Warner Archive Discussion Thread (FEEDBACK) - Page 16

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That's encouraging. Thanks.
Looking forward to seeing it.

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I just got THIS WOMAN IS DANGEROUS (includes trailer), THE GRASSHOPPER, SWEET NOVEMBER, THE BABY MAKER, and DREAM LOVER. I used DVD Media Inspector to check on the origin of the DVD-R media and it reported "MKM", indicating Verbatim and/or Mitsubishi. In other words, this is first class media as rated here:

digitalFAQ.com | Blank DVD Media Quality Guide

I'm very happy with what I've received so far. I'm sampling the titles now and they are as I expected. The printing on the sleeves are a bit lower in quality than I had hoped, but the kind of labeling on the discs looks very nice, like a pressed DVD. It isn't a label that can peel off at all - it looks like it was thermally printed.

I do think $14.99 is more appropriate of a price, but we'll wait and see what happens. Don't look for other languages or subtitles of any kind though.

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This is the promo that plays at the beginning of the discs.

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Uh-oh, that's one of the titles I ordered in my first batch. Haven't received notification of shipment yet. I'll decide for myself at the time I receive them. Other titles I ordered (and there's still another 10-20 I could order from the first 150):

Abe Lincoln in Illinois
Adventures of Huck Finn, The
Ah, Wilderness!
Along the Great Divide
Beast of the City, The
Big House, The
Carbine Williams
Citadel, The
Close To My Heart
Dance, Fools, Dance
Dusty And Sweets Mcgee
Grasshopper, The
On Borrowed Time
Possessed (1931)
Private Lives
Room For One More
Shopworn Angel, The
Too Hot to Handle (1938)

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All 5 of the titles I got are interlaced. :-( The encoding on THIS WOMAN IS DANGEROUS showed some macroblocking, though minor.

I don't understand the interlaced part since these all appear to be newer masters.

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I'd love to see many of these films but I have to agree that $19. is steep. $10 - $14 would tempt me. I could buy Blu ray's cheaper than $19.

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Apologies if this was mentioned already but critic Lou Lumenick posted this on his blog a few days ago:

"Warner, incidentally, has revealed it will make the titles available for sale by other retailers like Amazon (and, presumably, TCM's site run by Movies Unlimited) after a 30-day period of exclusivity at the new WB Shop website."

If true this could address some of the issues folks have, like price (presumably these would be discounted by the retailer) and international shipping.

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That is disappointing news

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Hopefully this is true. But this might effect the price or be of much interest to international collectors. If Warner's did sell through amazon, it would probably be through marketplace, which still restrict international orders. I also do remember Disney preventing Amazon from selling some Treasures tin collections a few years back.

Even if Amazon sells these titles, you might wait much longer to receive your order. All items available on amazon give an expected delivery time. Some items say, Usually ships in 4 to 6 weeks. Not all titles will be in stock. Another problem might be that amazon might sell only select titles. Of course, this in only week one. I am sure that many changes will occur. Warner's wants to sell as many titles as they can, so we will have to wait to see what transpires over the coming weeks.

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That's disappointing! I bought 10 titles and spot-checked a few of them using my PS3/Sony 60" LCD and didn't notice, but both these pieces of equipment have excellent de-interlacing capability.

I watched OXFORD BLUES all the way through last night and, on my 60" LCD, it didn't look all that great. It was good, but just seemed to lack that sharpness and clarity of a newly mastered store-bought DVD. Could it be that these are single-layer DVD-Rs and that movies over 90 minutes may suffer in quality/compression a bit because of it? Or, is it that Warner is just putting out some of these titles with years old transfers? Come to think of it, looking at DOC SAVAGE and OXFORD BLUES, the latter may be the case.

When I looked at them on my 20" iMac at work, they looked a LOT better on the smaller screen (obviously).

I'll check out a few more this weekend, but with my home setup, and using the iMac DVD player on my office computer, I didn't notice the interlacing. The interlace issue shouldn't be too much of a concern for people with newer equipment, but that certainly won't be everyone who buys these. I'm not unhappy with my purchases so far, but the ones I've looked at extensively don't compare to even a newly-remastered older film from a major studio. The "clarity" isn't there (for the lack of a better word) on the two I watched (8 to go). The biggest issue I have is the price point. If the remaining eight titles I bought look like the first two I watched, I won't be spending $19.95 on any of the others... if they were a few bucks cheaper (even $15), I might consider more, though.

One thing that is bugging me, though... as the President of a smaller indie studio, we do print runs of 2000-3000 units all the time. Making stamped DVDs is not too expensive, even at THAT quantity for little ol' Synapse Films. I can't believe that Warner doesn't believe that ANY of these Archive titles wouldn't sell even a couple thousand units. Not only that, I can't believe that doing these as DVD-Rs is REALLY giving them all that much of a savings. I appreciate their efforts for sure, but even I could sell 2000 units for DOC SAVAGE for cryin' out loud! I guess, for the "big boys" with millions of dollars in overhead, every nickel counts. For us, making 2-3000 DVDs of a title is commonplace.

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If this is confirmed than it's certainly killed the deal for me at any price... I've complained endlessly about the use of non-progressive transfers from this studio in the past. Can anyone please verify this?

This is often the case on Warners animated menus, extras and short subjects, but if their features are now being transferred interlaced that is a really big deal that needs to be addressed right away!

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It just suggests that these particular films are old transfers. Warner has said that they have been doing all their transfers in 1080p since 2004. They should say on each film's page if it was HD or SD sourced so buyers know what they are getting before hand. Failing that, they should say if the master was analog or digital, again so buyers know what they should expect of the quality.

Sure there are those short videos on the pages (which are often poorly formatted) but a lot of videos look like good quality when the image is so small.

