http://weblogs.variety.com/thompsononholly...-grit.html#more

This link is to a blog entry (by Peter Debruge) on Thompson on Hollywood called "Where's the Grit, Dirty Harry?" pointing out how the word, "gritty," "no longer applies" to DIRTY HARRY, thanks to the hi-def transfer of it, in which "virtually no sign of film grain remains" in the new Blu-Ray box set of the Dirty Harry movies. He also includes excerpts from an interview with Eastwood's editor, Joel Cox on how the folks at Warner Home Video botched the original SUDDEN IMPACT transfer to home video by brightening up dark scenes and raising the volume on dialogue that was meant to be drowned out. This is what happens when you put techies in charge of managing artistic choices.

As someone who's always been a fan of DIRTY HARRY (1971), especially its grainy, urban street-level cinematography, I think I'm gonna hold on to that old VHS I have of it. I remember it having a lot of welcome grain. :P

Haven't seen the new disc, but this is something that needs to be nipped in the bud now, on forums like this.

The answer is not to ignore HD, but to make sure studios know that there's a consumer contingent that might actually *buy* catalog titles that doesn't want older films manipulated in a fruitless effort to make them appear contemporary for customers who can't pull themselves from the new release shelf anyway.

There was an article on The Digital Bits about this. Apparently, hi-def consumers don't want pesky grain showing up on their sleek and shiny TVs. They think it looks "dirty," and not "dirty" as in DIRTY HARRY. So off it goes from the DVDs. PAN'S LABYRINTH is apparently grain-free in hi-def, as its filmmakers did not intend, and it is not the only title afflicted. A dismaying development to be sure.

Perhaps all films in the future can be shot in the Univisium ratio with the understanding that all grain will also be removed for the HD crowd on DVD releases so you might as well shoot the film as clean as possible. That way directors can worry about plot and character development and not have to worry about those bothersome, and often agonizing, artistic choices like aspect ratio or film grain. :wacko:

This post from Robert Crawford, an administrator to the Hometheaterforum, disagrees regarding the removal of grain.

Vincent

Let's continue the tradition of the flipper disc but instead of pan&scan vs. widescreen it'll be a choice of grain vs. no grain.

Funny comment, Richard, but honestly, given the way things have been going (questions about DIRTY HARRY notwithstanding, there have been several documented cases of massive grain-reduction being done to High-Def titles, resulting in waxen facial features and a lack of real detail- i.e., what HD is supposed to offer us over standard-def), I almost hope something like that does become the standard. Offer a "degrained" version for the grain-haters (which unfortunately seems to include many DVD and Blu-ray reviewers- how many times have we seen "grain" being discussed negatively in reviews? I wish I could count that high...), and an accurate representation of what the film actually looks like without the massive automatic Digital Noise Reduction for the rest of us loons. As it stands, only the grain-haters seem to be being catered to at the moment, and as a result we have abominations like Anchor Bay's "1080P" EVIL DEAD 2 Blu-ray, which actually has less detail than the several-years old, single-layer THX 480I DVD based on screen-caps that have been posted over at the AVS forums (albeit, with dreaded "grain")! Utterly unbelievable, but the way the industry will continue to head if the grain haters continue to get their way.

Vincent

Maybe director approved releases like Criterion does is what is needed. I'm sure directors want DVD transfers to approximate as closely as possible their intended vision on the screen (or monitor).

Loons Unite! :D

Tellin' ya - reasonable, intelligent looniness like that seen on these boards gets attention from DVD producers.

I'm back-and-forth PM'ing right this very moment with the owner of a company putting out some pretty high-profile product to discuss a (rumored but groundless) issue with a few of his company's discs. Because I made noise on a board.

Without compromising his privacy, I think something he just wrote me is worth sharing, just so we're not thinking of this specific issue as past the point of fighting for:

"I don't believe in recursive filtering. The artifacts I see from that process are worse than what it cleans. Grain is natural."

Keep making noise, guys!

GRAIN! Film pictures are MADE OUT OF GRAIN!

They're MADE OF GRAIN, GODDAMNIT!

Kinda like that, yeah. I dig the Hestonesque histrionics. Hestrionics?

Hmm - I mean, "Hestrionics™". That's better. :ph43r:

I haven't adopted the Hi Def format yet and I'm not sure why I should. I am perfectly happy with my DVDs and their limited resolution because ultimately they serve their purpose - presenting movies in their original AR with illuminating extras. Unless I move into a colleseum, the biggest display I'll spring for is 50" and that's almost double what I have at the moment. Besides, I've noticed a lot of plasma and lcd panels have inherent artifacting or digital grain and are often incorrectly set up in shops and many homes I've visited. I'm still of the opinion that CRT remains the better quality image up to about 32" and people seem to have forgotten that $300-400 used to be a lot of money to spend on the luxury of a large screen - flat panels have stealthily raised the threshold on display spends for ordinary consumers.

