Hi- def movies you've seen lately

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Post by lestat »

Got my hd-dvd addon over the weekend and spent it watching some of the hd-dvds i got. I managed to sit down and watch king kong, the mummy and chronicles of riddick.

Hands down, king kong is the best hd i have ever seen, it's 3hrs jam packed full of the most beautiful hd ever. The mummy looked pretty damn awesome, it's an older flick now but still looked very sharp, detailed and clean. Chronicles of riddick is another amazing transfer, detail is so crisp and amazing.

Also sat down to watch black hawk down on bluray. Probably one of the best looking blurays so far, although there are some soft scenes here and there.

I've also seen snippets from constantine, batman begins, v for vendetta, Terminator 3 and pitch black. I have a couple more hd-dvds to go through too.

But without a doubt hd-dvd is king in my books, the picture quality of the titles I've seen is out of this world and you can really see a big difference over DVD. Also I really love the IME, ucontrol stuff. So far a lot of hd-dvds are packed with lots of cool and interesting extras and the way it's integrated is very nice.

The bluray group really need to get their act together, there is no reason why they should be getting their arses kicked in terms of picture quality and extra features when they have on paper better specs.
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Post by mech »

So I got the Fifth Element and "Nine Inch Nails - Beside You in Time" on Blu-Ray yesterday.

Fifth Element looks barely better than DVD, at best. Very crappy transfer, looks like it was copied from old, used film, and the bit rate is woeful - around 15-16 meg usually, i.e. not that much better than DVD (while trying to encode a 1080p signal using MPEG2, ugh), and it's only a 25 gig Blu-Ray. Quite disappointing, but at least it was cheap.

NiN, however, looks phenomenal. I forgot to check what bitrate/encoding it was using, but it looks miiiiiiiiiiles better than Fifth Element. It is simply stunning how much detail you can see.

The problem with these hi-def formats is that a lot of the time now, the source is going to be the limiting factor - even with DVDs, the source could be limiting, so it's only going to get worse. I'd be really surprised if Blu-Ray or HD-DVD ever take off as the new defacto standard.
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Post by lestat »

After watching quite a few hd movies and then looking at a really good dvd transfer, I'm starting to feel that neither format will take off as a defacto standard.

It can be really hit and miss and even then a lot of people may not even appreciate the extra increase in detail or care much for it. A great DVD transfer on a good panel can still look and sound amazing, I guess for pal owners the jump is much less because we had higher def dvds for a long time over us movie viewers thanks to pals higher resolution.

The only way i can see these formats taking off is if they become so cheap it becomes a no brainier to just pick up the hd version over the dvd for people.

I'm gonna be holding off buying anymore movies personally, I don't see a lot of value at the moment. I'm gonna just be renting in future. It's hard justifying spending $40 on a movie when you can get it on dvd for $10 bucks with more extras.
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Post by amba »

It's definitely not like the jump from VHS to DVD- not that you really expect it to, but it'll be a rare movie that will justify an upgrade. Stuff you haven't got, different story. And I sure as hell won't be buying movies that I hated just because they're on high- def.

And, frankly, while nerds wanting The Matrix helped DVD become successful, it was the families replacing Disney that really brought it into the mainstream.

What I have found is that I'm spending less on standard def- every time I look at one, I question whether it will be on high- def soon. It's just that little bit more waiting time for me.
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Post by jizzlobber »

not really what I wanted to hear, I just bought a hd-dvd drive and ordered 4 movies from amazon.

I won't go buying anything without reading reviews/impressions, i'll be making sure it's a good transfer before ordering.

but 2 of the movies I ordered (batman and riddick) are for the eye candy, I had no intention of buying either on DVD.

oh well, I paid $100 for the hd-dvd drive.
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Post by lestat »

I think DVD grew of the back of the whole home theater craze too. A lot of people never experience 5.1 sound or thought to create a mini theater atmosphere at home. It's why i think DVD grew the market over vhs, people with home theaters now took more pride in their movies and wanted to collect and own them.

I guess things like hd movies are meant to grow off the back of large 1080p flat panels sales and people wanting to feed their new large panels with 1080p content. But with decent size 50inch+ 1080p panels still at 10k or greater mark. I think it will be a while before that effect starts kicking in.
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Post by amba »

smelly ballsack wrote:not really what I wanted to hear, I just bought a hd-dvd drive and ordered 4 movies from amazon.

I won't go buying anything without reading reviews/impressions, i'll be making sure it's a good transfer before ordering.
Then there will be reviews of Children of Men, Grand Prix, March of the Penguins, Animal House, Fast Times at Ridgemont High soon, because they're on the way to me.

As I said, I'm only getting things I haven't got in SD :)
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Post by jizzlobber »

great, i'd like to read your impressions.

what are the better hd-dvd titles you already have?

I hear happy feet looks amazing but then I heard about the political message in the story and it turned me off a bit.
it's also one of the more expensive hd-dvds listed at amazon.
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Post by GreyWizzard »

there was a politcal message in it? Oh yeah I remember that crap now. But the penguins were so pretty.
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Post by amba »

There were 3 political messages in it- pollution, overfishing, and some other one which isn't political but involved him getting the penguin tang and being true to himself. I really didn't like that film. So not getting it.

