The New DVD and Blu Thread

[droosan]

I thought I'd also mention that it was only later yesterday when I realized that I hadn't seen any of the Tom and Jerry set--- BD or DVD--- at my local Future Shop. It won't help sales any if the thing's not in the public eye. (I may just have missed seeing it at FS, as I hadn''t thought to look for it, but I did look over the new releases.) Though I'm not a huge T&J fan, I did order last night from Amazon, though--- gotta encourage that tex Avery set we'd all like to see. Plus, even a lesser favorite is nice to see come out in a decent BD set.

I saw the new Tom & Jerry DVD set at Target .. but I have yet to see the Blu-ray set in stores (although, I haven't looked all that hard for it, yet)

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I did order Night Court: Season Five from Warner Archive yesterday, though..!

[Ben]

Steve and Mark, it happens everywhere, on every show and in every industry.

I was on a program once where the producer wanted a flashy title sequence and asked me for ideas. I had a weekend free and instead of just giving him an idea I thought I would well it better as an almost completed animatic, so I revved up Lightwave and put together something pretty cool.

The producer loved it and told me to make it final, but then the director that was brought in wanted a really somber and serious opening without any titles. I got into one of those creative struggles where I was fighting the director until the producer suggested we see both wways...

Naturally, the flashy titles sold the kind of pop-doc show it was much better and the director lost the battle. And of course when the show came out and everyone congratulated him on the titles he forgot he hated them and went as far as to say that he'd been behind the whole idea to revamp them!

There are more tales like that from the naked city. I see what you mean about how Jurassic turned out, but I do remember back in the day around the whole T2/Jurassic period that you two were quite visibly seen as the "backroom geniuses" behind those effects. I guess politics always plays a part too, and of course who you're in with on what team you're on.

But the people that do the work getting the credit? Never going to happen...

[spaz]

in nov. of 1991 i had the first version of the bone rex walking on a barco monitor as muren and an procession of kathlyn kennedy , frank marshal, janet healy came in. i had been working on this since muren had decreed that "digital dinosaurs were impossible" , kathlyn kennedy asked me "what is that ?. " i told her i was just experimenting with some "stuff". she patted me on the back and told me , "you have a very bright future". those are her words in Nov. of 91. Muren and Healy gave me major stink eye because they had no idea i was going to do this, nor did they know or understand that there was a major underground movement. when Dippe and i set up T2 , they would sit in the background with their arms crossed , just listening to Mark and me as we set up the groups and proposed problem solving related to the limit of bspline at the time (ask Muren what this means; and prepare yourself for the "spun" answer if any)
. they had now idea what we were talking about. they thrive off the success of shit they didn'nt even understand in 90.

more to come.

[droosan]

spaz .. perhaps you find it therapeutic to get this 'out there' in textual form .. but (if you'd not mind me saying so), harboring this amount of apparent vitriol twenty years after the fact would seem to be somewhat 'unhealthy'.

I still work on occasion with old-school artists/supervisors who have been in the industry since the 1970s. Do they fully understand the CG side of things, even now..? Heck no. But they still have an excellent eye for detail, and are likely to know more about why a shot might not be 'working' (in the abstract, if not the 'nuts & bolts') than the hotshot kids just out of school. I have much respect for them, and they respect me because of that.

I've never worked for Mr. Muren, but I did get to meet him, once. Seemed like a nice enough guy, to me.

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Have I been slighted on occasion..? Of course.

I created the entire opening sequence of a major Warner Bros feature (designed, built & textured all of the geometry, created multiple matte paintings, did all of the lighting, and animated/choreographed every element (the only thing I didn't do was composite the final shots) .. and I didn't get a credit on the film.

Those particular shots were later featured in a Cinefex article, and my supervisor failed to mention me by name, even there.

I was unhappy about that for .. probably a year, at most.

[spaz]

