The New DVD and Blu Thread

[droosan]

I own Dragon's Lair on six formats .. Laserdisc (the actual aluminum disc which was in the arcade machines!), CD-I, CD-ROM, Hi-8 videotape, DVD, and Blu-Ray.

[GeorgeC]

Those Japanese Ghibli Blu ray covers ARE ugly...!

The good news about the Japanese BD releases of Nausicaa and Castle in the Sky... probably means they'll get released in North America sometime next year. THAT I can wait for! I have no use for paying $80+ for an import disc I'll probably be able to buy within 8 months for less than half that amount!

The only BD's I intend to import (if and when I can afford them) are any that have at minimum English subtitles and probably the first Macross movie whenever it gets transferred to BD.

I might be buying the recent Macross PS3 game. The game is a port of a PSP game and fairly simple to follow. It has the first Macross Frontier movie on the same BD. It synopsizes the first half of that TV series but has a lot new animation in it, too.

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Oddly enough, I really don't feel compelled to get a lot of Bluth's feature work. I've got the last DVD release of The Secret of Nimh which is still his best film by far as well as Anastasia. The other Bluth films and videogames I can live without. I really wasn't impressed by Space Ace on DVD (badly scratched video in need of desperate restoration on the copy I bought) and got rid of it years ago. Never liked those LD videogames. So hard to hit the moves and get through the stages. With today's technology, a much better game could be made of the same material whether it's cell-shaded or not. Too bad the right developer hasn't popped up yet!

I know another company tried to redo Dragon's Lair in 3D (polygon, really) a few years back. The fact that nobody talks about that game now tells you about the quality...

[droosan]

I enjoyed Dragon's Lair 3D well enough. It was a worthy successor to the original arcade game, IMO. Much easier to 'control' than the Laserdisc games, for certain .. though, the cel-shaded CG doesn't match the hand-drawn animation's charm.

It was a bit of a shock to discover that rescuing Princess Daphne from the Dragon's Lair was actually only the halfway point of the game, though! Once Dirk succeeds in defeating Singe, Daphne is suddenly magicked away to a wizard's keep -- and Dirk's quest begins anew.

The animation in the Bluth Laserdisc games is sorely in need of re-mastering .. both the DVD and the Blu-ray releases leave much to be desired, in terms of video quality. However, I'm unsure how much of the source animation actually exists on film -- it's possible that the 1983 vintage Laserdisc resolution (roughly 400 lines of video) is as good as the material can ever look.

[Ben]

My DVR is pretty good at frame accuracy editing, George, but I did spend out on the best one at the time. If you know it's going to cut the previous or next frame off what you want to achieve, it's easy to jump back or forward a frame and mark your point so that it doesn't miss anything. It's certainly not more than a frame or two out at any given point, so commercial cutting and trimming things down to get them on DVD-R isn't a problem.

I record anything I know I want to keep on best quality XP, so that the internal conversion process to DVD can go from the best source (though encoded TV here is so crummy anyway it's sometimes like putting a VCD onto Blu-ray)! The recorder is great at "flexi-fitting" the length on the disc too, so it stays in the best quality to fill a disc. I try not to go more than an hour or two, but a 90 minute movie or documentary will be compressed to fit the disc by way of using XP when needed for fast moving stuff and reverting to SP for slower scenes (you can hear the machine "shift gears" when it does this).

I'll record the odd thing in SP or even LP if I want to conserve space and I know I'm just watching to see something and then wipe it. But the machine itself is a terrific gadget, and the VHS included does a good job of stabilizing the image when transferring to the HDD, from where I then trim down and then dub to DVD. It's even switchable between PAL and NTSC (though obviously not on the same dump disc), so I could copy over my LDs if I ever get the chance.

If I have to copy a pre-recorded tape that has copy protection, my years of professional editing and engineering come into play there, with a handy TBC (time base corrector) box that strips out the signal and records it fresh, while fixing up the image at the same time, allowing for color tweaking and gamma correction. I've got some startlingly good results from once recorded/once viewed tapes like that, but it's only a PAL box (though strangely it does work as quasi-NTSC-to-PAL converter!), so it wouldn't work on my LDs.


In terms of movie collecting, I've gone from Super 8mm, 16mm, through Betamax (short lived!), VHS, LD, DVD and BD. I even had a CED disc player and a couple of discs for a short time (the main one I remember was a TERRIFIC TerryToons compilation with some cartoons I've never seen again)!

