Who Listens To Us Anymore? (1 Viewer)

[Dick]

From the studio's point of view, the activity on forums like this one probably appears to fall into two basic categories: constant requests for catalog title releases on Blu, and constant criticism of what they see as niggling issues on titles that have been released. So I can well understand why they wouldn't bother seriously engaging us, or anyone else, on these matters.

In the first category, we seem to have thread after thread of long lists of requests for often-times obscure movies, or movies with extremely limited demand. "Why haven't you released X on Blu??". The answer is quite obviously that the title(s) in question are not going to get a sufficient return to justify the investment into restoring/transferring them onto Blu-ray. I'm not sure what more a studio could say. The best we can hope for is that studio insiders drop by and announce upcoming titles, but there again I can see how each announcement would lead to dozens of "but when will you release X, Y and Z??!?". I'm guessing it would be simpler if we just opened a single thread with the title "Dear studios, please release every movie you've ever made on Blu as soon as possible", sticky it, and leave it at that!

In the second category, I can again sympathize with studios in regards to the fact that very few releases ever receive the unqualified fan tick of approval. In most cases, something is going to be nit-picked, and we've all been guilty of doing that from time to time. Everything from "wrong colors" to "not enough extras" to "too much DNR" and so forth. So once again, what exactly could a studio rep say in response to these criticisms, especially once a release has already been made? We'd have recalls on virtually every release if they listened to us.

Ultimately, studios will listen, but not to a small group of enthusiasts. They'll listen to the majority of their paying customers, and those currently seem to be (a) not particularly interested in catalog titles; and (b) not overly interested in Blu-ray. So for all our demands and protestations, as enthusiasts in a small niche, we don't have much power to influence anyone, or be feted by the studios seeking our opinions. Majority rules; that's life.

You make many salient points. I hope you will consider the following to be one also:

Movie studios are companies. They bring product to the market. They should expect criticism and have a strong enough backbone to face it and, one would expect, to act upon it. If I have a faulty vacuum, I will get it repaired within the warranty period for no additional cost to me. If I get a DVD or Blu-ray that forces me to watch un-skippable ads and trailers, forces un-removable timelines in pause mode, has unnecessary DNR, bad sound, etc. we should be able to send it back for a full refund even though it's been opened -- not just another copy of the same release, which of course will have the same defects (some of you will say these are not "defects," but they are when we're paying $xxx. for a presumably quality disc that allows them to get to the movie without being forced to sit through advertising -- hell, theaters do this, too and shouldn't. Discs should be like pay-t.v. channels -- no ads). There should be a 30-day warranty on all discs sold, and not just for cracked or unplayable discs, but for the studio-implemented "defects" I name above, plus a bunch more.

Do you recall the early DVD days when you put in a disc and, bing! The menu was there. No elaborate animated graphics, no ridiculous ineffective 2-screen Homeland Security warnings, no promos, no trailers (except voluntarily from the menu). Now, it's sometimes a five-minute waste of my time getting to where I want to be. Defect. Intentional, studio-imposed, but still a defect.

SWORD IN THE STONE has earned a huge amount of criticism from customers at every home theater forum I've attended. Has Disney lifted a finger to replace the title? We're talking a defective release. Horrible aliasing, DNR, just abysmal. If it's actually painful to watch a movie you remember as having looked much better even on laser disc, can't we label this a "defective" disc? Shouldn't we all be able to just return it for a full refund (you can't do this easily just by arguing the studio did a bad job. Retailers consider that akin to the argument that "this album sucks" if you attempt to return a CD because you hated the music on it.) And if thousands of us did, you can be sure we'd get a new transfer.

VON RYAN'S EXPRESS is a terrible release also, and much was said online about it, but Fox has not stepped up to the plate to give us better. It is a defective product. Credit where credit is due, they did replace PATTON. DreamWorks replaced SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. Paramount gave us a better GLADIATOR. These were defective products, and the studios involved were thanked and congratulated up and down here and elsewhere for making good on their unspoken pledge to give us excellent quality releases. But, in spite of the fact that a number of releases since have been equally defective, these past two or three years have given us no further examples of bad transfer replacement. So, studios get flack. And they should. And what's more, they should respond. They really have a responsibility to their customer base, without whom their CEO's would all be greeters at Wal*Mart, and make right on their occasional crappy product.

Smaller companies, such as Twilight Time, seem to want to be truly symbiotic with their customers. I happened to post a comment a year or so ago to complain that TT's forced timelines were annoying. Nick Redman himself responded and said he hadn't known that was an optional authoring choice, but when he found it was, discontinued these unremovable timelines. I am still reeling from the fact that this was dealt with in such a respectful (to the consumers) manner, and on the basis of a single post. I am quite sure that Fox would make no such effort for the same problem. So, now, I actually prefer seeing catalog titles emerge from the "boutique" labels than from the major studios, who seem to have brushed us aside like pesky mosquitos.

