Jingle bells December 26, 2006
Posted by Michael Mackenzie in : Technobabble, Miscellaneous, Movie Watching , 1 comment so far
In case you didn’t notice, yesterday was Christmas. As luck would have it, the various presents I had ordered all showed up on Saturday, contrary to all expectation (Saturday being the last day for the postal service until the 27th), and I got one or two surprises in addition to those. Thanks must go especially to Lee for sending me a copy of Burton on Burton, which, as you can probably guess, is a book on director Tim Burton and his bizarre gothic fantasies. I’m sure I’ll enjoy getting stuck into it when I next have a spare moment.
Otherwise, there were no huge surprises. I got The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers - The Complete Recordings (what a mouthful!) on CD but haven’t had a chance to listen to anything but the first couple of tracks. And, in terms of DVDs, my collection now includes Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 4, The Double Life of Véronique (Criterion), The Quiller Memorandum and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Ultimate Edition). I’ve not had the time to watch any of them, but I gave most of them a brief glance, and have collected my thoughts below.
- The Double Life of Véronique: This release looks slightly better than the French MK2 release (repackaged in the UK under the Artificial Eye label), but it’s a close call. There is less noise reduction and the compression is better handled, giving the image a more eye-pleasing, filmlike appearance. However, I am once again annoyed that Criterion, who are (wrongly, in my opinion) frequently held up to be the pinnacle of DVD production companies, have chosen to assault the image with edge enhancement and brick-wall filtering. Especially following the advent of HD DVD, I am acutely aware that the vast majority of DVDs simply aren’t of an acceptable level of quality.
- The Quiller Memorandum: Probably the worst transfer I’ve seen all year. This DVD was released only a month ago, and yet it looks almost like a LaserDisc master. The image is flat, detail is non-existent, and I once again find myself wondering how Fox, like Criterion, can garner so much praise for such feeble efforts.
- The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: This restoration, undertaken by Synapse’s Don Mar Jr., has been praised to the high heavens on the Internet, and with good reason: the film has undoubtedly never looked better on a home video format, and the material May had to work with can’t have been in particularly good condition. All the more reason, then, for my to be annoyed by Dark Sky’s DVD, which is indeptly encoded, resulting in some of the most blatant macro-blocking I’ve seen in a long time. At times, the screen is such an array of compression blocks that it resembles a UK Freeview TV broadcast (which anyone who has witnessed this ingenious but flawed “digital TV through an antenna” solution will agree is capable of looking very bad indeed).
That’s all for now. Thoughts on the Looney Tunes discs will follow eventually.
Silent night, Holby night… December 25, 2006
Posted by Michael Mackenzie in : Telly Tat , add a commentMany of you probably know that I am something of a fan of the British medical drama series Casualty. These days, the show is sometimes so bad that I wonder why I don’t pack it in, but the two-part Christmas special that ran last night and tonight reminded me why I still tune in every week. These episodes were written by Barbara Machin, the creator of the excellent Waking the Dead and one of the show’s regular writers when it was at its peak, and she managed to deliver something that I’d thought the show was no longer capable of: cutting-edge, intense drama (as opposed to the soap we tend to be served up). It was like stepping into a time machine and going back a decade or so to when the show was of a consistently high standard and something that was unmissable television rather than the schedule-filler it so often seems to be now.
The concept itself is something that I’m sure has been done before in countless other shows, but nonetheless felt fresh and unique. Essentially, it told the same story from the perspective of three different characters, one after the other, with the focus shifting each time it was replayed, allowing the audience to see things that hadn’t been apparent before. Obviously, having every episode play like this would be pointless, which is what what really pleased me was the quality of the drama itself. Characters who had, for months or years, been stuck in the background or were written completely out of character, came to the forefront and seemed like their old selves again. I never expected this show to ever again amaze me and have me absolutely gripped, but I have no happily been proved wrong. This was not just the best episode of Casualty in years but one of the finest television programmes I’ve seen all year. I am, quite literally, stunned.
