When you buy a BD, DO NOT give away the DVD of the same title!

[Jetrell Fo]

I have The Relic on DVD and LD and they both sound better than the Bluray. It's an under-rated film imho.

[oswarez]

I'm working on grading the film Scared To Death and when I was trying to sync it to the old DVD I have I saw that it was quite different, some scenes were longer, some shorter.

[spoRv]

I'm working on grading the film Scared To Death and when I was trying to sync it to the old DVD I have I saw that it was quite different, some scenes were longer, some shorter.

Welcome to our world!

[pipefan413]

Another day, another frustrating Disney Blu-ray...

I just started to sync the very first DVD version of the 5.1 Dolby AC-3 track for HERCULES (1997) to the Blu-ray, and... after figuring out the delay that would basically do the trick throughout, I stopped bothering, because I had a flick through the video and saw that they've pretty much messed up all the colours compared to how the older 35 mm transfer looks (the DVD's from a film source, which I'm pretty certain is the LaserDisc master, whereas the Blu-ray is from the pre-film digital CAPS files like many other Disney Blu-rays and later DVDs). The old transfer is more cropped (on the right particularly) but the colour looks much more correct to me in a number of ways.

The Blu-ray basically has too much magenta, not enough blue or yellow, and a whole bunch of specific colour choices have been completely changed or forgotten/missed. For instance:





This one really gets me... they appear to have neglected to reproduce an environmental lighting effect here:


This one shows the reduced yellow very clearly:


Check out the dodgy skin tones:


The underworld has a sickly green glow on the DVD that surely has to have been an intentional "mood tint" for the unpleasant setting (I mean it's not exactly meant to be a nice place) which they've not really done at all on the Blu-ray:


That's only a few examples to give you an idea but the whole film looks wrong seeing it side by side with the old transfer. I assume I'd see something similar if I lined up MULAN (1998), which I also have the old DVD copy of. As a wee bonus, I also discovered that they'd made a really dumb editing mistake right at the start of the audio, where they seem to have tried to edit out the old Disney logo but didn't edit from the very start but instead just after the sound begins - so you get a brief second or so of background noise, then an abrupt cut back to sheer silence again, then the new logo music starts. It's pretty much inaudible unless you're listening for it but it's just so daft.

Over the past couple of years or so I've basically learned that home video releases in the modern era seem to be messed up more than they're done right, and there are clear patterns of the same old problems happening over and over again with specific distributors...

• Disney has been infuriatingly revisionist for decades and occasionally quite inept
  
  
• StudioCanal totally screws up just about every aspect of their audio (e.g. crap/inconsistent sync and cases where they appear to have taken sped-up PAL sources then slowed them down but kept the pitch the same... but when they were sped up in the first place they obviously had the pitch shunted upwards, meaning the StudioCanal Blu-ray will have the audio at the right speed but the wrong pitch)
  
  
• Criterion sort of nails it for the most part in terms of video, and generally with audio for more modern films as well, but they sully that significantly by filtering the living crap out of all older audio (mono tracks) in an attempt to reduce crackle / hiss / general signs of age, which completely ruins the frequency response as a result so that everything sounds muffled and tinny as hell; they're not the only ones doing this but it's especially frustrating to see a company that's supposed to be putting out the best of the best releases (with prices to match!) get such a crucial part of preservation so badly wrong
  
  
• Shout! Factory "couldn't compress a mattress" as one guy put it (their video encoding is infamously dodgy a lot of the time) and they include loads of cool bonus stuff but often destroy it by doing things like upscaling it and deinterlacing from 480i to 1080p, rather than just leaving it the hell alone as SD video (I've found this to be inconsistent though)
  
  
• Arrow's mostly doing good stuff and I've found their compression to be much better than Shout's... buuuuuut because they seem to frequently use pre-timed (negative) sources, that necessitates digital colour grading, meaning the image fidelity is fantastic but the colours aren't accurate (which has made me massively regret getting rid of older THE THING and HELLRAISER Blu-rays for example, even though they were imperfect in other ways)
  
  I'm so sick of this crap.

[PDB]

And that is a perfect summary as to why this forum exists.

[alexp2000]

[*]Arrow's mostly doing good stuff and I've found their compression to be much better than Shout's... buuuuuut because they seem to frequently use pre-timed (negative) sources, that necessitates digital colour grading, meaning the image fidelity is fantastic but the colours aren't accurate (which has made me massively regret getting rid of older THE THING and HELLRAISER Blu-rays for example, even though they were imperfect in other ways)

The new UHD of King of New York looks suspiciously over-saturated. I've never seen in on 35mm but it definitely doesn't seem right.

[spaceboy710]

With the Blade UHD coming out, does anybody have the DTS 5.1 MA track from the Alliance Blu-ray? I've got the PCM LD on the way (which also has the AC-3 track) and the original DD DVD track.

This remixing to Atmos business is a mess.

[captainsolo]

I looked at the versions of later 90's era Disney titles recently and even noticed that sort of color and mood alterations on Mulan. While the old versions aren't the best and have their own issues they do seem to have a more "as they were" approach much like the Laserdisc of Toy Story would be as it's the only film scanned master.

