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Old 7th January 2013, 05:19 PM
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tele1962 tele1962 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mentasm View Post
Arrow does seem to have more than its fair share of these mastering/authoring errors. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that there is a company releasing niche titles like the ones Arrow puts out (especially in today's economy), but there always seems to be at least one niggling little thing amiss.

Interesting that they blame the seamless branching for the missing 6 seconds. I've gone over the disc with BDInfo to identify the various .m2ts files that comprise the .mpls (playlist) files and the only thing that's different between the three versions are the opening and closing credits, none of which contains any part of the film proper (just the credits). There is one .m2ts (0004.m2ts) file that contains the main feature, which is used by all three playlists and it's missing those first 6 seconds. This means it's not a technical issue with the seamless branching that's causing players to skip footage, it's a case of the footage not even being there to begin with. I guess technically they could still blame the seamless branching as without it this error would have less likely occurred, but it's a more of a 'oops, we messed up the mastering/encoding' thing.


That's not really a defence. Their QC process should have picked up on it - no distributor should rely on external reviewers to do their job for them (but in this case it seems that someone actually did tell them, which is worse). Lionsgate had a similar authoring problem with their release of The Cabin in the Woods last year and they ended up recalling all copies and issuing replacements, although admittedly in that case the issue was more distracting.


It's only unreliable if you don't know how to interpret what you're looking at. For example, looking at screen captures I can easily see that Arrow's release of ZFE looks better than BU's. The framing is better, the colour rendition and contrast are more natural, and there is slightly more detail. Unfortunately I can't post links, but all of this is evident from just looking at the comparison on Caps-a-Holic. There's a shot of Paola in the shower that really bears it out - the framing and colour benefits are obvious, but look at the shower jet and you'll see that the BU version is missing some of the individual water streams and droplets, possibly due to filtering or dirt/scratch removal. The grain on Arrow's release also looks more natural and the BU 'grain' looks more like noise (of the sort that has been present on some of Arrow's releases, for which they were slated). It's actually pretty easy to tell whether a screen cap was captured correctly, especially if it's from a reputable source (like one of the 'blogs' you are so ready to write off). Some of us find those sources invaluable when making our purchasing decisions and they've certainly saved me from buying more lemons than they have prevented me from buying decent releases. I'm not claiming screen captures are the be-all end-all, but they are generally a good indicator of quality. Put it this way, I've yet to see a a poor set of captures translate to a nice looking BD and vice versa.


What about Lady Snowblood? That is washed out because the levels are incorrect. In fact, the only way to view it as it should look is to change the RGB levels in the viewing equipment, which one shouldn't have to do. That should also have been identified and corrected before it went into mass production. Very few reviews picked up on that either, but it doesn't make it any less of an issue. In this case though I'm assuming Arrow just licensed it from a third-party, so it's not strictly their fault. Not sure what it would have taken to correct it; probably more time/money than they deemed economical.


I have to agree with that. With the exception of a few directors who maintain obsessive control over their home video presentations (such as James Cameron), a lot of 'director-approved' tags mean nothing. As a recent example, it's a little co-incidental that Quentin Tarantino decided both Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown needed to look orange after years of having natural colour timing, especially when a host of other Lionsgate titles also came out with similar colour timing around the same time. There's also the issue of just what the director/DP approves. Is it the master or the final encode? If it's the former there's nothing to stop a distributor making radical changes to the look of a film before slapping it on a disc. Fellowship of the ring was supposedly director/DP approved, but that's now overwhelmingly green. Even Cameron has fallen foul of this; while he approved the old T2 master for home video releases years ago, he isn't responsible for adding noise reduction to the most recent release. However, even when he is directly involved with the final look of his Blu-rays he still revises the look of his films (Aliens), which opens up another can of worms... Terminator is also cooler than it used to be, but although I'm told it's director approved I can't say if that's the 4K scan Lowry did ages ago, or the final product.

Still, keeps things interesting, eh?
I was refering to the posters quote on Calibrated TV's being washed out.
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