Decreasing DVD ad Blu-ray sales notwithstanding, studios are companies who sell us product, and customers are entitled to their support and communication.

I am sorry that studios have had rude remarks made about them online and have retreated from chats and forum posts in order to avoid confronting them. We all know that anonymous remarks on this wonderful thing called the internet are often brazen and inappropriate, even scary. But if studios choose to sell their product online, and because their product is being talked about online (and this can only be mostly good for them -- free advertising), they need to be accountable to their customer base. I don't want to be bringing my defective vacuum back to the shop and finding the company has gone out of business. But, trying to get a correction on SWORD IN THE STONE is like finding the company went out of business and we're shit out of luck. Sorry. But don't forget to come back and buy more of our crappy product next month.

To sum this all up: Tough beans that studios are being criticized. They have money and power...they can take it! I do not condone nor will I contribute to nasty confrontational comments made toward these studios, but I will express my disappointment and even anger regarding shoddy product. Conversely, these same studios are also being hailed for their fine releases, so it kind of evens out. I always try to stop by a forum thread to thank this studio or that for a fine transfer. Yes, I also then suggest other releases I would like to see them put out. Like most of us, I do not expect to see these releases happen (especially these days), but that is not a criticism. It is an affirmation that I have liked their current or past product well enough to want more of them same.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Dick,

Great post. Thank you.

Something else I forgot to mention and your post reminded me of it.

I feel as if we are the vocal minority as far as the studios are concerned.

There's a "dumbing down" within consumers that we often talk about here.
The public wants everything offered to them as conveniently and cheaply as
possible. This is why they turn away from high-quality formats such as vinyl,
CDs and Blu-ray to readily accessible mp3 and streaming options.

The majority of people who buy these discs will never complain about its
quality nor realize that one of the most respected animation studios of all time
is removing all the grain and changing the colors of its films in order to make it
look as pretty as it can when it plays on brightly lit displays that sit on store shelves.

By the way, those brightly lit displays killed one of the best television formats we
ever had...plasma.

The general public doesn't care about preservation and purism.

I believe there are many folks at the studios that GREATLY care. However, as
one exec once told me before he left a major studio, "They won't let us play in our
sandbox anymore. They took it away." I took that to mean that changes that occurred
within the industry nearly a decade ago, meant that those who had freedom to create
great DVD and Blu-ray releases, had their means of creativity taken away from them.

 

[Robert Crawford]

Dick, so you're going to tell these people they can take it, but in reality they're not taking it. That's why chats such as the ones we've conducted in the past are gone and will probably not happen again as they can communicate to their consumer base through FB, Twitter and Podcasts.

 

[jcroy]

There's even a trope for all this: "Why Fandom (or We) Can't Have Nice Things"

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhyFandomCantHaveNiceThings
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhyWeCantHaveNiceThings
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnpleasableFanbase

 

[Dick]

I feel as if we are the vocal minority as far as the studios are concerned.

Yes, but this wasn't always true, and perhaps I should have realized six years ago or so that it just couldn't last.

You are entirely correct about the "dumbing-down" of, well, not just movies and video, but everything in our society. Colleges are graduating near-illiterates. High school grads often cannot make change without a register telling them what to give the customer back. Twitter and Tweets and iPads have contributed to the horrible grammar that permeates our media and speech (daily newspapers, which used to be scrutinized by proofreaders, are now full of terrible spelling and grammatical errors). Our culture has been manipulated into accepting Homeland Security and a hundred other programs that really are in place to control the population, and spy upon it. As far as entertainment goes, we now prefer Michael Bay's latest vacuous TRANSFORMERS sequel to anything resembling originality. We are becoming drones and don't even seem to know it, or we don't care.

This is so frightening that I am actually glad I won't be around 15 years from now to see how this all plays out.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Dick,

Amen.

Apathy seems to be our biggest problem.

However, I would caution myself and others to leave it at that without bringing
political discussion into this.

Let's stick with the topic of entertainment in our homes.

 

[Dick]

Dick,

Amen.

Apathy seems to be our biggest problem.

However, I would caution myself and others to leave it at that without bringing
political discussion into this.

Let's stick with the topic of entertainment in our homes.

Yes, I hear you. I was just using that as one of a number of examples. And I think you meant to say "There is a lot of apathy" or something to that effect.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

I am working on a separate review as I write this and not fully paying attention.

I will correct that.