PowerDVD HD - finally December 23, 2006
Posted by Michael Mackenzie in : Technobabble , 2 commentsAs you probably know, I use my computer quite extensively for DVDs - not just for playback, but also for taking screen captures for reviews, analysing bit rates, carrying out in-depth comparisons between different releases of the same film, and so on. As you can therefore probably imagine, I’m dying to start doing the same thing with HD DVD content. Originally, I thought this would mean either buying an expensive HD DVD drive or waiting for them to come down in price, but the recent discovery that the $200 Xbox 360 add-on drive could actually be hooked up to any PC and used for HD DVD playback right out of the box was a considerable relief, and means that, when they finally become available again (the initial shipments were snatched up faster than you can say “steal of the century”), I will certainly be picking one up.
More good news, then, that Cyberlink has finally released its long-delayed high definition version of the venerable PowerDVD suite. PowerDVD Ultra can play both HD DVD and Blu-ray movies (although the word on the street is that it can only do one at a time, meaning that you have to choose which format you want to play during the install process). At $99, it’s a bit steep, but I expect it will eventually come down in price, and, in any event, I won’t be buying it until I’ve ascertained that it is capable of playing titles in full 1920×1080 resolution. The early HD-enabled versions of PowerDVD bundled with HD DVD PC systems downscaled the image to 960×540, regardless of the fact that, so far, no commercially released titles have had the resolution-limiting ICT flag enabled, and despite the fact that those with HDCP-enabled video cards and displays (like me) are being affected by what should, for them, be a non-issue. Apparently, this is because PowerDVD were terrified of being sued, and therefore chose to mangle the viewing experience for their customers rather than face the wrath of the Hollywood thugs. Obviously, if I can’t watch, analyse and capture discs in their native resolution, there’s not much point in the whole affair, so I certainly won’t be frittering away any pennies until I know exactly what I’m dealing with. I hope for a trial version before too long.
Here’s someone else who doesn’t pay import duty December 22, 2006
Posted by Michael Mackenzie in : Technobabble, Movie Watching , add a commentThe HD DVD of The Adventures of Robin Hood arrived from Deep Discount DVD yesterday, and I’m pleased to report that Warner have delivered another stellar disc. It’s becoming quite apparent that, at Warner, there are two processes through which a title can go. The first, which has given us discs like Constantine, Million Dollar Baby and V for Vendetta, delivers a noise reduced, slightly edge enhanced transfer. These are good-looking discs, but not up to the standards I demand. The second, which has given us discs like Corpse Bride, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and now, seemingly, The Adventures of Robin Hood, results in an image that seems to be more or less completely untampered: sharp as a tack, appropriately grainy (or not, as is the case with the all-digital Corpse Bride), and no edge enhancement in sight. A couple of scenes in Robin Hood show some slight ringing, and I’m currently investigating to determine whether this is caused by edge enhancement applied to the transfer, or something else endemic to the source materials (optical process shots, for example, often result in what nowadays we would refer to as edge enhancement).
As for the film, I found it to be a hoot: gloriously colourful, outrageously camp and filled with swashbuckling adventure and melodrama. Not the sort of thing I usually go in for, but I was suitably entertained and found it to be an enjoyable enough way to kill an hour and a half. The high definition Looney Tunes cartoons look gorgeous too, although something is up with the sound on both of them, with a lot of crackling that sounds decidedly digital in nature during the high frequencies. I’ve tried two different sets of speakers, so it’s not my sound system, and I can therefore only assume that this is a mastering fault.
HD DVD review: Miami Vice
Posted by Michael Mackenzie in : Reviews, Technobabble, Movie Watching , add a commentMiami Vice is ultimately close to two and a half hours of posturing, insincere characterisation and abrasive style, none of which would suggest, barring the appearance of his name during the opening credits, that a filmmaker of Michael Mann’s calibre was behind it. To describe it as a failed experiment would be charitable: a mess is a more accurate description.
Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx don their designer shades and head out to the beach as I review Universal’s recent HD DVD/DVD combo release of Miami Vice.
