S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

By Kenneth Brown is a staff writer and reviewer at High Def Digest:
Sound & Vision Magazine - Blu-ray 2008: The Studio Report Card
I would have given MGM a D, not an F.
Discuss!

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

Warner deserves lower than a B- for their lack of lossless on so many titles. Their transfers are usually fantastic, but Blu-Ray is supposed to be top notch video AND audio. They've dropped the ball too many times IMHO.

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

Well said Brent, I agree. I would have scored Disney a bit higher though, at least a B+.

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

I agree that Warner Bros. deserves no better than a C+ for their inconsistent use of lossless audio; however the one thing that saves them in my mind is the truly diverse nature of the content offered and their reasonable pricepoints.

Disney should have received at least a B+ if not an A- for their efforts. I would've given Fox a C- based on their pricing alone, and MGM while it is probably more reasonable to give then an D, if an F improves their efforts, particularly in the extras department, I'm all for it. The Weinstein Company appears to have gotten shafted a bit here. While I've heard less than impressive things about 1408, The Mist appears to be a winner, and the company is a small one that is struggling financially.

Universal does not deserve a B+ when you consider how many titles have had their extras compromised due to using BD25. Also, titles like The Mummy, U571, and The Thing have all had additional DNR applied compared to their HD DVD counterparts.

Everything else looks about right to me...

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

I think Universal & Warner should have the grades reversed. It's too early, too little content to judge Universal on Blu-Ray. If graded on HD-DVD, they score a C- in my book. The majority of their titles had DD+ soundtracks and so-so transfers and I'm not at all impressed with what they've done with BD so far. They had a chance to improve on HD-DVD but didn't.

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

Ouch. As much as lossless audio is nice, I have a hard time seeing the lack of it as such a deal-breaker - the broad range of titles with full complements of goodies at reasonable prices strikes me as much more important than the incremental upgrade between "really good sound" and "really, really good sound".

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

I agree. Warner has done more than any other studio to get Blu product out there, including Sony. If lossless hasn't been on all titles, I'd say it's more of a business decision than a plan to deprive us of lossless audio, but that's just me.

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

What do you think of the authors assumption that WB is holding back lossless too upgrade later w/a double dip?

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

I like the comments according to what I've seen. Tougher to assign a grade. He's seen a lot more BDs than I have.

Agree that Fox deserves a fairly low grade though. High prices, lousy (IMO) transfers, next to no extras. Definitely, holding back for the double/triple dip, least as far as extras. [Can I say it?? Put out even a half-assed "The Abyss" BD and I'll gladly bend over and take the price.]

I am surprised at Paramount's offerings. Surprised I don't know why, but they seem quite decent to me. And Disney and Sony too, no real surprise there. Disappointed with WB for the opposite reason, in that I expected more based on past SD performance. They've had some winners though, but definitely need to pay attention to the audio in general...if nothing else it is a noticeable feature "shortcoming" compared to others' offerings.

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

I see it this way, the film and it's sound track should be the most important. The extras should be just those, "extras". If the extras fit on the disc after the film gets the best possible A/V treatment, great, if they don't fit add a second disc or just exclude them. Dropping lossless because the extras have to be on the disc is completely unacceptable.

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

Double post

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

The use of BD25s by Universal, and Warner which seems to be the reason for some of Warner's titles having lossy audio, is likely not the fault of the two respective studios. Warners use of lossy audio seems to be part of an effort to maintain the highest quality picture with those films on which they are forced to use a BD25.

Doug

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

I think that the only reason WB would double dip to include lossless and other features is if the sales of the initial release justified the expense. Speed Racer hasn't been selling like hotcakes exactly, so I doubt if WB will double dip on it, even with all the hue and cry from the HD community.

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

I would have graded Disney higher as overall IMHO they have done a great job at Bluray, I would have given them a A-. And as far as Fox goes, yes there MSRP is high on many of there titles and lack of suplements. But for the most part I feel that Fox has put out some very good titles and deserves a higher score than they got. WB should have been scored better as there video transfers are very good and should not have been dragged down by lack of lossless audio. They have titles out with lossless and I agree that there where titles that did not receive such treatment that did not get it.

