Tuesday, September 28, 2010

A few thoughts on the new Mulholland Drive BD

10:01 PM / Blu-ray / Comments8 Comments

Blu-ray
Blu-ray

When Studio Canal released David Lynch's masterful MULHOLLAND DRIVE on a bare-bones French HD DVD back in 2007, they basically gave it a reasonable but far from jaw-dropping transfer and an audio track that was marred, like a number of early Studio Canal releases, by being pitched too high (an artefact of sourcing the audio from a PAL master and slowing it down from 25 to 24 fps but neglecting to also PITCH it down).

Fast forward to 2010 and Studio Canal have finally released it on BD (via their UK division Optimum in this country) as part of their prestigious Studio Canal Collection. This series has been a bit of a mixed bag so far, with some very nice-looking releases (e.g. BELLE DE JOUR) and some not-so-nice-looking ones (such as THE LADYKILLERS, my pre-order for which I actually cancelled when I saw the screen captures). MULHOLLAND DRIVE falls somewhere in between these two, and while I'd like to say it at least matches the quality of the HD DVD, I'm afraid that's not the case.

First, the good news: we get the usual extremely classy digibook packaging and a 20-page booklet featuring a new essay by Adam Woodward. We also get a slew of bonus features, some new, some ported over from the earlier special edition DVD release. Oh, and perhaps most importantly, the pitch problem is gone.

Now, the bad news... and unfortunately it relates to what is, for me, the most important part of the package (besides the film itself, natch): the video. Studio Canal have reused the same master that graced the HD DVD, but this time round they've added a layer of grain reduction on top of what was already a noticeably grain reduced master. The result is something that I've struggled for some time to capture with static images, but ultimately it's something that can only really be appreciated by viewing the disc in motion: grain is still visible, but it's frequently static and almost always looks unnatural. If you pretend the HD DVD release never existed, the BD looks fairly acceptable, but knowing a better version could have existed - nay, DID exist - makes it a bitter pill to swallow.

This is the best representation of the difference between the two I could get, and even then it doesn't come close to conveying the difference that is visible during playback:

HD DVD:

Mulholland Drive HD DVD

BD:

Mulholland Drive HD DVD

The bottom line is that, if you aren't overly bothered by the pitch problem, don't mind the lack of extras and still have a means of playing it, stick with the HD DVD. That's a lot of "ifs", though, and I can imagine that for a lot of people the new BD is going to be the only feasible choice - meaning no choice at all, really. I know there's also a Nordic BD release from Pan Vision, but I've no idea how it compares to either of Studio Canal's efforts on the visual front, or whether it suffers from the pitch glitch. If anyone has any idea, or can match the above capture with the same frame from that release, please do let me know.

 
8 Comments

1. Thunderbolt said:

in any case, dont use jpegs for comparisons.

most of the screens at cinemasquid dont look so soft/DNR'ed though. you need to take some more, can't judge it from one comparison pic only.

(Posted on Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 12:16 AM)

2. Erik said:

"I know there's also a Nordic BD release from Pan Vision, but I've no idea how it compares to either of Studio Canal's efforts on the visual front, or whether it suffers from the pitch glitch. If anyone has any idea, or can match the above capture with the same frame from that release, please do let me know."

Is this a hint? :) Here's the closest I-frame, couldn't get the other programs working to get an exact match, but perhaps you might be able to with this...

http://home.online.no/~bhundlan/temp6/drive_pan-vision.jpg

(No pitch issue on this disc from what I could tell).

(Posted on Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 2:08 AM)

3. Author Profile Page Michael said:

Erik:

Many thanks. Obviously as it's not the same frame it's difficult to be sure, but it certainly looks to have more grain than the Studio Canal BD while at the same time resolving the grain better than the VC-1 encoded HD DVD.