The irony is that HiDef is well placed to present natural organic film grain much better than standard DVD.

Victor

By and large, it does. There have been some major gaffes regarding digital grain reduction in HD, but the situation is, for the most part, considerably better than it was for DVD. This is particularly true for recent films, which, when taken from a digital intermediate, are for the most part being transferred straight to Blu-ray (or HD DVD) without any digital manipulation taking place. Things get a bit tricker with catalogue titles, particularly when the HD masters being used for these releases are actually several years old and date back to a period when technicians knew less about preserving the look of a film and therefore were more overzealous in their use of noise reduction, filtering, edge enhancement and so on. Something like JUNO, therefore, is absolutely alive with grain and looks very much as if you are actually watching a film print rather than a digital encode, whereas at the other end of the spectrum you have that Paul Naschy double pack put out by BCI, which has been so heavily assaulted with noise reduction techniques that it looks like video (and has a boatload of other problems besides). I think you'd agree that you'd expect to see more grain in a Naschy film than in a recent blockbuster release, but you'd be mistaken!

A lot of effort, I suspect, is needed to educate both the disc manufacturers and the general public that film grain is not the enemy. To their credit, many of the major studios, particularly Sony, genuinely do understand this, and have been taking steps to make reviewers more aware of what film grain is and why it's there. It's going to be an uphill battle, make no mistake, but I do think the horror stories should be taken with a pinch of salt. Some people have said that they are wary of going down the HD route precisely because they fear the results of grain reduction. Well, please bear in mind that grain reduction (and filtering, and edge enhancement, and...) is a FAR, FAR greater problem on DVD than it is on either of the HD formats.

I suppose it's also worth remembering that any of the formats - VHS, DVD and HD - are not really meant to be a duplicate of the original theatrical media or experience. Regardless of the very real differences in image quality, it's quickly forgotten once you get caught up in the films narrative and mise en scene. The AR and the film's completeness is far more valuable. I'm not arguing that improved resolution doesn't bring us closer to the original intention, simply that we can lose sight of the point of having copies of any given film in the first place. If for example you love DIRTY HARRY, it's natural to want the best version you can afford but none come close to owning an actual 35mm print and it's the film itself that captures our imagination and interest, not the grain or the contrast or the resolution. How many times have you dug out a VHS after weeks of watching DVDs, noted the loss of resolution and then quickly overlooked it once the film was underway?

Victor

. . . I certainly hope this education process works, but I fear it will be much more difficult than the battle over the proper aspect ratio for DVD presentation which went on for years and years; to help win that argument, at least you could sit them down in front of a projection system and demonstrate they were missing a great deal of the image - the folks currently doing the online DVD reviewing, as well as those doing the viewing, will spend at lot of their time watching Hi-Def television presentations that seem to lack any grain whatsoever (at least those I have watched), as well as modern films, and the image certainly can be seductive (it helps a lot to have your set properly calibrated) - I am afraid it will be next to impossible to convince them that grain in older films should be there . . . I realize this is probably a bad comparison (and I don't want to get that argument restarted) but, perhaps, it might be like the famous-around-here wires in WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953); you know, many folks seemed to say, "Now we have the technology to take them out, so take them out; the director would have if he could have back when the film was made" . . . well, now other folks are saying, "We can remove the grain, so remove it; the movie looks better without it; would the director have left it in if it could have been removed way back when" . . . it will be very interesting to see what Criterion does when they start with their Blu-Ray DVDs later this year - particularly since they will produce stuff like WAGES OF FEAR (1953) and THE THIRD MAN (1949) - and the online reviewers give them two or three stars for the transfer because of all that grain which they will, of course, mention probably reflects the original movie, but, still, there is a lot of grain and they expect better from a Hi-Def transfer . . .

The prices of the movies and players for BluRay are right in line with where DVD was three years into that format. DVD was a substantial leap beyond the previous format VHS while BluRay (HiDef) is a quantum leap over its predecessor DVD. I don’t get the argument that Hi Def is so expensive when DVD was also obviously more expensive then VHS when it first arrived on the scene. I do agree that BluRay (Hi Def) does have a larger hill to climb then DVD did with consumers and a lot of this has to do with that lack of educating the public.

