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Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Beware of inaccurate BD captures
5:50 PM / Blu-ray / 
25 Comments
The other day, I came across captures of the recent BD release of Drag Me to Hell on a DVD and BD review and image comparison site. (There are only a few sites that actually post direct full resolution captures, and fewer still have actually covered this disc, so you probably won't need to work too hard to figure out which one it is.) My first reaction was "That doesn't look right at all," followed almost immediately by "Oh good grief, who would put out such a crummy-looking disc?" The whole thing looked blocky in the extreme, as if it had been upconverted from a lower resolution using a crude pixel resize technique.
That in itself is not entirely unheard of. Recently, Paramount released Braveheart on BD with what was generally a stunning and revelatory image. However, the first twenty-two minutes suffered from some semi-noticeable stair-stepping on vertical edges, seemingly stemming from the image source having a vertical resolution of less than 1080 pixels. (The rest of the film was unaffected.) Similarly, Sunshine Cleaning from Anchor Bay and The Orphanage from New Line suffer from a milder form of this issue, only in the horizontal domain. All well and good, but these are small fry compared to the problems I was seeing in the screen captures of Drag Me to Hell.
Then I remembered: my own copy of Drag Me to Hell arrived last Friday. (My "to watch" pile is so big at the moment that I somewhat shamefacedly admit to occasionally forgetting what films it contains.) I popped it in...
And was rewarded by an image that is pretty close to flawless in my eyes. No blockiness in sight, no sirree Bob.
My capture (click to enlarge):
Other site's capture (click to enlarge):
Side by side comparison (cropped):
Well, that's that, then. I guess it rules the site in question out as a reliable source for BD screen captures in the future, particularly given that it has already been embroiled in no small amount of controversy regarding the reliability of its standard definition DVD captures. It's a shame, because like I said before there are only a few sites out there posting full resolution BD captures. However, far more troubling than writing off one of these few sites is the knowledge that one of them is posting misleading and inaccurate images. (I particularly take exception to the fact that the site describes these images as "full 1920x1080 resolution".) If I was responsible for the the creation of their the BD encode of Drag Me to Hell or the master from which it is derived, I'd be incredibly pissed off.
Updated Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 03:21 PM: The site in question has now admitted its error and replaced the earlier captures with accurate ones. However, I note that other similarly affected reviews have not been revised accordingly.
25 Comments
Eric:
Oh, I couldn't possibly deny or confirm that. What I will say is that it's not Hundland.org, CinemaSquid, Blu-ray.com, DVD Talk or any of the various AVS Forum posters. Are there any other sites/individuals out there doing full resolution captures?
LGans316:
It's the first time I've seen anything like this too.
(Posted on Tuesday, October 13, 2009 at 6:09 PM)
Lots of mentions of Caps-a-holic.com here. I must admit I didn't know about them, but have now bookmarked them and will be checking their site for updates regularly. Needless to say, the Drag Me to Hell capture I posted isn't theirs.
Foxy:
By all means link to my captures on AVS. As far as bandwidth goes, I'd appreciate it if you linked to the original post rather than the individual images. That should stop me from getting overloaded as it means people can click on the thumbnails that interest them rather than ending up loading a bunch of full size images they might not want.
(Posted on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 7:07 AM)
Yes, a number of my older captures have the incorrect colour matrix issue too. If memory serves me correctly, someone pointed it out to me on the AVS Forum when the fiasco surrounding Lions Gate's MPEG-2 reissue of The Descent first broke and we were comparing screengrabs.
(Posted on Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 11:21 PM)
Alex:
By "inaccurate", are you referring to the incorrect colour matrix? I consider that a problem, but not a deal-breaker, because at least you are still able to get an idea of how the image looks overall. However, captures that are labelled as full resolution but in fact are not, such as the initial Drag Me to Hell shots, are to my mind completely inexcusable.
(Posted on Friday, October 16, 2009 at 2:23 PM)
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1. Eric Steinberg said:
Is it dvd beaver?
(Posted on Tuesday, October 13, 2009 at 6:06 PM)