I feel that Paramount deseves a worse score than they got as they need to make alot of improvements as does MGM. As far as Universal goes at this point I am not sure to be honest with everyone here. They have some good transfers and I give them alot of credit for embrasing DTS-HD MA which is what will make me end up replacing some of my HD-DVD's with Blu-ray replacements just because of DTS-HD MA over Dolby Digital Plus.

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

The play's the thing.

I agree with Ron whole-heartedly on this one...especially since the lossless audio is the one area of a BD presentation of which I can take the most advantage (I've got a small HDTV). And, I've got so little free time to watch the films in my collection, it has been a rare occasion when I've had a chance to watch an "extra" on a disc. So I would put the quality and diversity of titles as Job #1 (& #2) for the studios.

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

With regard to Fox, apart from The Longest Day and Patton I think that they have done some of the best, ie film like, transfers and that includes Predator and Butch Cassidy which I both find excellent (the article calls them underwhelming ...). I was also very happy with the picture quality of MGM's A Bridge Too Far and Battle Of Britain and I question the value of an article that calls these transfers "spotty".

In general I have nothing much to complain about as far as the video and audio quality of 99% of the discs I buy is concerned. I don't hear much of a difference between lossless and lossy audio so the exclusion of lossless audio on a release is not a big deal for me.
If I had to grade studios I would look at content first. For me Warner and Fox would come on top then and Sony, the masters of crap, last.

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

How was WB "forced" too use BD25?
Thanks.

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

There still seems to be a limited capacity to produce films on BD50 disc. It has already been discussed here that even now the studios have a limited number of films in a given time period that can be on a BD50 because of this bottle neck.

A studio like Warner, that has a very heavy release schedule, likely has to decide which films are going to get a BD50 and which aren't. Speed Racer is a good example here. It seem to have made the choice to leave off the lossless audio and use the extra space to have the best picture quality possible.

Universal seems to have chosen lossless audio and some have complained that the image has suffered as a result (in comparison with the same film on HD-DVD) on their BD25 releases.

Doug

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

Here are some reviews from the site the author works for of the titles you mentioned:
Blu-ray Review: Battle of Britain | High-Def Digest
Blu-ray Review: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid | High-Def Digest
Blu-ray Review: Predator | High-Def Digest
Oh, no! Not the old 'its good enough for me' argument!
JJ
HD is not about "content".
HD is about quality.
Look for SD DVD for content, you'll be much happier.
(tens of thousands of titles, instead of a few hundred)

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

I remember posts here, back in '06, stating that 'everything' would be BD50 by '07.
If we can't get BD50's just drop in another disc.
(although that kind of defeats the superior storage feature, at least we wouldn't get gipped)

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

Clearly they haven't made that goal yet as there are still a number of BD25s being released.

Speed Racer actually is a 3 disc set. The only thing on the first disc is the movie.

Doug

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

Your links only serve to illustrate that some reviewers haven't got a clue what they are talking about. I suggest you do a search on this site to see what Robert Harris had to say about BoB, Bridge Too Far and Butch.


Don't put words into my mouth thank you very much.


Really? So I guess you own for instance Daddy Day Camp and will rush out to buy National Security and Blue Streak if the video and audio are good?


Are your telling me that Blu-Ray is not for people who like good movies?

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

Well, within the context of this article, grading studios on their output, I think "content" (which I suppose is better than calling movies "product", but still seems kind of cold) is fairly important. A studio could be making the one or two discs it puts out a year fantastic and I figure they'd still be doing a piss-poor job if the rest of their library was being overlooked. If you're looking at a studio's entire output, I think it's very fair to give weight to the number and variety of movies they release as well as how much they charge.

I'm guessing "JJ" is "just joking", right?

