I'm wondering if anyone here has slipped the just-released Naschy Blu-ray Disc double-feature (Vengeance of the Zombies and Night of the Werewolf) into their player yet.

I watched both titles last night and had playback problems on my PS3. Zombies kept stuttering during playback, displaying a single frame across what should have been two, three, or more frames of playback. (The sound was OK.) It seemed to happen in shots with a moving camera and a fair amount of detail in the frame, so I wondered if my PS3 was having a problem decoding scenes with lots of data in them. However, I was able to reproduce the problem in frame-advance mode, which made me less sure that it's just a processor problem. (Also, the sound dropped out of sync for a few scenes toward the end of the film, but I'm not sure if that's at all related.)

Werewolf was much better, although there seemed to be a glitch in the frame cadence. It was mostly noticable in pans, where the image would hitch intermittently. It's the kind of error that I'd typically associate with some kind of video pulldown/inverse telecine problem, so I'm going to look at it again tonight with the "Cinemotion" feature turned off on my Sony TV to see if that has anything to do with it. Again, I'm curious to hear if anyone else has watched it — especially on the PS3 — and either seen or not noted the problem.

I've played a whole raft of high-end titles on the PS3 — Ratatouille, Blade Runner, etc — without similar problems (my HD DVD add-on for the XBOX drops frames like crazy, however), so I wonder if there's something non-standard going on in the authoring of these discs that's making my unit hiccup. Interestingly, the problems exhibited by the two discs don't seem to be related at all.

Thanks!

-bf-

Hi Bryant, I ordered a copy of this release this afternoon, and I'll let you know what my playback experience is once I've received it (it may take a couple of weeks, as I'm in the UK and ordering from the US). I also use a Playstation 3.

It wouldn't surprise me if there were glitches, as this is bleeding-edge territory for BCI.

Also wouldn't surprise me that there are discrete issues between transfers/authoring, as VENGEANCE was presented open matte (I'm convinced this was a mistake due to lack of direct oversight in preparation of the master), leading me to believe the transfers come from different telecine houses.

All just speculation, but considering the catch-as-catch-can quality of dealing with overseas licensors on marginal titles, and BCI's relative lack of experience with chasing down proper elements, I think it's a decent bet.

Michael, thanks. I'll look forward to hearing what you see. I guess I'm spoiled — here in New York, Amazon.co.uk deliveries typically make it to my door in just three or four working days!

Jeffrey, funny thing about Vengeance. Near the start of the film I was trying to troubleshoot the repeated-frame problem and thus turned on the info-display function on my PS3 so I could keep an eye on the bit rate from shot to shot. On the PS3, this puts black strips across the top and bottom of the image, and superimposes the disc data on top of the black bars. I was about to apologize to my wife for cropping the top and bottom of the frame when I realized that the compositions actually looked much better in widescreen. (Which makes sense, of course, for a Spanish film from 1972.) I might have left the black bars on the screen for the duration if they hadn't lopped off the very bottom edge of the subtitles.

I agree with you that the full-frame master was likely a mistake. The open-matte HD master provides more-than-adequate resolution for creating an anamorphic (720x480) DVD, but you're stuck with the complete frame when you sit down to make your 1080p Blu-ray. (I didn't notice if there were any nude bits near the margins of the frame that would make the full-frame transfer more attractive to Eurocult completists.) I wonder if any other HD masters lurking in the vaults have similar limitations.

It's sure going to be interesting over the next few years as Eurocult (and other niche) titles start to trickle out in HD. I'm not exactly happy about the playback problems — but I'll take them over the alternative, which would be a Blu-ray collection comprising only big-time releases from the Hollywood studios. I had never seen a Naschy werewolf movie before (there are eight of these!?) and it was great fun to watch it at home at such a high level of clarity.

A rep from BCI confirmed on DVD Maniacs' forum, I believe, that they didn't do these transfers themselves -- they were provided to them by the licensor.

I haven't seen the Blu-ray disc, but these masters did have their share of problems on DVD. Zombies had it worse than Werewolf.

Just so long as they don't crop 1.66:1 films to 1.78:1 just because they figure people don't like side mattes.

I wonder if this is similar to the problems with the German Fantastic Four Rise of the Silver Surfer HD DVD; that had stuttering cadences and freezes at least on 1st generation HD DVD machines.

That's my thinking. I should clarify something from my post above. I checked Zombies again the other night, and the repeat-frame problem is not apparent in frame-advance mode. (I don't know what gave me the idea it was before -- maybe there's a spot in the film where several frames actually are repeated in the transfer, I don't know.) So this smells like a problem with my PS3 hardware.

High-def playback is obviously still a moving target. I've read online reviews claiming that the XBOX 360 HD DVD player never drops a frame -- a key factor in my decision to purchase one for my 360 Elite model instead of going for a standalone player. In my (admittedly limited) experience, though, this thing drops frames like crazy. I've looked at King Kong, The Searchers, Mr. Bean's Holiday and Zodiac, and they all had the problem.

So it seems like your mileage may vary, but caveat emptor in my opinion. If I had it to do over again, I'd get standalone players instead of buying a PS3 for Blu-ray and the XBOX add-on for HD DVD. (Well, if I had it to do over again today I'm pretty sure I wouldn't bother with HD DVD playback in the first place.)

