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Movie Matters #17 - Halloween Special III

12:00 AM / Podcast / 10 Comments

All Hallows' Eve descends on the Movie Matters podcast as co-hosts Lee Howard and Michael Mackenzie, accompanied by special guest Daniel Sardella, brave the terrors of three spine-tingling horror movies in the show's third annual Halloween special: Ti West's THE INNKEEPERS, the horror anthology THE THEATRE BIZARRE, and Richard Donner's classic THE OMEN.

This episode also features Movie Matters' first ever competition, open to all listeners worldwide. Listen to the show for details on how to win a Blu-ray Disc of one of the films covered in a previous episode...

• Direct link
• iTunes

The music sampled in this episode is from THE THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS by Danny Elfman, THE INNKEEPERS by Jeff Grace, THE THEATRE BIZARRE by Pierre Marchand and THE OMEN by Jerry Goldsmith.

Letterboxd lists:

• Movie Matters filmography
• Michael's best Blu-ray catalogue titles

Created by Lee Howard & Michael Mackenzie
Edited by Michael Mackenzie

http://moviematterspodcast.blogspot.com

The colours of autumn

9:12 PM / General / 6 Comments

The view from my bedroom window yesterday. Colours certainly become a whole lot more interesting at this time of year.

How I take BD screen captures

10:11 PM / Blu-ray / 18 Comments

I quite often get emails and comments asking how to take screen captures of Blu-ray Discs. Given the frequency of these requests, I thought it would be a good idea to make a quick guide on the subject in order to avoid repeating myself.

The method I'm going to provide here is, in my experience, the easiest to follow and the one that is least likely to introduce inaccuracies. If you follow these instructions you should be able to produce captures that are an accurate representation of what is on the disc. Please note that you will only be able to use this method for titles encoded with AVC. These days, that's pretty much 99% of all titles on the market. You'll need to use different methods for discs that use either VC-1 or MPEG-2, but that's a guide for another day.

What you'll need:

1. A BD-ROM drive
2. DGAVCDec
3. A means to decrypt Blu-ray Discs

For point 3, you have a few options. The only one I know anything about is SlySoft's AnyDVD HD, which unfortunately comes with a fairly significant price tag attached. I bought mine some years back when a lifetime subscription was considerably cheaper than it is now. If you're going to be taking a lot of captures and/or intend to turn your PC into a multi-region home theatre setup, I'd still consider it a price worth paying, but I can understand people not wanting to part with €119. Luckily there's a 21-day trial version available, so you can at least sample the product and decide whether you feel it's a worthwhile investment.

[Continue reading...]

Some more Prometheus captures

1:10 PM / Blu-ray / 7 Comments

I've been asked by a couple of people if I could post some more screen captures comparing the 2D and 3D BDs of PROMETHEUS. That strikes my as an entirely reasonable request, given that I'd previously only posted a single pair of images and could have been seen to be basically expecting people to take on trust that the entire film showed a similar discrepancy in terms of detail between its 2D and 3D incarnations. I've matched 15 different frames below, including the one I posted on Sunday.

A few quick notes about these captures:

They were captured using DGAVCIndex, my preferred method of capturing for AVC-encoded titles (which is pretty much everything these days). DGAVCIndex has the benefit of bypassing any tomfoolery applied by your video card, and while I know that things like edge enhancement, noise reduction, "flesh tone correction" (seriously, that's an option in my card's control panel) and other goofy manipulations are disabled on my system, I've learned from experience that users aren't always aware of what their hardware and/or software might be doing behind their back, which is why I always generally recommend DGAVCIndex when people ask me how to take BD screen captures.

The 3D captures represent only the left eye view, which is standard practice among "screenshot scientists" (™ and © Blu-ray.com Forums) such as myself when posting screenshots of 3D discs. I've yet to find a way to successfully decode the right eye data on its own. The left eye data is also what you'll see if you play a 3D disc on a setup without 3D capabilities (unless, as is the case with PROMETHEUS, the disc is programmed to refuse to play at all unless is detects a 3D setup).

