A Few Words About A few words about...™ Back to the Future -- in Blu-ray (1 Viewer)

[Nelson Au]

I have withheld making any comments about these scans because I don't have any background or knowledge of how film should look. In looking at all of them, I was struck first by how dull they looked! These are pretty amazing to look at, so thanks for doing it and posting them for us to see.


To my eye and it's an uneducated one, the colors look pretty dull and the images don't look very sharp. I imagine that each frame is in some motion, so some blurring may be going on. I've used a pretty inexpensive flat bed scanner myself with a proper film holder to scan slides and film clips myself. In scanning 40 year old film clips from Star Trek TOS, the colors were of course really bad!

I was surprised in looking at those scans from the Star Trek film clips, they didn't look to have so much grain, but they were not very sharp either. So it's amazing to see what the engineers did to Star Trek when they prepared the film elements for HD broadcast and then blu ray.


So I imagine the people doing the scanning and digital work for BTTF did similar things to clean the image and correct and boost color. Of course, the consensus here is that they didn't do the proper job.


I've watched all 3 films. I thought they looked fine and were acceptable for an evening's viewing pleasure of entertainment. What would be interesting to see of these scans is the infamous scene of Doc Brown on the train and compare that to a sceencap from the blu ray.

 

[mattCR]

I think it's also important to note that JPG, the format the scans are presented in, is a lossy compressed format, so even if presented at the same size, it is done in a secondary means of compression which by default introduces it's own issues which may or may not be related to the original image.

 

[AaronMK]

I think JPEG can be fine if you properly compress the images, just like the video codecs used for Blu-ray can be quite transparent when compressed properly.


I think the real question I would have for Mr. Harris is this: Are these scans representative of the type of output one would see from whatever source material Universal would likely use if they were going to do this "right"? Does these represent something that might be passed to their "digital workflow", again assuming Universal set out to do this release "right" from original elements to final blu-ray output?


BTW, thanks for the film scans Lindenbrock!

 

[Michel_Hafner]

BDs are not made from scanning release prints (unless nothing else has survived). If Universal had scanned the negatives and not applied

filtering the result would look sharper/grainier than the scans made from the print.

 

[Lidenbrock]

Originally Posted by Nelson Au /forum/thread/305298/a-few-words-about-back-to-the-future-in-blu-ray/150#post_3755480

I think JPEG can be fine if you properly compress the images, just like the video codecs used for Blu-ray can be quite transparent when compressed properly.


I think the real question I would have for Mr. Harris is this: Are these scans representative of the type of output one would see from whatever source material Universal would likely use if they were going to do this "right"? Does these represent something that might be passed to their "digital workflow", again assuming Universal set out to do this release "right" from original elements to final blu-ray output?

I hope not. The blu-rays look far better than these scans. They just don´t look like film, Universal applied some digital trickery, that´s it. Don´t take my images seriously. I didn´t upload them to prove that this edition is terrible and it´s not representative of the filmmaker´s vision. On the contrary: I think we usually idealize what we saw in theaters. I read things such as " this BD is not representative of the film" or "this is not what I saw in the theater" all the time in HTF. IMHO few people know what a film should look like, only those involved in the release of the BD and experts. It doesn´t matter whether we know the look of a particular print, it doesn´t matter what we saw in theaters. It´s irrelevant. Many prints from the same film are so different. IMO many films look better on BD than they did in theaters, and many films look as good as they did in theaters.Discussing whether a 20, 30, 40 or 50-year-old film had a reddish, greenish or bluish hue is insane, not only because our memory is based on pure speculation (as Oliver Sacks proved), but also because we don´t know if we saw a proper print. I wonder if this was usually the case. I can tell that I have strips of frames from 4 different films and none of them match exactly what you see on the BD. Besides, the look of a print can change completely depending on the light passing through it.

I remember the thread about Dracula, I really felt sorry for the people who made the BD, and I think some unjust comments were made.

 

[Nelson Au]

I think your presentation makes a very valid point. We really don't have a good idea what a 20 or 30 year old film really should look like! It opens up a can of worms for several topics that go beyond this thread. Like the director's intent and his revision after the fact. ( changing the aesthetic quality of The French Connection IIRC )

 

[mattCR]

I will say what I know has been said repeatedly.... I bought the set over the Thanksgiving @ Amazon for cheap. I enjoy the movies. That having been said, this may be the absolute worst packaging I have ever seen. I mean, who thought of this Rubiks cube disaster. This is just designed to destroy discs. I keep some films in a 500-disc CD case.. it looks as though that's where this goes, becuase there is no way I need to be looking at instructions and fighting to get discs out every damn time.

