Monday, March 22, 2010

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy BD - a typical New Line job

5:34 PM / Blu-ray / Comments18 Comments

Blu-ray

Quelle surprise.

To be fair, the look of these transfers appears to be deeply inconsistent. Some shots look pretty damn good, and I get the impression that things improve with each subsequent film (bearing in mind that my memory of these movies is a tad fuzzy and I can't always remember which capture belongs to which film), but others have a serious case of DNR-itis. This shot of Ian McKellen makes me want to puke, and here's Miranda Otto looking spectacularly oily... and this one is pure DARK CITY. The reports and the small number of direct image comparisons that have surfaced suggest that the HDTV broadcasts look at least slightly better (example here).

Sadly, I predict that the usual suspects will praise these discs to the heavens, confusing the films' epic sweeping vistas with good image quality. Exactly the same thing happened with the utterly mediocre-looking DVDs of these films, which many people still seem to believe represent the best the format had to offer.

And now to await the usual barrage of claims that "screen captures aren't representative of actual image quality".

 
18 Comments

1. Will Dearborn said:

It's maddening isn't it. Your second paragraph pinpoints exactly what makes me the most sad of all.

(Posted on Monday, March 22, 2010 at 6:24 PM)

2. ChuckZ said:

Michael,

There are those in that thread who have already claimed that very statement you denounce (as I do as well).

I linked your brother to the first image set that DaveUpton posted for the Felllowship. Start there if you want to read the whole mess. Dave's posts were actually moved to later in the thread so it appears as if people are commenting on his images before they actually existed!

(Posted on Monday, March 22, 2010 at 7:16 PM)

3. David Mackenzie said:

http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/3328/42995955.png

WTF... are they serious?

(Posted on Monday, March 22, 2010 at 8:24 PM)

4. Author Profile Page Michael said:

My favourite comments are the ones made by Pincho. Man, that guy's hilarious.

(Posted on Monday, March 22, 2010 at 10:19 PM)

5. Ronny said:

Damn it...how hard is it for these people to figure out? Film grain for 35mm movies=beautiful details and nice contrast=full of win. Filtering of 35mm movies=mushy details and inconsistent contrast=epic failure. Seriously, New Line leave the f**king film grain alone...pretty please with sugar on top.

(Posted on Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 2:20 AM)

6. Dom said:

are any of these captures from the original 1:1 blu-ray source? or all they from the ~15GB re-rencodes that have leaked on the net?

doubt it'll be any better, but just wondered :)

as if it wasn't already bad enough that they're shipping the theatrical versions and then holding out on the extended ones :/

(Posted on Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 7:52 AM)

7. Dom said:

... oh and the icing on the cake would be EIV (Entertainment In Video) releasing them as 1080i encodes for the UK boxset :-)

(Posted on Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 7:54 AM)

8. Danno said:

Sadly, I predict that the usual suspects will praise these discs to the heavens, confusing the films' epic sweeping vistas with good image quality....

Well that has already come true, Michael:

http://bit.ly/c4mLCF

(Posted on Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 9:28 AM)

9. FoxyMulder said:

Ahhh Pincho the man who hated grain then learned to love it and then hated it again.

I was not interested in these theatrical editions when they announced them as i want the extended cut of each movie but it's a shame New Line/Warner aren't really putting a top effort into these.

I suspect all the love and attention will be given to the hopefully supervised Peter Jackson extended cuts. I hope they come sooner rather than later as i really don't want to wait until The Hobbit hits cinemas.

I remember reading Bjoern Rays site and he mentioned the UK DVD discs were unfiltered although botched up sound. Anyway superior to the American filtered and edge enhanced DVD discs.

http://www.videophile.info/Review/FOTR/FOTR_01.htm

I wonder if the problem with the first one Fellowship exists on the actual master since i recall the last one released to DVD ( extended cut ) was an improvement and is this also true of the Blu Rays ??

Blu Ray has more than enough capacity to hold a four hour film without filtering and grain reduction. I just think the studio's employ lazy staff or have a mandate to encode the films as quick as possible thus these things happen.