When the old debate of Pan N Scan vs Widescreen/Letterbox would come up, I'd always ask "Would you saw off the sides of a Van Gogh so it would fit on your wall?"

The same thinking applies now, in my opinion. Just because we have the technology of digital painting, would anyone want to do a High-Def scan of every classic painting, just to make a "better" version without all those annoying brush strokes and canvas texture?

There's nothing to be wary about with High-Def by itself (unless doctors find out in 10 years that it causes hallucinogenic brain tumors or something). It's the application of HD that's the worry.

Now, if they'd only fix Citizen Kane and make it widescreen, everything would be fine! ;)

Ah, but DVD was actually much cheaper than LD, so for many of us it was a case of saving money...except, er, that in many cases we were buying films that we already owned.

I guess what I am trying to say is that no one is forcing anyone to accept or buy BluRay and even if the format takes off there is no way DVD will ever go away. Collectors are creatures of habit who don’t like change. I have never bought a movie because of the format it was released on nor have I ever been dissuaded from buying a movie because it cost too much. I am willing to repurchase my favorite movies if a better release DVD or BluRay comes along. There is at least 80% or higher of my movies that I would never upgrade because I can live with the current version I have. Also I highly doubt that anyone even if they had the financial resources would ever re-buy every title they owned on DVD if they were released on BluRay.

I think the problem here is the assumption that the switch from DVD to Blu-Ray is equivalent to the switch from VHS to DVD....it's not. DVD's improved picture was certainly a big factor in it's popularity, but not the only factor. The way you watched a DVD was fundamentally different than VHS: no rewinding, chapter stops, etc., plus let us not forget the extras- commentary tracks, deleted scenes, making-of-documentaries, etc. Since Laserdisc was never a popular format (due to the price) these were all new things to the average videotape buyer/renter, and the combination of all the above made it an exciting purchase. The difference between DVD and Blu-Ray is just one aspect of that: the picture. It's like going from VHS to DVD was upgrading from a toaster oven to a microwave....WOW!!...but going from DVD to Blu-Ray is upgrading from a microwave to...a better microwave.

A large percentage of the public have no idea how to calibrate a TV picture properly. A lot of folks accumulate DVD collections by wandering into Best Buy and picking up whatever mediocrity hit the shelves that week, winding up with a pile of discs that have been so badly treated they can't be sold. Then they wise up and go with Netflix. BR may well remain a niche market for people like us who get a genuinly warm feeling from owing a movie they truly love. Of course, now that it's more expensive to drive to the movies than it is to get in, quality home theater will be more popular than ever.

As for Dirty Harry, every net review I found saw the same thing I did; There is grain and it doesn't look like a new movie but they did a fine job and the disc is recommended. If consumers aren't being educated by knowledgable reviewers perhaps they will be educated by the discs themselves.

Another reason to be wary of Blu-ray ( :P )

I was in a Chinatown DVD/CD shop last night and was about to leave empty-handed when I stopped to peruse the shelf of concert DVDs below the cashier's counter. I was surprised to see a concert from one of my favorite J-pop performers, someone whose solo concerts I'd never come across before and never managed to acquire. So I snatched it up. I should have been suspicious of the price ($7.95), but I was so excited to find it, I put my normal avoidance-of-bootleg considerations aside.

When I got home I was alarmed to notice the tell-tale blue border on the cover and the small "b" inside a curved line logo over the words "Blu-ray Disc." Since I'm not accustomed to browsing the Blu-ray shelves in video stores, it wasn't something I'd notice on first glance. It also said "DVD-9" on the cover in the lower right-hand corner. (I'm not sure what that means.) Now, of course, I don't own a Blu-ray player, so I wondered if this Region 2 disc would play in my code-free player the way all my other R2 J-pop concert discs do. However, given the price, I doubted it would turn out to be an actual Blu-ray disc. So I opened the case and took out the disc and noticed that it said "Blu-ray" and "DVD-9" on the disc also. I popped it first in one of my two code-free machines and then in the other. It played fine in both and the image didn't look any different from any other R2 J-pop concert DVD I've acquired in the past.

So, the message is...just 'cause it says it's Blu-ray doesn't mean it is. At least at this particular store (right on the corner of Canal and Bowery). And when the price is too good to be legit, then--guess what?--it ain't! :ph43r:

Curiously, the CDJapan page for the DVD edition of this concert ("Acoustic Nacchi") doesn't even mention any availability on Blu-ray: http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/detailview.html?KEY=HKBN-50096

Yeah... you would have been driven into fits by the Iraqi-burned bootlegs on display at Green Zone bazaars and Army base shops:

"The Criterion Pacino Collection: 18 big hit! 3 Disc! DTS™! Also SuperBit®!"

