Individual Entry

 
JESUS CHRIST WHAT A HORRIBLE TRANSFER

After the Escape from New York Blu-ray scandal broke, I knew I just had to see the disc for myself. Of course, the screen captures were pretty damning in their own right, but there’s something about seeing it in motion that makes it all the more “real”. Thank goodness for LoveFilm, who dispatched it to me yesterday. It was waiting for me today when I got home from work, and my goodness, it is, if possible, even worse than I expected.

Quoth Lyris:

As someone who’s authored and encoded DVDs, it is my opinion that the source looks like a processed standard-def studio tape (and not a very appealing one, either): that is, marginally better than DVD, but way below 1080p standard. The film grain structure (or what’s left of it) is thick and clumpy, it looks undoubtedly SD.

If Optimum are reading this, I urge them to look into it. Did the master tape come from France? Could there possibly have been a language barrier issue? For example, if Optimum requested an HDCAM SR tape of “Escape from New York”, the facility could have made them one, using a Digital Betacam tape as a source. Optimum receive the HDCAM SR tape and make a disc out of it, completely unaware of the original source material.

Escape from New york
(Optimum UK, AVC, 18.8 GB)