Virtually all of these are I-frames. In something approaching 95% of cases, the I-frames on the 2D and 3D discs are the same frames.

All captures are saved in Photoshop as .jpgs with a compression level of 12 (the least amount of compression possible). See my "Lossy vs. Lossless" challenge for why I don't bother using .pngs: challenge; results.

In retrospect it was probably slightly foolhardy to post the capture I did. It's by far the most detailed shot in the entire film, and the loss of detail on the 3D disc was always going to be particularly pronounced in that instance. As you'll see by looking through the wider selection of captures below, the difference in detail varies considerably from shot to shot, depending on how much fine detail is on the screen at any given time. Sometimes there's no apparent difference at all other than that the 3D disc is slightly brighter throughout - as I noted in an earlier comment, presumably to offset the dimming that takes place when you wear 3D glasses. More problematic than the slight detail loss, I feel, is the stair-stepping that is visible on diagonal edges throughout the 3D disc. I first noticed it during the opening sequence on the credits text, but it persists throughout the film and tends to be particularly noticeable in the landscape shots (look at the rock formations in Example 3). I've noticed this on a handful of discs in the past (e.g. HIERRO, SUNSHINE CLEANING, THE ORPHANAGE), but this is the first time I've seen it on a BD of a big budget Hollywood blockbuster. (In the past, my theory was that these BD transfers were taken from masters with a resolution of less than 1920x1080 as a cost-cutting measure, but I highly doubt that was the case here.)

It's not my intention to be alarmist about the 3D disc - the picture quality is not bad by any means, and the fact that a significant number of displays don't actually display 3D content at full resolution anyway means that for many people this won't make much of a difference. Plus, 3D holds so little interest for me that I'd be lying if I claimed the fact that PROMETHEUS's 3D disc wasn't absolute perfection was causing me sleepless nights. (If the boot had been on the other foot, and it was the 2D version that was compromised, I suspect I'd be a lot more concerned.) The fact remains, though, that the problems are there, and if I was Fox, I'd want to know about this, and to find out how it occurred in the first place.

Prometheus (2D)
label: 20th Century Fox; disc country: USA; region code: A;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 2.39:1

Prometheus (3D)
label: 20th Century Fox; disc country: USA; region code: A;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 2.39:1

Just arrived...

6:53 PM / Blu-ray / 9 Comments

So, that 3D disc of Prometheus...

3:22 PM / Blu-ray / 24 Comments

...is kinda lacking on the detail front compared to its 2D counterpart. I wonder what happened there?

Above: 3D (click to enlarge)

Above: 2D (click to enlarge)

To the best of my knowledge, no-one else has commented on this yet. I guess, given that a lot of televisions don't actually display 3D content in full 1920x1080 anyway, it's going to be a moot point for a lot of people, but still I'd have expected at least someone to have spotted the discrepancy by now.

Any thoughts?

And before you ask, it's not just this shot that's affected, or even a handful of shots. It's the whole movie.

BD Impressions: Raiders of the Lost Ark

2:57 PM / BD Impressions / 7 Comments

The long-awaited INDIANA JONES: THE COMPLETE ADVENTURES has finally made it to Blu-ray, containing all three films in the Indiana Jones trilogy and, erm, THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL. I'm not sure I'll have time to do BD Impressions pieces on all four films, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to cover the first and, as is so often the case, best film, 1981's RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.

The film: I'm unabashed in my love of RAIDERS. It's fantastic: action-packed, heart-stopping, funny as hell. While some people would point to JAWS or CLOSE ENCOUNTERS as their favourite Spielberg film, this one has always got my vote. I saw it as a young kid and, like so many films first experienced at that age, it wormed its way into my subconscious to the extent that, even though I didn't revisit the film until several years later, when I finally did I found I knew it more or less off by heart. And it's one of those special films where knowing what's coming next is no bad thing: the fun lies in its familiarity, and it just gets better with age. I've always found Harrison Ford to be a fairly wooden actor, but oddly enough it doesn't hurt this film one iota, and in many cases his slightly stilted delivery actually adds to the comedy. Karen Allen is brilliant - she was always my favourite Indy leading lady, and the stuff she gets up to here just reinforces how wasted she was when they brought her back for CRYSTAL SKULL. Unlike Mrs. Spielberg in TEMPLE OF DOOM, who served a similar function, her schtick is endearing rather than infuriating, and I love the fact that she's neither a screaming damsel in distress or an unbelievable Strong Independent Woman(TM): she's brash, goofy and actually a bit of a lightweight, even though she clearly thinks of herself as a hard-ass. And of course there are the villains: in particular, Ronald Lacey makes for one of the most sinister movie Nazis ever, which takes some doing.

