NO color-banding anywhere in site (and my viewing buddy, Matt, and myself were looking for it); blue skies just effortlessly blend gradations without any “edge contours” of digitization. Whites are bold and blacks are rock-solid and shadow-detail is outstanding in the dimly-lit interior shots. But most impressively is the detail…

Detail. Yes, let’s give it a paragraph all its own. Why? Watch Seven Years in Tibet projected at 1080p and you’ll have your answer: this image is among the most detailed, razor-sharp and perceptibly 3-dimensional that I’ve seen (as good or better than the recent Pirate’s discs). And all without even a hint of edge-ringing. Yes, there are a few scenes and distance-shots that reveal a slight softness and/or “haze” of grain given the film-origins of the material (as they would have in the theater), but what shocked me was how much sharper and more detailed this film-based image appears than more recent, digitally-captured, 1080p24 material like Planet Earth and Apocalypto: clearly 35mm film has potential that still outshines the latest generation of 1080p24 cameras. The image is so detailed that it has actually demonstrated new levels of “detail” that I didn’t realized 1920 x 1080 was capable of producing to the human eye: razor-sharp contours that never feel artificially boosted or “digital” in any way and the film preserves a silky, natural character that has all the grace and “bloom” of a 35mm projected film print. Yes, in addition to being a very good film, Seven Years in Tibet is pure eye-candy. Demo-material you don’t have to check your brain at the home-theater-door to enjoy; how often does that happen?

Dan Ramer often states during his high-definition prose how the added visual information of 1080p, in comparison to DVD, enriches the emotional impact of his film experience. And he’s right. DVD is a facsimile; a nice one, but a facsimile nonetheless. The purity of high-definition is where the film medium is able to be fully communicated and come to life in our home cinemas. Don’t resist it. You love film? Then you owe it to yourself and to the films you love to begin your high-definition collection.

The Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?

The audio on this disc performs as well as do the visuals. The 5.1 16-bit/48 kHz PCM track is superb, and could possibly only be improved by a 20-bit delivery (which looks to be Sony’s general practice with their recent Dolby TrueHD soundtracks on other titles). The soundtrack is primarily dialogue-driven, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it a complacent mix: the film’s sound effects (doors opening/closing, footsteps, cars driving by etc.) are presented with true directionality and move across the soundstage with an ease that never distracts. Dynamics are also quite impressive: the monks hitting the drum canvas is a reference recording for both dynamics and frequency response and delivers bass that extends DEEP and stays tight and controlled. Surround use is effective and envelops the listener into a believable soundscape when appropriate to the on-screen cues. This 5.1 mix via PCM is just outstanding with a lush, sumptuous fidelity that reminds old-timers like me of the glory-days of PCM on laserdisc. If you’re not expecting an overly-active mix (which you shouldn’t be) you’ll be well pleased.

There is also a 5.1 English (and French) Dolby Digital mix compressed at 640 kbps which is outstanding and easily out-performs any Dolby Digital mix on DVD (owing to its higher bit-rate). But it still falls slightly short of the nuance and naturalness of the 5.1 PCM presentation. I’d encourage those of you without HDMI or mutli-channel analog output to listen to the PCM lossless mix downmixed to 2.0 over conventional SPDIF coax/toslink digital and see what you think: in my system, getting the lossless PCM audio to my receiver this way and playing it back in old-fashioned “ProLogic II” still sounds better, all things considered, than the lossy Dolby Digital track in discrete 5.1