later that week. we showed the test in "weeklies". the joint went nuts. you see, in June of 91 (one month before the release of T2 , of which i had figured out a way to build the T1000 using bspline patches, then hired a friend of mine from Alias at the time named Angus Poon to write a script which sewed the patches together maintaining c2 continuity), myself Mark Dippe, Dennis Muren, Stefen Fangmeier, John Schlag, Mike Nackin, Carl Frederick all went to a Chinese restaurant named Yushang , which was located across the street from ILM at the time. Muren went on about some new film that we were going to do named Jurassic Park. he asked the "brain trust" if we could add motion blur to stop motion. again, he never divulged too much information. it was his control tactic to prevent runaway idea's which did not maintain his credit. immediately Dippe and i batted up and said "why don't we build the whole thing in cg ?" everyone laughed, "impossible" is what every person at the table said. lunch ended. we all walked back as Fangmeier and Frederick laughed at Mark and me. Mark was directing a commercial called "A to Z" for a Japanese client. i was initially animating on it. soon after the lunch Mark and i sat in our disgusting office called "the pit". a defunct sound stage where Editdroid was first developed and where Gary Rydstrom claims to have developed a permanent cough from. i drew on the board down there, the essentials to building a rex. we knew that "grouping" a string of bones together using the only software that we had at the time Alias V2.4.1 , a "foreward" kinematics system, was the only way. we looked at what Pixar was doing with their in house software, MENV. we did not have anything as elaborate (will get into the first intro of SI V2.6.1 later; this didn't come about til Dec. 92). so i thought, well i'm going to build a bone test the same way i build the original bone test walk for T2 , to prove to Cameron we could do the T1000. (i built both the bone test for T2 and all skinned stages of the T1000). so Mark and i decided that i would secretly slip off the commercial and start building this secret trex bone test. no one knew. i started it in June of 91. T2 releases a month later and is a smash hit. naturally Muren is a genius. to Ben's pojnt; just the system we deal with. anyhow, sometime in Oct, a "clipboard" (bobbed hair cut harpies who perused around looking to rat out artists to management ; oddly they run ILM now) must have tipped off Healy/Muren that this clandestine undertaking was going on under his nose. "oh oh!". so he calls me in front and center and says to my face " what are you doing ? Phil is doing the dinosaurs. i am telling you right now, there will be no computer graphics in this film. do not bother trying to build a dinosaur. Phil is doing it, you are committing political suicide ! ." you see gang , it is one thing 20 years later, to have been inspired by your superior to go and do something , then they get the credit, it is another thing to be told not to do it, because they have decreed it impossible, THEN they still get the credit once it happens.

more to come.

[Ben]

Dammit! Just wrote a long reply about Spaz' obvious feelings still and how I wouldn't worry about who takrs credit for what because the new BDs ate supposedly horrible transfers.

Evrn some of the more technical review sites are shoeing their surprise by marking the images down. Another screw-up from Universal?

Anyone got these yet? Not sure I'm going to spring for this set if they're as bad as they sound. Okay, they're catalog movies but that's no excuse nowadays when Star Wars and Back To The Future look like 2010 releases.

[GeorgeC]

I saw the new Tom & Jerry DVD set at Target .. but I have yet to see the Blu-ray set in stores (although, I haven't looked all that hard for it, yet)

I had no problem finding the T & J BD set at my local Best Buy... Right there next to the other Family/Children's Blu rays. Also saw the new Deluxe Box BD release of Willy Wonka which surprised me... I'd forgotten about it! That might be the BD release of that film I get.

Funny... I usually hate the deluxe box stuff but Willy Wonka is one film I might make an exception for!

Anyone got these yet? Not sure I'm going to spring for this set if they're as bad as they sound. Okay, they're catalog movies but that's no excuse nowadays when Star Wars and Back To The Future look like 2010 releases.

I don't know that I'd be that surprised, honestly.

They just might not have the best technical people working on the HD releases. The other thing might be that the masters for Jurassic Park really needed some touch-up/restoration work done on them and that Universal didn't bother to do clean-ups and just wanted a quickie release. It was no big secret that the delay for getting Jaws onto DVD was because a new master had to be created for home video. What Universal had was so badly worn that they knew they had to step up to do a proper DVD release. Too bad that the powers-that-be (and it looks like Spielberg) weren't vigiliant this time.

(NOTE: I hate JP. Just can't stand dinosaur films to be honest. I empathize with people disappointed by the releases. NOBODY likes a mediocre home video release of a favorite film... Still too common in the hi-def age.)

Another possibility is that the people-in-charge at Universal believe too much in the video-on-demand hype and are skimping on the home video releases because "streaming/download" is the future. If I might be so bold, they're getting ahead of themselves -- streaming is overrated and the Net structure is already overloaded with downloads as is with no major building in sight any time soon to relieve the loads (in the US at any rate) and most collectors will still prefer 5" disc for obvious reasons -- and are only going to shoot themselves in the foot as far as the average consumer is concerned if they don't step up and improve the quality of their home video product ASAP.

Universal was late coming into the BD game -- they were wary of hi-def during the BD/HD-DVD format battle -- and were among the last of the majors to announce home video releases in BD.

There's still a lot of classic films Universal hasn't released on BD yet. Jaws, Dracula, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolfman, The Mummy (1932), and The Invisible Man come to mind. Funny thing is that most of the monster features are available for download in hi-def! I was browsing around PSN Network the other day and was surprised to see HD downloads available for the Universal Monsters.

[Randall]

Man, I'd love to see some Uni Monsters on hi-def. Some of those were great flicks, and even the later cheesy ones were largely enjoyable.