I've a few films across many formats, but cherished ones on film include a bunch of Disney cartoons (Super and Gene Kelly/Hanna-Barbera's Jack And The Beanstalk (16mm), but I don't think I have any Betamax left (I think I remember having the Incredible Hulk pilot). On VHS, I have too many unreleased on disc films and documentaries to mention, but one or two I have across most formats are Mickey's Christmas Carol (Super 8, VHS twice, LD, DVD twice), Superman The Movie (hilarious Super 8 cut down which gets the 2.5hr film into 15 minutes!, plus twice on VHS, once on LD, three times on DVD though I do need to pick up the BD) and Tron (a couple of VHS, DVD, will get the BD).

There are probably others that I have multiple times: many of the Disneys on VHS, LD, DVD and BD, especially the cartoon shorts that I also have on film (wow...five formats)! Some of them I keep for "collector value", like the first edition of Tron on VHS, which is just cool holding the cover, and some other first edition Disneys from the 1980s (from "the magic lives on" days). I don't really have the room for them, but I could never throw them out!

[eddievalient]

Upgrading stuff from VHS to DVD was always a no brainer, but now that I finally have a bluray player (yay!), the question of whether to upgrade or not, for me, comes down to whether or not the BD has any extra stuff that's not on the DVD that I want. For example, I probably won't upgrade Snow White because I think the original DVD had a better set of extras than the current release but I probably will upgrade Beauty and the Beast because I want the deleted scenes and the new 3 hour documentary. I'm waiting to see what the Tron BD is going to have, but the long documentary from the DVD is going to be hard to top.

[Ben]

I would say that SW is worth the upgrade if only for the GORGEOUS transfer and the chance to see many Disney shorts in HD.

I've done a fair share of VHS-to-DVD converting, but only as a way to watch stuff without harming the original tape, which I always keep because someday the transfer will need to be done again. And when I get a BD recorder, I may run stuff off onto that for the same reason, though it'll be less compressed (remember that, whatever signal noise faults VHS had, at least it wasn't compressed)!

[droosan]

Big haul today .. I got:

Back to the Future trilogy Blu-ray
How to Train Your Dragon Blu+DVD combo
The Venture Brothers: Season 4 part 1 DVD
Freaknik: The Musical on DVD
Chaplin at Keystone 4-DVD set <-- really looking forward to watching this one; most of these films have never been available on home video before!


The Rock & Rule Blu-ray -- which had originally been slated for September 26, and then re-scheduled for release today -- has apparently been pushed back again, to November 9th.

[GeorgeC]

Is there any difference between the How to Train Your Dragon single-BD versus the BD+DVD pack?

They list extras on the 2-disc pack but next to nothing on the single-disc BD release. I'm thinking the BD is the same in both cases (I'd rather save the cash and just get the BD) but sometimes the packaging is confusing and makes matters worse...

[droosan]

Well, since I bought the Blu+DVD combo of HTTYD .. I'm not sure. I'd assume the extras are the same .. but, perhaps, the only way to know for certain is to seek reviews that mention the single-Blu release specifically.

I tend to watch a movie while at work, on occasion. I have a DVD player on my desk at work -- but no Blu-ray player, as yet .. so, having a 'bonus' DVD is a welcome addition.

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Less useful (IMO) are the Digital Copies. The BTTF Trilogy set contains 6 discs -- 3 Blu-ray, and 3 'digital copy' discs (one for each movie!) Aren't the DC's supposedly 'compressed' for iPods? .. they should all fit onto one disc. If you're gonna add one additional disc for each film, why not just make 'em actual DVDs..?

[GeorgeC]

I'm not finding the description for the single disc BD for "How to Train Your Dragon" online. I'm guessing it's the same as the two-disc pack. Might be a Wal-Mart exclusive... Frustrating, yes, but companies do exclusive releases all the time now for Wal-Mart, Target, FYE, etc... A single-disc release was done of Wizard of Oz for Wal-Mart when Oz was released on BD last year. I got the better multi-disc package from Target (sans the book and ticket extras which I can live without).

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As for Digital Copy, yeah you can look at it mainly as "an iPod thing," BUT you don't have to watch the films on iPod, either.

The main advantages I find with Digital Copy are a) I don't have to compress films all over again to enjoy them; that can take hours IF your ripping software even works with newer DVDs; security encryption gets changed every year and if you have an older computer, rippers are even less reliable; b) you don't have to use an iPod, period. Just put the Digital Copy in iTunes --- any Mac or PC can use the software --- and voila, you have something for portable-on-the-go trips on your laptop. Watch it in compressed, fuzzy full-screen. Still less than 1/4 the size of a DVD rip (if you can even do those with newer discs. You'd be better finding the original DVD releases of films if you kept them to rip).

Good thing/bad thing depending on your POV.