Thunderbolt:

I'll try to post some more captures later if I get the chance, but I'd like to point your attention to what I said in the original post:

"The result is something that I've struggled for some time to capture with static images, but ultimately it's something that can only really be appreciated by viewing the disc in motion: grain is still visible, but it's frequently static and almost always looks unnatural."

As such, I wouldn't necessarily expect further captures to provide any sort of revelation. I actually took quite a few other shots but didn't post them as they didn't adequately convey what the grain reduction looks like in motion - the one above was really the only one that came close.

As for the whole JPEG vs. PNG debate, I've had it before and don't want to repeat myself here, so I'll simply direct you to this:

http://www.landofwhimsy.com/archives/2009/08/compressed-vs-uncompressed/

and

http://www.landofwhimsy.com/archives/2009/08/lossy-vs-lossless-results/

(Posted on Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 7:31 AM)

4. FoxyMulder said:

Thunderbolt i can assure you that a 100% Jpeg is identical to the captured PNG when converted, now let me explain why Jpeg should be used.

A PNG file can be almost 4MB in size, the JPEG which will lose nothing in quality can be under half of that, now thats at the extreme end of things.

Now take into account this and it's something not many people know of.

Not so much a bandwidth issue as the main pipeline with servers, I am on a VPS with 100mbp/s uplink, now if someone hits an image at my site which is 4mb in size you can maybe get 25 simultaneous hits before the server cannot cope with the demands, its that pipeline of 100mbp/s uplink, now thats why it's important to convert to JPG, less stress on the server keeps the webhost company happy and allows you more simultaneous hits.

Now some people only have 10mbp/s uplinks, imagine that scenario with a PNG, a few hits and thats your lot.

Now the huge sites like Amazon or IMDB use 1000mbp/s uplinks with multiple massive servers and CDN farms to process things, they can survive huge numbers of hits before going down, us little people cannot unfortunately.

I have actually just yesterday on my birthday moved my server from Inmotion Hosting which was fairly good to Knownhost, i now at last have proper full root access and plan on installing Eaccelerator to compliment my wC3 Total Cache, i'm hoping for speed improvments once the work is complete.

Another thing to bear in mind is the speed of your site is determined by host server location, i use an American host thus my site is much faster to Americans than Europeans, indeed my site is extremely slow in China or New Zealand. Once again the large huge sites use CDN which is content delivery networks to ensure users all over the world get great connection speeds to their site, that can be more expensive so once again us little people are limited and get less traffic because of it.

A good site to test web speeds from different locations of the world for different sites is below. Pingdom is crap and does not take into account caching plugins a user may have on their site thus their results are always slower than the real world results. Indeed its best to set the page below to do maybe 3 tests at a time.

http://www.webpagetest.org/

(Posted on Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 8:37 AM)

5. Paku said:

The Nordic version looks like it could be the best, I'll probably pick it up at some point. Doesn't hurt that it's bargain-priced here in Sweden either, makes the mediocre quality a bit easier to swallow.

(Posted on Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 11:03 AM)

6. FoxyMulder said:

I hear Wild At Heart which is my favourite Lynch movie is out here in the UK soon, i so hope it's a good release, i have still never watched Lost Highway but i hear thats coming too, i fear the worst for both films though but maybe i'll resign myself to at least a rental thats assuming Blockbuster UK doesn't suffer the same fate as Blockbuster in America, they claim they are financially secure and i hope so because i don't want Lovefilm for rentals.

(Posted on Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 11:58 AM)

7. Erik said:

Exact match, feel free to use it, no plugs needed:

http://home.online.no/~bhundlan/temp6/drive_pan-vision_exact.jpg

I prefer the I-frame (larger in size :) Anyway, if you really look at the tiny details, down to eyelashes, the Pan Vision BD appears to "win" -- though I doubt you'd be able to notice much of a difference between this and the old HD DVD release in motion.

(Posted on Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 10:18 PM)

8. Thunderbolt said:

hows the audio of the nordic disc pitch wise?

(Posted on Wednesday, September 29, 2010 at 11:11 PM)

 
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