The labels are all different.
Criterion really pisses me off now. No care about compression, usually ruined audio, but the elitism and fanbase doesn't care to know. I only have a few Criterion BDs because it's hard to afford every disc on a tiny budget and know the audio is going to be fubared. I love Criterion from the laserdisc era and its ethos. Modern Criterion? I doubt any of the original guys are even around anymore.
Kino Lorber puts out way too many discs at once, but gets new restorations ad rare titles out-but has almost no QC whatsoever and when they mess up they like to take it out on anyone who brings it up. And after what they did in the Leone situation it forever me me wary and displeased with them. Not to mention if someone else does the title overseas, KL will get it and cram down to a bd25 usually with less or no extras.
Shout is just...I have no idea how to describe them. They licence big titles and either fubar up their new transfers somehow or reuse what was previously there and then charge 9000% more than anyone else. Their compression is just unacceptable.

Arrow is pretty good. However when they take a studio source they're stuck with what's there like anyone and that can cause issues like the Flash Gordon audio. Criterion was dethroned years ago for me by Arrow first but now they have been surpassed by two others I'd like to mention.

Warner Archive is what every label should aspire to be as a baseline. BD50s always, maxed out bitrates, new transfers, all old extras carried over, average price points, frequent sales, no frills.
But there is someone who outdoes even them. One hope for us all. One label that is quality over quantity and every darn disc they do is worth its weight in gold. One label that seems to make fanres minutiae approved discs.

All hail Indicator.

Without question THE best label in the world. I had heard of them but didn't get a release of theirs until the LE Night of the Demon set which absolutely blew my mind. I just went crazy in their last sale because titles were going OOP and I was tired of missing them. So I said f*** the Criterion sale and got in on a group buy to avoid the large shipping fee from their site which is the one downside for ordering from the USA.

[SpaceBlackKnight]

Another day, another frustrating Disney Blu-ray...

I just started to sync the very first DVD version of the 5.1 Dolby AC-3 track for HERCULES (1997) to the Blu-ray, and... after figuring out the delay that would basically do the trick throughout, I stopped bothering, because I had a flick through the video and saw that they've pretty much messed up all the colours compared to how the older 35 mm transfer looks (the DVD's from a film source, which I'm pretty certain is the LaserDisc master, whereas the Blu-ray is from the pre-film digital CAPS files like many other Disney Blu-rays and later DVDs). The old transfer is more cropped (on the right particularly) but the colour looks much more correct to me in a number of ways.

The Blu-ray basically has too much magenta, not enough blue or yellow, and a whole bunch of specific colour choices have been completely changed or forgotten/missed. For instance:





This one really gets me... they appear to have neglected to reproduce an environmental lighting effect here:


This one shows the reduced yellow very clearly:


Check out the dodgy skin tones:


The underworld has a sickly green glow on the DVD that surely has to have been an intentional "mood tint" for the unpleasant setting (I mean it's not exactly meant to be a nice place) which they've not really done at all on the Blu-ray:


That's only a few examples to give you an idea but the whole film looks wrong seeing it side by side with the old transfer. I assume I'd see something similar if I lined up MULAN (1998), which I also have the old DVD copy of. As a wee bonus, I also discovered that they'd made a really dumb editing mistake right at the start of the audio, where they seem to have tried to edit out the old Disney logo but didn't edit from the very start but instead just after the sound begins - so you get a brief second or so of background noise, then an abrupt cut back to sheer silence again, then the new logo music starts. It's pretty much inaudible unless you're listening for it but it's just so daft.

I recall reading on somewhere BD.com that a user (who claims to work for a Hollywood film/digital processing center that regularly deals with the majors) mentioned juicy bits about how different the film elements for the the CAPS titles looked to the raw digital master files. He mentioned something along the lines of Disney scanning the digital CAPS filmout to 35mm negative stock for high quality archival purposes, and that they were re-timed by the IP stage so the colors would stand out more and not fade as much on release prints. He also mentioned that Disney did indeed do drastic reworking of the CAPS master files to BATB, Aladdin, and TLK for their IMAX/re-release versions. These were not just limited to color timing and noticeable alterations/scene additions, but subtitle things like Scars teeth in TLM and likely other changes that haven't even been discovered yet.

I believe he said the CAPS productions (including the remaining that were left untouched) were all later transferred and stored on HD tape masters at 2k res (SDR obviously). He said the HD tape masters on several of them were supposedly mastered at the wrong color spaces with dull and drained colors, and that Disney attemped to correct them at authoring/compression stages but they all still had darkness and saturation issues from the underlying issues they had. He had also mentioned the HDR versions out there (which are upscales of the 2k files that Disney transferred from faulty HD tape masters) were regraded to an extent to make the colors pop out more, but they still don't entirely represent the digital CAPS files nor the 35mm filmout elements they created back in the day.

[pipefan413]

This one isn't a DVD vs BD thing but it's a DVD master vs BD master I think. PRINCE OF DARKNESS (the John Carpenter film) appears to have a green cast that isn't in the earlier master. (It looks brighter as well.) Otherwise it generally is a more grain-friendly transfer, at least.

https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?go=1&a=0&...10&i=9&l=0

The old one looks a little pinkish to me (which makes sense, old master etc.) and the encoding is fairly crap some of the time (fair bit of artefacting) but the colour generally looks less "tinted". Most of the time. Sometimes the pink gets a little intense, to be fair: https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?go=1&a=0&...17&i=2&l=0

What's really irritating is I had this and sold it for like £4 or something. God damn it.