Scanners 'n Photoshop: the great equalizer!

So wait, you're using your experience buying a bootleg as a cautionary tale against the Blu-ray format?

The fact is, if you buy a legitimate release that says it's a Blu-ray, it will be a Blu-ray.

Vincent

DVD9 usually means its a dual-layered disc while DVD5 is single-layer.

Ummm...no. :huh: I was just sharing a funny story. I thought my first encounter with "Blu-ray" would make an amusing supplement to this thread. And since the board allows no more than two emoticons in a thread and I'd used up my two, I couldn't punctuate my "cautionary tale" with any more of them. :P

(Well, at least Jeffrey got the joke, but then he usually does--three out of four times. [insert laugh emoticon here])

Oh, and thanks, Eric, for the DVD-9/DVD-5 explanation.

But I wasn't kidding! I haven't even told you about the "Action N****r Collection"!!

Yeah, but that's funnier than my story! :lol:

I was (probably) in the same store that Brian was last week, and noted the dodgy "Blu-Ray" discs available. Not that I have a Blu-Ray player, but I'm glad he confirmed my suspicions. :)

For anyone who has been on the fence about buying a Blu-Ray player. Wal-Mart is giving anyone who buys a Blu-Ray player between, June 8th – June 14th a $100 dollar gift card and they currently have the Magnavox NB500MG9 Blu-ray Player for $298. This is one hell of deal that when you factor in the $100 gift card it is like getting $100 of your purchase back to buy movies for the player you bought. Also right now Wal-Mart has these titles priced at only $15 each.

300
Blade Runner
Blood Diamond
Last Samurai
Training Day
Goodfellas
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut
16 Blocks
Blazing Saddles
Bullitt
Full Metal Jacket
Syriana
Deliverance
Lethal Weapon
Dog Day Afternoon
The Getaway

Brian:

Funny. But, I've encountered this same situation here on the opposite side of the world in Malaysia (where I've had an extended stay while undergoing surgery). In a DVD store in a place where tourists (and copyright cops) never go, I also spotted discs clearly marked Blu-ray (down to recreations of the Blu-ray covers); but what it really meant (when I queried the shopkeeper) is that these were standard DVDs ripped from Blu-ray originals.

Oddly enough, customers in the store were being advised to go with the Blu-ray rips because they were better quality than the standard DVD rips. :D

Technology (and piracy) marches on.

To be fair, they probably ARE better-looking than the standard DVDs. 99% of commercially released DVDs are filtered, removing fine detail, whereas, ironically enough, there's a good chance that an amateur SD downconvert of a Blu-ray disc would actually use all the available resolution available to DVD. This is in no way an attempt to advocate video piracy, of course, but merely to point out that there's probably some truth to what the store was advising.

Too bad they didn't brighten TIGHTROPE when it was on TV because I was wondering at the reveal: "Am I supposed to recognize that guy?"

. . . just watched the new Blu-Ray of Richard Brooks' THE PROFESSIONALS (1966) on a properly calibrated plasma set - I think this will be my new demo disc . . . not a modern special effects movie with lots of CGI, you know, the sort of thing they usually show you when you are looking for a new television set, and ends up looking like a way too bright cartoon - this movie is just a great western classic that has never looked this good (probably even in its original release at many cinemas); wonderful movie, wonderful transfer - it even has grain!! . . .

A lot of it was shot in the desert. ...right? ;)

I have used ENTER THE DRAGON (for its bright colors) and THE WILD BUNCH, also shot in the desert. You should take a look at THE WILD BUNCH and see if it (as a disc) stands up to THE PROFESSIONALS.

. . . actually, that would have been quite a movie - THE WILD BUNCH STANDS UP TO THE PROFESSIONALS . . . well, both THE WILD BUNCH and THE SEARCHERS (two shot-in-one-desert-or-another movies) look good on Blu-Ray (I have yet to watch THE WILD BUNCH all the way through), but, right now, THE PROFESSIONALS is my personal pick - my wife and I became fascinated looking at all of the colors in the rocks we had never noticed before; of course, after subsequent viewings, opinions (which is, of course, all it really is) could change . . .

. . . I think it was among the amber waves of Kansas :P

...like sands through the hourglass, these are the days of our lives. <_<

Yes! In Sydney one of the shops on George Street just up from Chinatown had a bunch of these 'blu-ray' titles for sale - but helpfully had crossed out the BD symbol on the fascia with a black marker pen! ;)