 

[jcroy]

You are entirely correct about the "dumbing-down" of, well, not just movies and video, but everything in our society. Colleges are graduating near-illiterates. High school grads often cannot make change without a register telling them what to give the customer back. Twitter and Tweets and iPads have contributed to the horrible grammar that permeates our media and speech (daily newspapers, which used to be scrutinized by proofreaders, are now full of terrible spelling and grammatical errors).

(At the risk of going offtopic on a possibly verboten tangent).

As much as this may possibly be true, I've found that the younger generations may have become "wiser" a lot younger in other ways unrelated to their "dumbed down" education. For example, the "great recession" and constant "internet noise" (independently in an "orthogonal" manner) seems to have greatly heightened their "BS detectors" a lot sooner, than when I was their age.

 

[Robert Crawford]

Maybe, it's just me, but I'm having a great time with this HT hobby! I have access to more films now than I ever had before, I just don't understand the "woe is me" attitude. Hell, I have so many titles available to watch, there are times, I can't even make up my mind which title to watch first. The best move I ever made was to get into downloading/streaming during the past year. It has given me even more opportunities to watch my favorite films. If it's just about having a disc in your hand then I think you're limiting yourself. For myself, it's about seeing as many of my favorite films as possible within the limited time I have left on this earth.

 

[FoxyMulder]

I tend to agree with what Dick says above and would add excessive edge enhancement to the discussion, when the dials are pushed too far and you start to see a thin halo around objects then they have gone too far, those halo's are digital and not to be confused with some you see because of the photography and sometimes a lack of an anti-halation backing.

I think social media was invented by the devil, i hate it but, i think studio's now use that to get their message across.

It's a slow day, that's the only reason i'm taking part in a thread when i have nothing much to add to the discussion.

I also agree with Ron, in the modern consumer world people will always go for the easiest and cheapest option rather than the one which provides the greatest quality, that is why MP3 took off and SACD and blu ray audio failed, it will happen to disc and streaming will eventually take over, i hope it's ten to fifteen years away, i like to own something i can place in my hand, i'm not against streaming, if the quality gets good enough, both video and audio and, if my broadband is upgraded to superfast speeds then i'll be in, living in a small town i doubt my chances of getting superfast broadband is good in the near future.

It's interesting that Ron says they do read these forums and have mentioned a few members who have complained about transfers, i wonder if their reaction was to dismiss the complaints of those members, to look upon those members as a giant looks upon an ant, or if they took the complaints on board and accepted them and vowed to do better next time.

 

[jcroy]

The best move I ever made was to get into downloading/streaming during the past year. It has given me even more opportunities to watch my favorite films. If it's just about having a disc in your hand then I think you're limiting yourself.

I have a very different perspective on this.

If I had done more "research" into downloading/streaming back in 2009 or 2010, most likely I would have never started buying dvds and blurays in 2011. (I only started buying a lot of dvds and blurays in 2011).


(This may sound extremely selfish).

On the other side of the coin from a strictly personal self-interest perspective, I like the fact that a lot of catalog stuff will most likely never be released on bluray. (Or it will be released at sky high prices through channels like TT, Warner Archive, etc ...). For me, this means I won't be wasting my time and money trying to "complete" my bluray movie collection.

I use this fact to clamp down on my OCD compulsive collecting/hoarding habits. It would be a lot harder to squelch my OCD habits if I restricted myself to only dvd.

Widely released blurays greatly restricts what I can (or will) buy, and is easier to control my OCD hoarding habits. (ie. I don't bother buying stuff released through channels like TT, Warner Archive, etc ...).

 

[Yorkshire]

Dick,

Great post. Thank you.

Something else I forgot to mention and your post reminded me of it.

I feel as if we are the vocal minority as far as the studios are concerned.

There's a "dumbing down" within consumers that we often talk about here.
The public wants everything offered to them as conveniently and cheaply as
possible. This is why they turn away from high-quality formats such as vinyl,
CDs and Blu-ray to readily accessible mp3 and streaming options.

The majority of people who buy these discs will never complain about its
quality nor realize that one of the most respected animation studios of all time
is removing all the grain and changing the colors of its films in order to make it
look as pretty as it can when it plays on brightly lit displays that sit on store shelves.

By the way, those brightly lit displays killed one of the best television formats we
ever had...plasma.

The general public doesn't care about preservation and purism.

I believe there are many folks at the studios that GREATLY care. However, as
one exec once told me before he left a major studio, "They won't let us play in our
sandbox anymore. They took it away." I took that to mean that changes that occurred
within the industry nearly a decade ago, meant that those who had freedom to create
great DVD and Blu-ray releases, had their means of creativity taken away from them.

Given this (and I agree), the amazing thing is that we're still getting so many great releases.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this argument would suggest the only Blu-ray Discs anyone would ever release would be of the latest Transformers film.