Pencils at the ready! December 21, 2006
Posted by Michael Mackenzie in : Technobabble, Movie Watching , add a commentSource: Animation Nation
Some potentially very interesting, not to mention shocking, news has just surfaced regarding Walt Disney Pictures. As you probably know, shortly before the release of Home on the Range, it was announced that this would be the studio’s finally traditionally animated feature, with the bulk of the staff being laid off and the remainder retrained in 3D animation. However, when Pixar big-shots John Lasseter and Ed Catmull took over Feature Animation as part of the terms of Disney’s acquisition of Pixar, it was widely expected that 2D would eventually make a return to Disney in some form. I don’t think that anyone, however, was expecting this:
Pencil. Paper. Have you two met? I think the better question may be directed to the animator — do you remember how to use them? I remember when Toy Story came out in 1995 — it was huge! It broke barriers being the first full-length computer animated film. It was exciting and quickly became the thing to do; seemingly making hand drawing the thing of the past. Disney animation is now putting a stop to the CGI addiction and returning to a more traditional drawing plan.
This change, just announced today by John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, will take place in Walt Disney Co.’s Burbank studios, leaving Pixar to exclusively work on CGI projects. There isn’t a specific answer to why the change happened, but one rumor centers around Chris Sanders who is responsible for Lilo and Stitch and the upcoming film American Dog. Lilo and Stitch, if you can remember, was hand-drawn — and was a huge success. Perhaps they’re hoping the same hand-drawn success with American Dog.
If this turns out to be true, all I can say is “wow”. This is something that I never thought would happen in a million years, but it sounds as if traditional theatrical animation is well and truly on its way back. It sucks that so many artists were laid off in the first place, many of them after having already completed extensive 3D retraining, but if ditching Disney’s schedule of CGI flicks in favour of a return to the studio’s roots means yet more upheaval in the short term, I’m sure most will agree that the benefits will be immense in the long run.
Buena Vista quietly switches to VC1 December 20, 2006
Posted by Michael Mackenzie in : Technobabble, Movie Watching , add a commentSource: High-Def Digest
Due in stores today, Disney’s latest wave of Blu-ray titles features the studio’s first VC-1-encoded title, the Jodie Foster thriller ‘Flightplan.’
Interesting, interesting. Could we be in line for an HD DVD announcement at some point in the new year?
Le DVNR et la compression
Posted by Michael Mackenzie in : Technobabble, Movie Watching , add a commentMy copy of Studio Canal’s recently released HD DVD of Basic Instinct arrived from Amazon.fr this morning.
Unfortunately, the transfer, while clearly in a different league compared to standard definition, is artefact-ridden in a way that I’ve never seen on an HD DVD until now. Daylight scenes generally look fine, but those taking place at night or in subdued interior lighting conditions (which accounts for a considerable portion of the film’s duration) look smeared and defocused. Grain patterns stick to the walls and actors’ faces during panning shots, making it pretty clear that some intensive DVNR has been applied. And why? The film isn’t even 15 years old, and the compressionists have 30 GB of data to play with (and no extras, barring a trailer for other Studio Canal titles and some test patterns). I don’t think I’d go so far as to say that this is the least impressive HD DVD I’ve seen so far (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and An American Werewolf in London are contending for that crown), but it’s definitely underwhelming and not the sort of thing I’d show to someone to sell them on the delights of high definition.
I just hope this isn’t indicative of what we can expect from Studio Canal as a whole. Certainly their trailer reel, which showcases everything from The Elephant Man to Rambo to Ran, looks rather mixed in terms of quality, with some material looking absolutely excellent (the grain in Rambo looks phenomenal, and their version of Million Dollar Baby looks more impressive than Warner’s), but some not so impressive (Ran is marred by giant edge enhancement halos).
RIP Joe Barbera 1911-2006 December 19, 2006
Posted by Michael Mackenzie in : Miscellaneous , add a commentSource: USA Today
This really is the end of an era.