Okay, the discs arrived today. I'm frankly appalled by how bad they look, but rather than spout off ad nauseam, I'll let my brother, who encodes DVDs for a living, explain why these are among the worst-looking HD discs either of us have ever seen:

http://www.lyris-lite.net/2008/02/niche_ti..._bluray_wi.html

"As someone who's authoring SD DVDs on a comparatively miniscule budget, I understand entirely what it's like to be working with limited resources and some old film stock. My job is to make damn well sure that not even a trace of this shows in the end product (I look forward to the day I can show screen grabs, the wait is pretty agonising for me).

So, I can almost sympathise with BCI Entertainment, who have just released their first Blu-ray Disc. My situation, where I'm working with a mature, standard-def format is very different to their one of working with a relatively new HD disc spec.

The difference is video knowledge, and knowing where to stop (I'm sorry, but I'm done with being afraid of looking arrogant - this is quite clearly a release gone wrong). BCI's release, a double-feature of "The Night of the Werewolf" and "Vengeance of the Zombies" - two Spanish horror films the 70s and 80s - contain unforgivable mistakes which are related to authoring mishaps, not a lack of money - which is much less understandable. Both films are presented in 1080i (the packaging claims 1080p) which is unusual, given BD's native support for 1080p/24, but isn't fatal.

Firstly, the black level hasn't been correctly set somewhere along the line, so no matter how good your display is, the best blacks you'll get (without compensating for it, that is) will be very milky grey. As I said, that's a baffling mistake, but because we can lower the "Brightness" setting on our display, it's not entirely unrectifiable (I'm not entirely sure what effects this will have on the image's tonal range, though).

As usual, my biggest gripes with these discs are how shoddily digitally manipulated they are. There's nothing we can do to undo these effects - these copies of the films are ruined for good. The film grain on both titles has basically been eroded with what looks like a purely Spatial process, which gives things a waxy appearance and cuts off details. In my opinion, film grain reduction should ideally not be done at all, but if you're going to attempt it, it should be done first across the time axis (temporally) rather than at the single-frame level.

Every so often on "Zombies", the picture will freeze up entirely for a few frames. Either this is a weird encoding bug, or it's a botched attempt at hiding areas of damaged film. If it's the latter, I sympathise because I know how tricky film damage is to undo, but as I said, know when to stop. Removing entire frames from the film is much, much more distracting than any film defects and is much more damaging. If you can't undo the film damage - then leave it alone and make the best of a less-than-ideal situation. If it's the former, well, it should have been fixed.

The audio on "Zombies" appears to be very out of sync. I'm not sure if this is down to shoddy dubbing or a disc authoring error, but I suspect the latter. In that case, it's not forgivable. It should have been corrected before the discs were mass-produced.

Moving on to "Night of the Werewolf", the image is just as eroded - the same shoddy attempt to hide film grain is here. What's the point? The grain is still here, the difference is that now it looks waxy and ugly, rather than like natural film grain. Now you're left with a still grainy image with lowered detail, so you'll please neither camp. Secondly, the film stutters badly throughout. I'm assuming that the 3-2 pulldown hasn't been correctly applied (it shouldn't have been applied at all - BD supports native 24p).

Most bizarrely of all, this one actually has DVNR artefacts. By "DVNR artefacts", I mean instances where an automated system set up to remove dirt and scratches from the film has mistaken parts of the image for dirt and tried to remove them (example at 19 minutes, 20 seconds). So it would appear that the people in charge DO have access to this expensive equipment?

Before anyone says "These are low budget films, they'd never have looked great", I wouldn't be entirely sure. What's there shows more potential, underneath the digital mangling. Again, leaving things alone looks like it would have been the best policy. And yes, I know what these films are. People would be much more upset if, say, "The Godfather" had been bungled in this way, but I don't care whether it's "Night of the Werewolf" or "Revenge of the Valley Girls III", because 1) we can't start judging and 2) good mastering techniques are free.

Oh, one other thing. Both discs have 14.1gb and 12.8gb filled respectively, falling way short of the 25gb maximum capacity of a single layer Blu-ray Disc. I'm not sure what the point of this is.

I think it's great that smaller companies are beginning to release films in HD, but honestly, these discs should never have gone out the door in this state. They are seriously dreadful by anyone's standards. I would hate for poor quality releases like these to add fuel to the already-existing "only Hollywood live action blockbusters should be released in HD" fire - these releases do more harm than good and if I had been calling the shots, I would never allow for these to have gone into mass-production. Small companies have it rough in the HD world, but there's a difference between having limited funds and making a mess."

I haven't seen these discs, so I can't comment on them. But one thing to mention, it looks like the writer is assuming that BCI created these masters. The HD remastering was done in Spain by the rights holders prior to BCI signing a deal to distibute the films. The one question I have about the review is were these watched on a Blue Ray player or a PS3?

They were watched on a Playstation 3 (which IS a Blu-ray player, arguably one of the best). The problems described above are nothing to do with the hardware the discs were being played on.

That's a fair point about the HD remastering being done by a different company, but at the end of the day BCI put their name on it, for better or for worse, and are ultimately going to be the first in line for receiving flak about this substandard release.