As always, the best PQ are the animation digital transfers, even if they're not the best films. So Corpse Bride, Ant Bully. Assume A Scanner Darkly will be similar- that's stuff to showcase the format with.

Older movies, you do need to check on the remastering- if they did the process with HD in mind when they did it, then they're genterally very good, otherwise they're just an upscaled version of the SD remaster. The movies I listed as on their way above will be examples of the latter, with the exception of Grand Prix.

I think the real difference with most films in HD is that you do notice the grain, and often you can tell digital grain from 'real' grain. And some people appreciate grain; others don't.

I'll come back to you on the better films. I want to think about it a little bit.
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Post by jizzlobber »

what's the story with terminator 2?

it's being released in france yeah?
any word on when?

and how would I go about finding the damn thing?

need that movie :D
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Post by lestat »

Universal/studio canal have the distro rights here so who knows when they'll release it locally. You can get T3 from the us right now on HD-DVD, I have a copy at home now. T2 is only available on bluray from liongate in the us, but I hear it's a very ordinary transfer.
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Post by Scullibundo »

T3 is shit.
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Post by jizzlobber »

I like T3, not as good as the other 2 but still good.
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Post by mech »

mech wrote:So I got the Fifth Element and "Nine Inch Nails - Beside You in Time" on Blu-Ray yesterday.

Fifth Element looks barely better than DVD, at best. Very crappy transfer, looks like it was copied from old, used film, and the bit rate is woeful - around 15-16 meg usually, i.e. not that much better than DVD (while trying to encode a 1080p signal using MPEG2, ugh), and it's only a 25 gig Blu-Ray. Quite disappointing, but at least it was cheap.

NiN, however, looks phenomenal. I forgot to check what bitrate/encoding it was using, but it looks miiiiiiiiiiles better than Fifth Element. It is simply stunning how much detail you can see.

The problem with these hi-def formats is that a lot of the time now, the source is going to be the limiting factor - even with DVDs, the source could be limiting, so it's only going to get worse. I'd be really surprised if Blu-Ray or HD-DVD ever take off as the new defacto standard.
So NiN is AVC and between 15 and 40+ Megabit... no wonder it looks so much better. It boggles my mind that Blu-Ray has such an advantage and it's completely squandering it.
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Post by lestat »

Picked up the ps3 remote over the weekend, used one of my tru vouchers and got it for $40. Also grabbed goodfellas on bluray, bigw finally got some blurays in, the warner titles are only $25 there, fox and sony titles are still priced way to high imo for catalog titles.

Goodfellas is such a great ganster flick, pretty good transfer considering the films age, but sonically not a lot happens in the film.

The ps3 remote is pretty nice and stylish i like it, much better than using the controller which started to annoy me for watching films.

I have to say, as a movie player I really like the ps3. If sony added the ability to stream content over the network it would be an awesome media center system.

Also i just joined quickflix and have a tonne of bluray rentals coming my way.

Also on AVS I saw that onkyo have announced this years receivers that have full truHD and DTS master audio decoding. With full 1080p hdmi 1.3 switching and source scaling. My trusty old pioneer thx amp is close to 10 years old now so it's finally time for an upgrade. :)
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Post by jizzlobber »

ezydvd has a bunch of hd-dvd titles in now between $30 and $40.

I see they have total recall, it's $40 but I might get it, great movie and I don't have it on dvd or anything.
apparently it has only been released in france and australia.
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Post by jizzlobber »

here's a DVD/HD-DVD comparison from someone at xbox-world.

http://img339.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mvc007ftr0.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://img186.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mvc009fnq1.jpg" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

crystal clear, massive improvement!
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Post by vision »

Casino Royale was orright. Have Click and Stargate lined up next.
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Post by jizzlobber »

my drive arrived, haven't watched anything yet, but I will say i'm a bit pissed at the size/shape of the cases.
won't fit in any racks, why not just use dvd style cases?

bah!
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Post by lestat »

I agree jizz, the smaller cases piss me off too. Cover art on the cases needs to be smaller and doesn't look as good. Plus they don't fit in any dvd storage racks. So they don't co-exist with your dvd collection very well at all.

I'm not sure what the reasoning was behind smaller cases. Maybe they knew hd would be niche and decided to go for smaller casing to use less retail shelf space? Who knows.
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Post by jizzlobber »

I think they are just getting fancy (the cheap way).
jewel red, slim, short... it's different!

but it shits me
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Post by Ben »

lestat wrote:I agree jizz, the smaller cases piss me off too. Cover art on the cases needs to be smaller and doesn't look as good. Plus they don't fit in any dvd storage racks. So they don't co-exist with your dvd collection very well at all.

I'm not sure what the reasoning was behind smaller cases. Maybe they knew hd would be niche and decided to go for smaller casing to use less retail shelf space? Who knows.
Blu-Ray is the same eh? Smaller cases/weird sizing? Maybe not the exact same dimensions as the HD ones but yeah..
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Post by lestat »

Yeah same height and width as the hd-dvd cases. Although the local bluray cases are about the same thickness as normal dvd cases. The US bluray cases and hd-dvd cases are about half the thickness of a normal dvd case.
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Post by Ben »

Still seems a bit weird to me, but I guess just about every new format had a new accompanying case.
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