I think you're right RE, but I suspect there are still one or two people left in the industry who do care.

Long may it continue.

Steve W

 

[jcroy]

It's interesting that Ron says they do read these forums and have mentioned a few members who have complained about transfers, i wonder if their reaction was to dismiss the complaints of those members, to look upon those members as a giant looks upon an ant, or if they took the complaints on board and accepted them and vowed to do better next time.

Wonder if their response was to simply "outsource" future bluray releases with readily available hd transfers, to smaller operations like: Warner Archive, TT, Olive, Mill Creek, Echo Bridge, Shout Factory, etc ... and letting them take the heat and criticisms.


ie. Washing their hands of it.

 

[FoxyMulder]

Wonder if their response was to simply "outsource" future bluray releases with readily available hd transfers, to smaller operations like: Warner Archive, TT, Olive, Mill Creek, Echo Bridge, Shout Factory, etc ... and letting them take the heat and criticisms.


ie. Washing their hands of it.

Twilight Time, Kino, Criterion, Shout, Mill Creek etc etc etc, they know the quality in advance, they make the choice whether to release substandard product onto the market or reject it, if they choose to reject it then they have my respect, if they instead choose to release substandard rubbish it does no one favours, they do not get my respect, the blame therefore lies at the hands of the label releasing the product, the studio that owns it should do better but at the end of the day the smaller label has a choice to make, stick to the higher quality transfers and take less flak or release poorer product with a quantity over quality stance.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

It's interesting that Ron says they do read these forums and have mentioned a few members who have complained about transfers, i wonder if their reaction was to dismiss the complaints of those members, to look upon those members as a giant looks upon an ant, or if they took the complaints on board and accepted them and vowed to do better next time.

I can help further with that.

Sometimes, you get a member that's going to be particularly unhappy with
a studio or exec and go on endless rants about how bad that person and
their product is. Hasn't happened recently, but in the past, when we meet
with a studio that member is mentioned.

When someone uses this forum as a means to continually badmouth a person
and his/her studio, instead of giving a constructive and polite opinion, it gets the
same dismissive reaction as most members here would have.

Think about that. How turned off would you be?

However, in the same light, I have actually heard some positive things from the
constructive criticism that HTF members have provided.

I think I can say this...

Warner had a very bad launch for their Archive program. It wasn't totally their
fault. Some things were out of their control. Members here were not happy and
expressed anger over some issues. The response I received in person was, "We
did things wrong, we are learning, and we vow to make things much better."

I think they have made things much better.

 

[Dick]

Ronald Epstein, on 13 Jul 2014 - 08:59 AM, said:

Dick,

Amen.

Apathy seems to be our biggest problem.

However, I would caution myself and others to leave it at that without bringing
political discussion into this.

Let's stick with the topic of entertainment in our homes.

Yes, I hear you. I was just using that as one of a number of examples.

 

[jcroy]

Something else I forgot to mention and your post reminded me of it.

I feel as if we are the vocal minority as far as the studios are concerned.

The large movie companies possibly learned the hard way, that the "squeaky wheel gets the grease" is completely false when it comes to "fandumb".

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FanDumb
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeriousBusiness
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fandumb

 

[Dick]

I can help further with that.

Sometimes, you get a member that's going to be particularly unhappy with
a studio or exec and go on endless rants about how bad that person and
their product is. Hasn't happened recently, but in the past, when we meet
with a studio that member is mentioned.

When someone uses this forum as a means to continually badmouth a person
and his/her studio, instead of giving a constructive and polite opinion, it gets the
same dismissive reaction as most members here would have.

Think about that. How turned off would you be?

However, in the same light, I have actually heard some positive things from the
constructive criticism that HTF members have provided.

I think I can say this...

Warner had a very bad launch for their Archive program. It wasn't totally their
fault. Some things were out of their control. Members here were not happy and
expressed anger over some issues. The response I received in person was, "We
did things wrong, we are learning, and we vow to make things much better."

I think they have made things much better.

Ron, it's great to hear that Warner Bros. passed that along to you. I do not believe, however, that we at HTF were made privy to the remark, and probably would have held Warner Bros. in much higher regard if either they'd had a rep post that on this forum, or if you had forwarded it to us. Some resentment occurs simply because we are left out of the loop.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

I think you're right RE, but I suspect there are still one or two people left in the industry who do care.

Yeah, Steve, there's a whole lot. You're right.

I believe my point is that there are many people at the studios
who know their library and understand the value and importance of
what lies in their vaults.

Then you have the bean counters at the top. All they see is sales
and care only about what they can continually regurgitate in order to
avoid having to spend money on digital cleanup and restorations.

This is why Warner and Fox keep re-releasing the same bread-winning
titles over and over again. Same transfers, new packaging.