Quote:
Originally Posted by ganthc
Did he "blow it" or was it just that he wouldn't give these movies higher ratings for flaws he thought should have been corrected. My statement was merely that Dugpa, as our resident a/v perfectionist, seemed extremely forgiving of these titles when he has been very picky with others. If there is a hint of a compression artifact, he drops it to an 8/10. Yet he'll say that "The Game" was not subpar?  |
Yes he did blow it. Brown was complaining about the quality of said transfers when in reality he just didn't like the filming style - therefore blowing the the review. The idea is of a review not to compare every movie to King Kong, but simply to review the quality of the encode and master
while taking into account the filming style, stock used, and budget of said movie. Some movies simply will not benefit as much as others from HD.
Compression artifacts can now be avoided with a properly encoded VC-1/AVC video stream. It costs little to prevent compression artifacts in a movie, and the technology/knowledge is there to do it. Because of this, compression artifacts should be pointed out and the release taken to task if it is littered with them.
However, in terms of looking for pristine masters for every release... Well, a comprehensive film restoration is incredibly expensive and expecting that for all titles is unrealistic IMO. Further, some filming techniques simply may not benefit from HD. Some scenes may be slightly out of focus, some film stocks may have more grain, some movies may have some slight edge enhancement added in post (this is often done to compensate for cheap film stock, mediocre focus, or to make filmed sections look as sharp as CG sections of the movie) - but all of these things are embedded in the master and generally impossible to correct without a comprehensive restoration - not to mention that often they are intentional and hence shouldn't be corrected. Mallrats was just retransferred in 2005, so this is likely the best we will see the movie in a long time.