I've gone through the first JP disc, and it looks pretty decent to my eyes. Not amazing, but definitely a big step up from the DVDs, so I'm pretty satisfied.

[Ben]

Well, me trusts good ol' Rand's opinion, so I'll wait for a bit of a price drop and pick up the regular boxed set. If reviews had been stellar the collector geek in me might have gone for the dino set just for the fun of it (since the regular case came inside anyway) but I think the saving would be better spent on other titles (my eye is on that nice looking West Side Story about to come out)!

Mind you, I've bern saying that about the Alien Anthology for a year now, and that's yet to get a decent dip below $70-ish!

Would also love Uni monsters on Blu, particularly the first four Frankensteins. An Psycho aside, where the heck are the Hitchcocks!!??

[Randall]

Uh, I hate to tell you this, but speaking of bad transfers...

http://www.hometheaterforum.com/t/31574 ... in-blu-ray

[GeorgeC]

...........
Mind you, I've bern saying that about the Alien Anthology for a year now, and that's yet to get a decent dip below $70-ish!

Would also love Uni monsters on Blu, particularly the first four Frankensteins. An Psycho aside, where the heck are the Hitchcocks!!??

Everything eventually goes down in price... I've had my eye on The PowerPuff Girls DVD set and now that it's at least $25 cheaper than before...! Ditto for The Little Rascals boxset released around two years ago...

On the other hand, there's a lot of stuff that had relatively low print runs and shelf life. Can anybody say Spider-Man: '67??? Sure doesn't look like Disney is doing anything to expedite releases of all the Marvel series it now owns (or for that matter reprinting most of the older shows issued on DVD that never had full series releases on DVD or had brief market life like Spidey '67). You'd think they would at least release all the 1980s and 1990s Spider-Man animated series to DVD! Big vote of no-confidence in Marvel's biggest cash-cow...

As for the Universal Monster films, I still don't understand the reason for the dragging on BD but it may be that someone at that studio thinks that A) B & W just won't sell on Blu ray -- which some market reaction shows might be the case unfortunately; B) they think the transition to streaming content will go fast -- I think it'll be slower than the experts think and would not count on the US upgrading its broadband much over the next few years; they'd be killing the goose too early in my opinion; and C) the older B & W films might just be too degraded as things stand now to make widespread HD releases worth the effort. Frankly, given the reaction to the original King Kong's and The Wizard of Oz's releases on BD versus the recent DVD releases I tend to think that a lot of the BD upgrades from earlier films and pre-21st century TV generally aren't worth the cost...

I've got all the Bruce Timm animated Batman and Justice League series on DVD and given how they already look on DVD -- you can clearly see dust and film grain clearly on the 1992-1995 Batman episode footage(!) -- don't think the BD upgrade is worth it. Then again, they're not as detailed as Disney animated feature films and were never intended to be seen in HD, either.

Oh, and a lot more Hitchcock is coming. Hopefully, Universal will get its act together and start doing some nice HD transfers. WB obviously has its act together and released probably the best home video version of North by Northwest to BD in the past year, year-and-a-half.

I'm not counting on much upgrade from B & W Hitchcock to BD but I'm going to hold the trigger on getting most of the color films on DVD. As it is, I only have Rear View Window and Vertigo on DVD (the Universal Legacy editions) in addition to Psycho and some PD B & W films from the 1930s and 1940s. I might go ahead and buy the Fox boxset of the public domain Hitchcock films that also has Lifeboat in it... Those films are all B & W.

[Ben]

Yep, everthing comes down in price...but sometimes not before they go OOP!

Rand...thanks so much for the West Side news. Definitely holding off on that purchase. Kind of good as I was on the fence between the regular and boxed set, but I will now wait a good few months and hopefully pick up a corrected disc.

That forum topic also suggests there were probelms/replacements for Pinocchio - anyone know what they were? Any other major BDs known for transfer issues? I should read the HTF more but don't get the chance!

[Randall]

Found this on Pinocchio. Looks like it's an audio issue:

http://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=6126

http://hd.engadget.com/2011/04/01/disne ... ray-discs/

Another issue, though, is that the Cine-Explore feature doesn't work on some Sony players, including PS3s (like mine!).

[Ben]

Thanks Rand! Better check my copy...

[spaz]

the greatest technical obstacle ILM ever posed was Muren. i suppose his resistance to our idea's was some genius tact; pushing us to succeed by ignorance; later he collects the reward. brilliant. reward at ILM in those days in my view was perverted. the rebellious and trenches thought it up , and executed it. some "ghost" without mere accomplishment , "farted" final. this is why ILM has lost it's best. it is left with "coat riders" ; "fans" near do wells from the Letteri, Dippe Spaz,Fangmeirer era.