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Monday, August 31, 2009

And the award for proper treatment of the master goes to... Lions Gate

5:02 PM / Blu-ray / No Comments

Oh ho! What's this? It would appear that Image Entertainment have discovered the wonders of the low-pass filter and applied it to their Blu-ray release of John Maybury's Dylan Thomas biopic The Edge of Love. A couple of months back, when screen captures for that disc first materialised, my initial thought was "What a shame - a filtered master." Further down the line, though, it became clear that, in actual fact, no filtering existed on the master itself. Instead, it appears that the image was deliberately softened by Image for their BD: the same elements, it would seem, were also delivered to Lions Gate for their UK release, and, unlike Image, they did the right thing and encoded the image entirely unfiltered.

Blu-ray.com posted numerous captures of the Image release to accompany their review, and while the reviewer failed to pick up on the filtering (he spends most of the "Video" section discussing the director's stylistic choices), the screen captures, as I always say, tell a far more complete story than the written word. Below, I've included a handful of my own captures from the Lions Gate version, which correspond to ones posted at Blu-ray.com. Head over there yourself and match them up to see the gains the Lions Gate version makes as far as detail and overall texture are concerned.

(I was also considering using a couple of the captures posted in DVD Beaver's review, but they've got something wonky going on with their colour decoding and, while this obviously doesn't affect the detail levels, I felt it would be unnecessarily confusing to refer to captures that showed the wrong colour values.)

Here are a few more shots showcasing the wonderful level of detail present in the Lions Gate release. The look of the movie is somewhat inconsistent, due to it having been shot using a combination of 35mm film and Panavision's Genesis HD digital cameras, and I suspect that the 35mm scenes may have been grain reduced in an attempt to create a more consistent look.

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