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I skipped over the promo when watching OXFORD BLUES last night, but watching it now, I noticed they edited the promo with the clip of BHOWANI JUNCTION still suffering from a slight anamorphic squeeze.

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Those sorts of mistakes just make the service seem tacky and unprofessional.

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...and cheap. Don't forget cheap. Which is a little galling considering...ah, well you know the rest.

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I had a dream quite a while back that I was in a huge warehouse full of shelves of movies. You went through and looked at all the film cans and when you found one you wanted you took it to a desk up front and they would make a dvd copy of it for you and then you paid for it like a normal dvd purchase. How wonderful to have this dream come true.

I’m not real crazy about having to pay $20 a pop for these films (like most other people) but it’s simply not realistic or good business for the studios to release all of their titles on bulk manufactured dvd’s as there is just not a big enough audience for each one to make it a profitable\break even venture. If this is the only way we can get the older and more obscure titles, I am thankful for it and sincerely hope other studios like Paramount (who still owns their silents which I also desperately want), Universal (who owns the Paramount catalog 1929-1949), and Fox will head this direction as well. If there are more studios doing this, then that means more competition and prices may come down.

I do think constructive criticism is good as it will let WB know our concerns\wants, just don't forget that this is a brand new venture and may have some rough edges for a while.

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I payed 40 dollars on ebay for a dvd-r of Gary Cooper in Ten North Frederick. It all comes down to just how bad some people want some titles that are not shown on TV very often if at all. I'd pay a good bit for movies that I really want.

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And if you are going to pay money for a DVD-R, it seems better to pay it to a company that actually owns the film, and thus is likely to at least spend some of the money on preserving and / or restoring other films.

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Yes but as you may or may not be aware that fox is having legal troubles on the ownership to the film Ten north Frederick with the decendents of the person that wrote the book, so it would be hard to determine who to pay the money to for that one. To quote a Pittsburgh Steeler phrase "Whatever it takes" as it would relate to obtaining a title that I wanted of which the studio was unable to release and may not ever be able to.

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you pay for things in your dreams?

in mine, the socialist revolution has come, and these films have become the property of the people, as they always should have been!

in real life, I have paid far more than $20 for similar titles on Ebay (on similarly shoddy DVDs), but I'm not going to do it if I don't have to--and with TCM on the air, I don't have to...

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Big time. Or the big boys know they just don't have the resources/desire to market them as they are focused on their top tier releases. As for DVD-R media, there's this disturbing possibility.

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This webpage covers the economics of Manufacture On Demand in a lot of detail. Essentially Warner gets to save on storage and upfront disc replication costs.

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Anyone that may be an expert on tcm care to compile a list on if every single one of the first 155 movies has in fact been shown on TCM at least once. I would guess that tcm has only shown a little more than half of them. Bright Leaf has never been shown on tcm and Room for One More has never been shown to my knowledge on tcm. I was shown to be wrong on Crisis but did fail to record it or know that it was on the one time it was on tcm this summer. My cable company does not seem to give enough room on analog cable for the tcm channel, so I freguently get pauses where it states loss of signal or studders are frequent during the movie. I am assuming they are giving more room on the cable for other channels as I've never had that problem on any other channel ever except on some digital tuned stattions. But since tcm is just a bunch of old movies, they must not care about that station as much as the others. It does make for many ruined recordings.

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I watched THIS WOMAN IS DANGEROUS last night. I was overall very pleased with the sharpness of the image. (Admittedly, my player, TV, and receiver are no older than two years, so maybe that made a difference).

No, there has been no digital cleanup on video or audio that I could tell. The sound was a bit hissy and crackly, but certainly no worse than you see on TV, but I think the grayscale of the movie in the main looked very good, and to get the film (admittedly not one of Joan's best; she didn't even like it) in my collection made my $15 investment worthwhile.

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We need to have a dedicated thread for posting information on individual titles as we receive them. I got my 5 titles yesterday and have already seen 4 of them (after a marathon session). I'm happy that these titles are coming out, but there are some issues that Warner needs to address. We also need a forum with comments from people who have the discs and can let us know about the quality for particular titles. I doubt many of these discs will get traditional reviews elsewhere.

Maybe HTF could create a section (sort of like Robert Harris's) with a different thread for each title. No need to clutter up the "SD DVD - Film and Documentary" section with individual threads for each of those Warner Archive releases.

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On this title I noticed some macroblocking in shadows where the gray scale changed, the kind where a large section of the image holds, shifts, moves slightly, etc. The encoding for these releases is definitely a step down from their pressed titles, down to the interlaced issue and less than ideal compression and authoring.

That being said, I thought the film looked very good! With proper encoding and authoring it could've been in the last Joan Crawford DVD boxed set. The image was quite crisp and clean, far better than similar titles I have recorded off of TCM.

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If you have a DVD drive, how much of the disc is used?

A 100 minute film filling all of one layer shouldn't show any compression artifacts IMO.

I agree with you that we need a sticky-ed thread where people can rate the picture and sound quality of the titles, and where we can keep track of different contributions about the same film so that there can be a cumulative opinion created over time.

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4.03 GB is the total disc size with an average bit rate of 4.97 mbps used for the feature film. I wonder if Warner was aware of the substandard compression/encoding jobs... The weird vertical strobing looks like when I would use my Canopus digital to analog converter box to record Laserdiscs onto my miniDV camera and then import the footage into Final Cut Pro to edit and master for DVD.

Here are some examples from the disc:

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It would be nice if somebody would take up the Herculean task of creating and hosting a spreadsheet or webpage table of these, with columns of relevant information (aspect ratio, sound format, links to reviews or review threads, errors, etc.). Sort of a Warner Archive DVD clearinghouse.