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Monday, July 20, 2009

BD impressions: The Lives of Others

8:16 PM / BD Impressions / No Comments

Languidly paced and slow to get going but ultimately rewarding, The Lives of Others provides a fascinating insight into surviellance and the culture of suspicion that characterised Soviet East Germany.

Although there's plenty to praise in Sony Pictures' BD transfer, it does suffer from a number of significant problems. The source is a lab print, and while detail is generally impressive (ignoring, that is, shots where the focus suffers - a by-product of the anamorphic Panavision process), unsightly ringing is noticeable in a number of shots throughout the film (for instance, Example 1 and Example 15). I suspect this is optically induced rather than the result of deliberate sharpening, but however it got there, it's distracting. The film's grain structure is visible throughout, but it "moves" sluggishly and unnaturally, leading me to suspect that some noise reduction was applied at some stage. Optical shots (i.e. those with on-screen captions and fades) also suffer from greatly reduced image quality, particularly the freeze-frame that concludes the film (see Example 18). This is to be expected from a film processed in the lab rather than via a digital intermediate, but I was surprised by just how severe the drop in quality was for these shots. Finally, blacks are elevated, in some cases severely so (see Example 7 and Example 8). Overall, the image tends to look a little on the harsh side, and despite its print origins looks rather more "digital" than I would have liked. 7/10

The Lives of Others
studio: Sony Pictures; country: USA; region code: A; codec: AVC;
file size: 33.7 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 35.11 Mbit/sec

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