are the original series blu rays any good?
- Thread starter tmosler
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You read wrong about The Godfather. The first two films were painstakingly restored by a team including one of the absolute best in the business, Robert A. Harris (who also worked on the stunning Lawrence of Arabia restoration that was released last fall). The Godfather films on Blu-ray are about as close to the original films as are likely to get. The goal was to match an original dye print (held by the Academy of Motion Pictures that awards Oscars) and by all accounts, it was a rousing success. If one has only ever seen them in previous home video releases (laserdisc, VHS, earlier DVD releases, cable or broadcast TV), then the blu-rays might not appear as one remembers--but that is not to say they are not as faithful to the original as they could be. You may not like the way the restoration looks (that is entirely your prerogative) but they are not a radical departure from the original intended look. Quite the opposite, in fact.
If you want to see a film whose Blu-ray release dramatically alters the original, get a hold of the first Blu-ray of The French Connection (the most recent release, after much outcry over the first one, is about as close to the original theatrical prints as it gets, as well).
As to TOS on Blu-ray, the non-effects stuff looks dramatically better than any previous release (sometimes TOO revealing, as they were never intended to be viewed by the audience at such a high resolution). The original effects were not designed to hold up to theatrical standards of the day, let alone now, so it is understandable they look worse than on lower resolution sources.
Grain is good. DNR is bad.
Well, not in every case. A judicious application of DNR can vastly improve PQ - it all depends on how it's done. Check out James Cameron's Aliens on BD for an example of perfect DNR application.
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Seeing TOS on bluray is like seeing it for the first time. It's amazing how clear it is. Plus, some of the original FX actually hold up pretty well in HD.
LOL, TREK_GOD_1 - I'm glad I'm not the only one who's purchased TOS progressively, and repeatedly, on those formats!
Yeah, I guess once you're in...you're in forever.
The grain is important. Nothing shot on film should ever look like an oil painting. The worst BD transfers are the ones where the grain has been scrubbed away to the point where people look like wax figures. Of course, having said that, balance is the key. I think TOS-R probably had the balance right.
Are you talking about the closeups of beautiful women being shot through a soft-focus filter? This was pretty standard in the 60s, and, yes, it was intentional.
There's supposed to be grain, because that's what film looks like.
Actually, that's simply not correct. Old film looks just as good as new film as long as it's been well preserved. In fact, all film, both old and new, has even greater resolution than a modern HD TV show, greater resolution than your TV is capable of showing. A movie made fifty years ago can look like it was filmed just yesterday. But grain is a part of the film. It's not the result of bad or old film, it's always been there in the film.
No, it's been manipulated with a computer to remove grain, meaning it is no longer a true representation of the actual film.
Is it worth getting the TOS-R Blu Rays if you already have the TOS-R DVDs? Is the improvement that much more noticeable?
I have all 6 of the Star Trek series on DVD (including TAS), and all the movies so far on DVD, and also on Blu ray. I got TNG season three again, on Blu, just to see how much better it was, and man, TNG looks so great in high definition.
To those who say old movies can't look great on Bluray, i have the Bond 50 box set, and those early Connery films look incredible in high definition
I have all 6 of the Star Trek series on DVD (including TAS), and all the movies so far on DVD, and also on Blu ray. I got TNG season three again, on Blu, just to see how much better it was, and man, TNG looks so great in high definition.
To those who say old movies can't look great on Bluray, i have the Bond 50 box set, and those early Connery films look incredible in high definition
I personally find the Blu-ray discs totally worth it. If you have a good sized HDTV and value seeing all the detail they extracted from the original 35mm film the Blu-ray sets are worth it, if you can find them for a good price.
The other plus depending on how you feel about the 2006 CG stuff is that the Blu-ray sets have the original visual effects included and can be toggled back and forth with the updated versions.
Otherwise, the DVDs are very good and of course are from the same masters so they have the same excellent color saturation, etc. from the remastering.
The other plus depending on how you feel about the 2006 CG stuff is that the Blu-ray sets have the original visual effects included and can be toggled back and forth with the updated versions.
Otherwise, the DVDs are very good and of course are from the same masters so they have the same excellent color saturation, etc. from the remastering.
Of course? I was under the impression that this wasn't entirely certain.
Where I do have doubts is the color saturation. MPEG's data compression usually resulted in less color fidelity for a DVD opposite to a rather full-bandwidth Blu-ray disc.
However, I can't shake the suspicion that during the remastering for HD (and DVD) some original colors got altered and I noticed it, I think, by accidentally comparing my old LaserDisc footage from "Journey to Babel" with the footage from the Blu-ray ("Gav is dead" scene). There was one shot where the colors of a background door were noticably different (something like green versus blue).
Bob
Sure there the BDs would be a bit better in that regard. But really, they come from the same re-mastered source, so it's almost picking nits. You're confusing things, both formats store color information at 4:2:0 chroma sampling. What you might be thinking of is the slightly expanded color space that HD formats use, Rec 709, over SD's Rec 601.
The main reason to get the BDs is for the pure resolution increase, giving you a really clear image of the scans the remastering team did of the 35mm film.
The same background colors looking different happened with other episodes. The one that comes to mind is Where No Man Has Gone Before. The sickbay scenes used to look very pale, kind of beige, it turns out the walls were actually greenish, either via a color gel light flooding the walls or they were actually a light green before being repainted when the series was picked up.
You're thinking about it the wrong way. They didn't change anything per-say. We've been watching really old beat up copies of the episodes since at least the '80s VHS tape releases, if not longer.
They pulled the film out of the Paramount archives and had it re-scanned from scratch. It revealed a whole new level of information that was there back in the '60s but had been aged out by generational losses of the film being copied and eventually transferred to video, etc.
Pick up all three seasons last night at Best Buy. They were still on sale plus I had a Best Buy gift card. After watching a few episodes, I would say they are worth it.
So the Okuda commentaries are not carried over to the blu-rays? I thought all the special features from previous DVDs were on the blu-rays. I'm disappointed. I never bought the DVDs. What else was on previous editions that are not on the blu-rays?
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