 

[Brian Kidd]

have some BTTF III frames from a 35mm print that I´d like to share with you. I thought someone might want to have them. I scanned them at 4K using a professional scanner with color management and a hardware calibrated professional monitor. The images represent the frames accurately. They are resized at 1080p. The images are cropped to match the blu-ray but they don´t match horizontally since there is more information on the Blu-ray than in the print.

So cool! I love finding hi-res stills from films! Thank you!

 

[Dave Moritz]

Going to pass on this trilogy for now! I have it on dvd and that will have to do for now, even though I hate the Dolby track on it! I hope they redo the transfer as the captures I have seen so far do not impress me or blow my hair back. I want these films to look as good as possible and if they can make Blade Runner look as good as it did on Bluray, I see no reason whey BTTF can not look that good. I remember the dvd of Blade Runner looking horrid on dvd so again I will hold off Back To The Future, maybe they will use a better case as well when they re-release it?

 

[Dave Moritz]

How does the bluray transfer stack up against the dvd transfer? How much of an improvement is the bluray transfer?

 

[urbo73]

Originally Posted by Dave Moritz

How does the bluray transfer stack up against the dvd transfer? How much of an improvement is the bluray transfer?

A lot better. I have yet to see any DVD transfer that doesn't look inferior to its Blu-ray counterpart. Now a Blu-ray may have its issues, but besting a DVD is not one of them.

 

[Paul_Warren]

BTTF2 was noticeably grainy at the cinema back in 1989 due to:


1: The number of ILM optical composites meant the prints shown were several generations away from the original as some VFX shots had many layers & back in those days each layer meant another print so the theatrical version(s) were probably close to 10 generations away from the originals!


2: The movie was also completed very close to the deadline so this again would have had some effect on quality as back in those days it was always very difficult to get the prints struck when the movie was so close to the wire in hitting its deadline due to the long post production schedule (which was rushed anyway to insane levels considering the nature of the photo chemical opticals process)!


I think the BD looks just fine there is still plenty of grain but they obviously cleaned up some digitally & still preserved detail I think Universal under Bob Gale's supervision did a great job here! The BD's are a vast improvement on the DVD's & BTTF3 looks simply stunning like a 2010 movie its so good!!!

 

[Josh Simpson]

I haven't found another thread on this, but in case you didn't know, my brother in law ordered this set for me from Amazon and the case had hubs. This was the U.S. release, btw. I'm wondering if Universal quietly changed the packaging... much better than that Season 6 set of The Office with its crappy packaging.

 

[Richard Travale]

Thanks for the update Josh. Do you know if there is anything on the outer packaging that would let me know I'm getting the newer packaging? I've been holding off on this one as I knew that having only one hand, the original packaging was going to cause me some issues.

 

[Nelson Au]

Pics of the new packaging?

 

[robbbb1138]

Not that I'd ever expect this to happen, but some kind of replacement program option for packaging would be a very nice gesture if it's being done differently on all of the newly-manufactured sets.

 

[Ron Reda]

Originally Posted by Richard Travale

Thanks for the update Josh. Do you know if there is anything on the outer packaging that would let me know I'm getting the newer packaging? I've been holding off on this one as I knew that having only one hand, the original packaging was going to cause me some issues.

Sorry to hear that but ya know, you've raised an interesting point...you should not have to keep such things in mind when making a purchase decision like this, shame on Universal.

 

[Karl Pozorski]

From another forum. The new packaging has a giant UPC sticker on the back of the case.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Originally Posted by robbbb1138

Not that I'd ever expect this to happen, but some kind of replacement program option for packaging would be a very nice gesture if it's being done differently on all of the newly-manufactured sets.

Not holding my breath either, but that would indeed make a very nice gesture.


Anyway, hope this is the last we see of that crappy packaging idea/mechanism...


_Man_

 

[Nelson Au]

Way back in the day, I asked Criterion if I could get a replacement outer jacket for the Forbidden Planet laser disc. And they sent me one! For free! Agreed, in this case, it might be unlikely. But it never hurts to try!