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As for your BTTFF discs, my guess is that Universal is going to sell the movies individually (next year) so that's why there are separate discs for the Digital Copy editions already. They'll just reprint the movie discs as-is (if they don't change the encryption YET AGAIN for the BD's!) with the DC DVD's ready for separate film release.

What I can't figure out is how unspecial the Toy Story Trilogy is looking for Blu ray now...

Read the first comment for the BD Trilogy set here http://www.amazon.com/Story-Trilogy-10- ... 867&sr=1-5

Four BD discs cover the 3 films (1 for Toy Story 1 and 2, 2 for TS3), and the final six discs are DVDs of the movies and DC discs! There's none of the special stuff included for the original, 10-year-old Toy Box released for the first two films on DVD! What a rip-off!

I haven't even decided if I'm going to bother getting TS1 and 2 on BD yet... They're good films but still far from being the best animated films IMHO and not even the best IMHO CG films any more... TS3 I can't comment on because I haven't seen it yet.

I do know the original TS1 was NOT a hi-def film. It was rendered 620p originally and transferred to film at that resolution. I guess later, MAYBE it was redone for hi-def.... I know it had to be re-rendered for DVD originally because Pixar lost some of the discs with finished film footage and that's why the original DVD release was delayed.

What's the excuse now for such bad BD releases?????

[EricJ]

Less useful (IMO) are the Digital Copies. The BTTF Trilogy set contains 6 discs -- 3 Blu-ray, and 3 'digital copy' discs (one for each movie!) Aren't the DC's supposedly 'compressed' for iPods? .. they should all fit onto one disc. If you're gonna add one additional disc for each film, why not just make 'em actual DVDs..?

Because the DVD disks are the exact same disks that the Cheap customers buy, and they don't get the Digital Copy? (Cheapskates!)

If they had to put DC"s on the disk for one, they'd have to do it for everybody. And THEN where would good ol' fashioned Blu-ray elitism be?

[Ben]

George...the TS and TS2 BDs in that trilogy set are the very same ones that came out as Special Editions around TS3's theatrical release. They contain a whole HEAP of the original Ultimate Toy box extras on them. Perhaps not EVERY single little thing, but over 90% of them in both instances.

The first TS not a hi-def film? That doesn't make sense! It's a resolution independent CGI image: they can output at what they like depending on the end format. Rendered at 620 for film? Bah! That would have looked total crud on film. I remember that it was one of the first 2K renders and printed directly to film like the other Disney films of the time were.

For home video perhaps they did only master it to 620p (still an odd resolution), but the entire film was overhauled when they did the digital reissue, which is where the sources come for both TS and TS2 on Blu-ray, so they're native, honest and genuine 1080p transfers. They both look great and contain the Toy Box extras spread across both.

TS3 has the movie on the first BD, and the HD extras on the second BD. The box then comes with the SE DVDs for TS and TS2 and the single disc for TS3, plus digicopies for all three films. Granted, the extras on the SD DVDs are not that great, but the BDs contain pretty much everything you're asking about.

So there's nothing new or exclusive to this set (save for the digicopies for TS and TS2), but there's nothing "missing" either.

[eddievalient]

Just wondering, does anyone else have problems with defective BDs? So far, I've had trouble with Final Fantasy VII:Advent Children (the disc froze up about five minutes into the film and I had to unplug the player to even get it to turn off) and Kill Bill Vol. 1 (Same deal at the Crazy 88s fight, but fortunately, I was able to skip to the O-Ren fight and at least watch the ending). Is this common or am I just having bad luck?

[Ben]

The only issues I've had so far has been the innovative authoring on the Prince Of Persia and Beauty And The Beast discs, where the clips that shoot off from the documentary materials won't play.

[GeorgeC]

Problems with Blu ray discs are often player-dependent.

This is a case where the manufacturer does count. Some manufacturers are much better at getting firmware updates out quicker to fix incompatibility problems caused by authoring.

This is why it's so important to make sure that you can actually update the player before you buy it. Always get a Profile 2.0 player... Best to see if it has USB ports so that even if you DON'T connect the player to the Internet you can at least download firmware to a Flash Drive and update through the Drive.

Frankly, I wouldn't buy most of the BD players that are $150 or less. Many of these are not as good quality, they lack firmware upgradability, and other standard features.

I have a PS3 so upgrades are not a problem. If I were going to get a standalone machine, I'd get a $200 Sony or Pioneer model at this point in time. I am just not so sure about the other manufacturers' ability to keep their machines up to date.

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The other option if a disc causes you trouble is to check on A/V Forums or the Digital Bits to see if other people are having issues with the same disc. If the problem occurs with enough people, most responsible companies will do recalls and ship new discs to owners within a few months.

Nothing new there... This has been going on since the mid-life of DVD...