Still, I get a little annoyed at the rigidness of the "lossless or nothing" crowd. Part of it is that I really can't tell how much of any improvement I hear in a lossless track over a lossy one - and the lossy ones on BD tend to be darn good - is the placebo effect. At a certain point, I think lossless becomes an expensive feature, in terms of the storage space and bandwidth it requires, that a relatively small portion of the audience is really going to notice. It seems to me like there should be some room for flexibility there.

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

We had a lot of arguments like yours back in the late 90s with the "anamorphic or nothing" crowd on standard DVD. At the time, most people didn't have 16:9 sets so there were a lot of people who thought the "anamorphic or nothing" movement were going overboard. Looking back, I'm glad they made the noise they did. I still have a lot of DVDs from that time period that are anamorphic. Yet, I've gotten rid of most of the ones that weren't.

I can get a "broad range of titles with full complements of goodies at reasonable prices" on DVD. I'm buying BD for top-quality. At these prices I don't want something that wasn't done right the first time.

Warner clearly deserves nothing greater than a C, since audio is half the equation here. If even Lions Gate can do lossless on everything these days, then so can Warner. Isn't it sad to think that if Speed Racer were a Lions Gate title instead of Warner, it would definitely have lossless audio?!? I never thought I'd see that day, but it's the sad truth.

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

Agreed.

Warner, more than any other studio, is a conglomerate of divisions, sub-divisions and departments. It's takes a while to get a change in policy (such as lossless on all releases) to get implemented across the board.

And while lossless is ideal, 640k 5.1 is nothing to sneeze at, IMO.

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

Agree. If you don't meet the A/V bar set by the rest of your "class", you can't get better than a C. OTOH, if we're grading on "plays well with others", WB did quite well earlier this year and they were "an asset to the class"... It's tough to rate the whole output of a studio when some titles are great and some are a little short ("does assignments the night before").

Lionsgate, when they were Lions Gate, was one of my scarey studios. I only have two BD titles from them, both well done. A good sign I hope.

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

Lionsgate releases about 1/10th as many titles as Warner. They don't have the corporate logjam problem.

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

I think they're quantitatively, if not qualitatively different arguments. I don't deny that there are gains to lossless audio, and I suppose that for many people they are very noticeable. However, IIRC they suck up a lot of space relative to a Dolby Digital(+) or DTS-HD track, a much bigger hit than an anamorphic transfer causes. I mean, stop me if I'm wrong on this, but an anamorphic image actually has the same amount of pixels as a non-anamorphic one, just stretched (thus, anamorphic) - the difference is that the extra black space compresses more. It's a lot less "expensive", space-wise, than lossless audio.

Also, I think "lossless" is something of a buzzword, much like "digital" can be. Is a 16-bit lossless track better than a 24-bit lossy track with a higher sampling rate? And why must lossless be the standard for audio? It isn't for video, after all, and if the majority of customers will trade some audio quality for some video quality, is lossless audio necessarily the best choice commercially or, indeed, in terms of quality?

Anyway, that's why I think "lossless or nothing" is an oversimplification, even beyond my personal belief that it is often a difference that will be difficult to perceive even on the best equipment because it's so close to the limitations of the human ear.

If what the other studios are giving you is what you want, sure. Go to the SD section, though, and you'll find a whole bunch of "I don't need to bother with Blu-ray because I only buy foreign/classic films". The situation isn't quite as bad as it was a year and a half ago, when there was something to the grumbling that Blu-ray was only releasing recent action movies and comedies that would appeal to teenage PS3 owners, but that's in large part because Warner has been putting out good stuff. There's value in that - and for a lot of people, there's a lot more value in that than putting a slightly better soundtrack on a movie they won't buy.

Says who? I'd put it at closer to a quarter or a third, and that's for titles I'd actually buy.

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

Which is one of the reasons they're a better studio, deserving of a better grade.

Re: S&V Grading of BD Studios in '08 (so far).

I can't begin to understand the logic where Lionsgate is a better studio than Warner because they release an order of magnitude fewer movies, even if they do have a couple extra rear channels.