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So very very jealous.

(Posted on Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 12:27 PM)

Alien 3 was the one I was mainly interested in, it's been given a non-spectacular transfer, decent but not great and has some "ringing" - maybe it's a good idea it hasn't been given the major sprucing which the first two received because the Alien effects were never very good and a high quality HD transfer would only make them look worse.

Ian Holm's performance in Alien is the best of the bunch.

(Posted on Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 12:47 PM)

Just finished watching Alien, i'm ok with it, i see the comparisons with the DTheater edition but the different colour temperature and brightness/contrast levels means the film grain and look of the movie will appear different thus hard to compare but that edition seems more film like and this edition seems smoother and more hd videolike to me.

I had read some horror stories about static grain and the sheet effect, i didn't notice this, perhaps Michael will as his eye for this is keener than mine but i personally was ok with the blu ray quality but i felt something was lacking and perhaps its that film look i talk about above.

From what i gather Ridley Scott was very involved with the final product and people have to remember there is a lot of photography which is not always in focus in this movie, think of the lenses and cameras used back when they shot this film and i hope people don't see softness and cry dnr for those scenes, it certainly looks like grain was scrubbed from the release and i felt maybe this detracted from the film and maybe some scenes had that slight dnr blur to them which can be captured in screencap form and can be seen in the comparison with the DTheater but i'm not certain about that.

Ihave read some peoples comments about stretching of the image, nah i don't see it, it looks normal to me, some cropping at the sides compared to the last release but it seems Ridley is happy with it and well he is a fussy guy so this must be the look he now wants for the film.

Now i'm going to do some screencaps on the computer, maybe closer analysis will reveal flaws but i didn't notice any major issues on the big screen but it just seemed to lack something to me

Oh and on my Oppo the film starts all zoomed in and you need to return to the menu to replay before it fixes itself, i understand a firmware release should address this problem.

I think the slight perceived blur i talk about happens when you remove some film grain and maybe alter the look by darkening a scene or changing colours/contrast/brightness, it doesn't seem to remove detail but it seems to detract from that gorgeous film look some movies have.

Maybe Michael will consider the disc perfect and maybe i'm totally wrong about that but it just seemed the transfer was missing something, i'm not a fan of Lowry's work at all.

(Posted on Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 6:15 PM)

Ok after viewing some caps on the computer i definately think it's better than i gave it credit for, it looks much better than i saw on my projector, i'm thinking the bulb is dying, it's over 1500 hours now.

Scrub what i wrote above.

(Posted on Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 7:19 PM)

I'm wondering what your thoughts are going to be about the transfers, I read about James Cameron saying he was removing the grain from Aliens and began to worry.

(Posted on Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 8:35 PM)

David -- Cameron has always thought ALIENS was too grainy/noisy due to, as mentioned below, a (poor) film stock they used to shoot the film on. So recently he was happy to announce that he'd "Just done a complete re-master of [ALIENS]. It's spectacular, we went in and completely de-noised and de-grained it, up-rezzed, color-corrected every frame, and it looks amazing. It looks better than it looked in the theaters originally. Because it was shot on a high-speed negative that was a new negative that didn't pan out too well and got replaced the following year. So it's pretty grainy. We got rid of all the grain. It's sharper and clearer and more beautiful than it's ever looked."

All the fanboys expected another PREDATOR wax-fest after hearing this, instead they got arguably the best-looking disc in the new box set. Grainy ol' ALIENS... Nice work, Jim.

(Posted on Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 5:33 AM)

Yah i'm watching Aliens later, seems it's not the projector bulb although no doubt that's probably dimmed a little but it was my stupidity at fault with my viewing of Alien.

I bought a Panasonic SD-600 HD camcorder late last week and was testing it yesterday before i watched Alien, guess what i did, well i changed all the settings on the projector as i was testing things with the camcorder and forgot to set them back, i swear it's the beef i ate when i was younger, the memories going.

Anyway i got the calibration disc out ( Spears and Munsil and spent an hour fixing things and it looks fine now, much better probably not as good as an ISF calibration but serviceable.

(Posted on Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 10:17 AM)

Aliens was phenomenal, looked fantastic and sounded great too, so far i'm very pleased with the first two movies and will watch Alien 3 tomorrow.

(Posted on Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 8:06 PM)