Anyway i continue to save a fortune from these half assed jobs some of the studio's are doing with great films. Indeed i now rent more than i buy as i can check out the quality first.

(Posted on Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 11:32 AM)

10. Author Profile Page Michael said:

Dom:

As far as I know the captures are all from the BD itself, not a recompressed rip.


Foxymulder:

It may be true that some of the problems are baked into the master itself - in fact I'd say it's pretty likely - but that doesn't explain why a number of the HDTV captures look noticeably better.

(Posted on Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 1:33 PM)

11. David Mackenzie said:

@Foxymulder:

>> I remember reading Bjoern Rays site and he mentioned the UK DVD discs were unfiltered

Absolutely not true - the UK discs were filtered, but less so.
I can count the number of unfiltered DVDs on the market on a single hand :(

(Posted on Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 7:29 PM)

12. FoxyMulder said:

David

I know from reading your site that you work on encoding discs.

Why do films get filtered for DVD or Blu Ray ?

Is it to make them easier to encode thus spend less time working on the discs or is there another reason ?

In your opinion is the situation with Blu Ray discs being filtered getting better or worse or is it just a few studio's still doing this.

Finally could this be a case of low bitrate VC-1 as Warner seems to have an obsession with trying to acieve as low a bitrate as possible and cramming extras onto the same disc.

I know VC-1 at higher bitrates looks excellent but at lower bitrates i have noticed things get smooth and it looks like grain reduction but i think it's the smoothing effect of low bitrate VC-1.

You can put me right if i'm wrong about that.

(Posted on Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 7:50 PM)

13. ChuckZ said:

Filtering is done to remove high frequency detail and reduce entropy. This makes video much easier to encode. However, this was in some ways logical for early DVD authoring. Blu-ray doesn't need any video filtering for acceptable compression. It seems to be carried out due to habit.

(Posted on Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 8:58 PM)

14. Kentai said:

That's a shame. I wouldn't be surprised if there's plenty of DVNR baked into the DI itself, but that's no excuse for the broadcast version to look more like film than the Blu-ray.

I could care less until New Line drags out the extended cuts, personally.

(Posted on Wednesday, March 24, 2010 at 1:28 AM)

15. Will Dearborn said:

I think studios maybe have been pressured by those uninformed consumers who cry afoul when seeing film grain and complain about it. Then we get DNR as some sort of ugly standard.

Sidenote, do any of you remember this page http://www.cornbread.org/FOTRCompare/index.html from many long years ago? I don't know where that guy got that HD source but it's sad that even those best the Blu-ray we get now.

(Posted on Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 1:39 AM)

16. Author Profile Page Michael said:

Will:

To me, those HD captures look very similar to the ones posted by eric.exe and others of the HDTV broadcast, so I'm assuming the source was the same. Either way it is, as Kentai says, a sorry state of affairs when a broadcast version looks better than the BD itself. I can accept there being problems baked into the master (THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING was a hodge-podge of photochemical timing and digital intermediate, and I believe the whole thing was then rendered out to film and rescanned to create the final master, so things could have gone wrong at a number of different stages), but I CANNOT accept more problems being added on top of them for the BD.

(Posted on Friday, March 26, 2010 at 10:37 AM)

17. LGans316 said:

http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/3328/42995955.png

The Curious C(f)at(c)e of waxline's DNR button :-)

(Posted on Sunday, March 28, 2010 at 9:23 AM)

18. FoxyMulder said:

I do think after examining closely the screencaps that only some of the HD captures are better than the Blu Ray.

When you take into account contrast changes then things start to change a little.

Having said that i consider the HD tv and Blu Ray both pretty disappointing but i wouldn't say a blanket statement that every capture of the HD tv version is better, more like they are identical in most except a few being better on the HD tv edition.

I think they need to go back to the original print and make a new digital intermediate for the films.

(Posted on Sunday, March 28, 2010 at 5:29 PM)

 
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