I can't really say anything else about the film that you haven't heard before. If you've seen it, I've a suspicion you'll agree with all of the above. If you haven't seen it... what the hell is wrong with you, and why are you still reading this? See it now! 10/10

Image quality: For this Blu-ray release, much has been made of the fact that RAIDERS has received a new 4k scan from the camera negative, which I take to mean that, for TEMPLE OF DOOM and LAST CRUSADE, older masters have been reused. I haven't looked at them in any detail yet, so I'll restrict this discussion to RAIDERS, which looks extremely impressive indeed. Shot in anamorphic Panavision, the image has the smooth, fine grain look you'd normally expect from this process. Colours look much warmer than the cooler-looking DVD version that was released nearly a decade ago in the THE ADVENTURES OF INDIANA JONES box set (and was reviewed very positively at the time), but aside from the rather blown-out contrasts during the opening credits (taken from a source at least a couple of generations removed from the negative, naturally, since RAIDERS is a pre-DI title and they haven't been re-composited for this release), the overall balance of colour, contrast etc. is very pleasing to the eye. Either way, the present colour timing comes with Spielberg's blessing, and while that doesn't automatically count for everything (remember the FriedkinVision FRENCH CONNECTION BD from a few years back?), I reckon it stands for a lot more than looking at older DVDs and automatically assuming THEY were accurate and this isn't. Quoting TLEFilms' Torsten Kaiser on the subject:

Re: RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK: Pretty much "the same picture" as with [the 2012 European BD release of THE TERMINATOR]: close (to the original mostly), but not 100% perfect; but compared to everything before on video masters A HUGE LEAP forward. Everyone who ownes an LPP of the re-issue will know.

(Source: Blu-ray.com forum)

There are a handful of minor glitches that prevent this disc achieving perfection. The aforementioned opening titles with their constrained dynamic range are one; another is this shot of the spiders on Alfred Molina's back, which has a very strange appearance - almost like the effect of watching a 3D film without glasses. I don't know whether it's some sort of compositing side effect, but it doesn't look like an optical so I'm inclined to assume not. There's also a shot at around 01:55:00 where Indy hides from the Nazi U-boat where heavier-than-usual grain has clearly been digitally reduced, but that's really the only shot in the entire film that shows obvious signs of digital manipulation. Otherwise it's an extremely impressive presentation - one of the best I've ever seen for a catalogue title, and continues the almost unbroken streak of Spielberg films receiving top drawer treatment on BD. 9.5/10

Raiders of the Lost Ark
label: Paramount; disc country: USA; region code: ABC;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 2.39:1

Movie Matters #16 - Sci-fi double bill

8:53 PM / Podcast / No Comments

Co-hosts Lee Howard and an uncharacteristically cantankerous Michael Mackenzie take a look at two of the science fiction genre's more unusual and divisive offerings from recent years: Panos Cosmatos' dark, dystopian BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW and William Eubank's ambitious meditation on the human condition, LOVE. Lee and Michael also catch up on films they've been watching recently and upcoming cinema releases they're looking forward to.

• Direct link
• iTunes

The music sampled in this episode is from BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW by Jeremy Schmidt and LOVE by Angels & Airwaves.

Created by Lee Howard & Michael Mackenzie
Edited by Michael Mackenzie

http://moviematterspodcast.blogspot.com

Just arrived...

11:01 PM / Blu-ray / 19 Comments

Just arrived...

1:32 PM / Blu-ray / 8 Comments

A couple of long-awaited goodies...