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I watched Heat on DVD the other night, and it looks AWFUL. It looked a bit poop in SD, but in HD the transfer is terrible - it pretty much looks like VHS. I've got the older, single-disk version, but I cant see mention of a newer one and the 2-disk version is apparently pretty crap too.

Apparently it will be released on Blu-Ray later this year, if the Blu-Ray website is to be believed. Where did you see it in HD?

I'm just referring to the tv I'm using. SD was blurry enough to hide the crapness, but on a better panel it looks worse. Are the BR transfers usually good?

It depends, really. Sometimes it's stellar; they did a really great job with Star Trek II.

Stark wrote:I'm just referring to the tv I'm using. SD was blurry enough to hide the crapness, but on a better panel it looks worse. Are the BR transfers usually good?

One thing we need to keep in mind here is that a lot of the raw film is often not sufficiently high quality to look good at such high resolution. I'm sure you've had the experience of being in a movie theatre and noticing that the picture often looked rather noisy, or even blurry on the huge screen. One normally forgets that when the DVD comes out, because the picture, no matter how imperfect it might have been in the theatre, seems to be perfect within the constraints of 480p. But it's a whole new world with 1080p. Many films have to be extensively processed before they will look good at such high resolution. If you just take the raw data and dump it on BluRay, you'll often get a transfer that looks just plain bad.

Uraniun235 wrote:It depends, really. Sometimes it's stellar; they did a really great job with Star Trek II.

The Predator Blu-Ray, on the other hand, is pretty damn ordinary.

Yeah, many of the comments I've read regarding the Heat DVDs seem to suggest that the original film is not in good condition, as some of the artefacting isn't DVD-compression artefacting but scratches and cracks in the film. It's very strange (and a bit sad) that such a cool movie that isn't really that old is apparently already in such poor condition.

Vympel wrote:

Uraniun235 wrote:It depends, really. Sometimes it's stellar; they did a really great job with Star Trek II.

The Predator Blu-Ray, on the other hand, is pretty damn ordinary.

And the Fifth Element Blu-Ray is shit. The first one was so shit that they actually offered a free exchange to an improved version, but the improved one is still grainy as hell.

Stark wrote:Yeah, many of the comments I've read regarding the Heat DVDs seem to suggest that the original film is not in good condition, as some of the artefacting isn't DVD-compression artefacting but scratches and cracks in the film. It's very strange (and a bit sad) that such a cool movie that isn't really that old is apparently already in such poor condition.

They can work miracles with modern image processing (just look at how badly the Star Wars film stock degraded before they did the Special Edition re-releases; it looked awful, and they somehow cleaned it right up). But that costs money, and not every studio is willing to spend that kind of money for an old movie. It's also worth noting that even with the extensive clean-up, it's not as sharp or detailed as newer films shot on digital.

Darth Wong wrote:

Vympel wrote:

Uraniun235 wrote:It depends, really. Sometimes it's stellar; they did a really great job with Star Trek II.

The Predator Blu-Ray, on the other hand, is pretty damn ordinary.

And the Fifth Element Blu-Ray is shit. The first one was so shit that they actually offered a free exchange to an improved version, but the improved one is still grainy as hell.

I've read some comments online from people who have no problem with grain and think it's actually a positive feature when using film.

JLTucker wrote: I've read some comments online from people who have no problem with grain and think it's actually a positive feature when using film.

Considering the intelligence of the average online reviewer, I think this is rather hilarious. I don't see how grain could be a positive feature at all unless the film was intentionally attempting to capture a retro style.

JLTucker wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:And the Fifth Element Blu-Ray is shit. The first one was so shit that they actually offered a free exchange to an improved version, but the improved one is still grainy as hell.

I've read some comments online from people who have no problem with grain and think it's actually a positive feature when using film.

I'll keep my grain in my bread rather than my movies, thanks.

General Zod wrote:

JLTucker wrote: I've read some comments online from people who have no problem with grain and think it's actually a positive feature when using film.

Considering the intelligence of the average online reviewer, I think this is rather hilarious. I don't see how grain could be a positive feature at all unless the film was intentionally attempting to capture a retro style.

Oh, I agree completely. I was just saying that some people actually think it's a positive. And most of those who made the comments are anti-digital, going by other comments they've made. I recall seeing a scene from Transformers on Blu-Ray and the grain that is present is distracting and it pulled me out of the film.

Every film that I've seen where digital is utilized (Benjamin Button, Zodiac, Public Enemies, Collateral) looks outstanding to me.