Am I the only person who thinks AI is a lousy transfer? (1 Viewer)

[Richard Travale]

I think it looks just like it did in the theaters.

 

[Larry Sutliff]

I thought that the DVD had a stellar transfer and was a nice replication of the theatrical presentation. Having said that, my television is only a modest 40" Samsung widescreen and therefore a lot of problems that others see on better equipment(ie,the edge enhancement in THE PHANTOM MENACE) are almost completely unnoticable to me.

 

[MichaelZema]

i thought the film was lousy. does that count?
it's actually one of the worst movies i have seen. the ending went on too too long and the commercial made it out to be a humans vs robots type movie, and i was very dissapointed.about halfway through the movie, i actually contemplated walking out of the theater. i kept saying, itll get better and it just got worse and worse.
i thought the blue fairy crap and aliens at the end was taking it way too far. very weak last act. i just wanted the damn kid to die so the movie would finally end.[/

 

[Michael Reuben]

i thought the film was lousy. does that count?

No, it doesn't count. There are numerous threads (most of them in the Movies forum) discussing the pros and cons of A.I.. This thread is about the technical quality of the disc. Dropping into such a thread just to blast the film is considered thread-farting, and it's not popular here.

M.

 

[Tim RH]

MichaelZema,

You obviously did not get the film at all, you certainly missed some things based on what you posted in the Spoiler section of your comments, which shouldn't have been in this thread anyway. I suggest you check out the A.I. threads going on in the Movies forum right away before you make judgments about this misunderstood film. Thanks.

---

As for the transfer, has anyone considered that when you saw A.I. in the theater it might not have been the intended look? People seem to automatically assume that if the DVD doesn't look exactly like the film print you saw on the big screen, then there must be something wrong in the digital transfer, and not the other way around (would you like all of the hairs, nicks and scratches that are found in the theater to appear on your DVD copy too?). Not to mention the fact that you were probably focusing more on the movie the first time you saw it rather than the quality of the projection (unless you saw it more than once in the cinema).

[end of rant]

 

[Mark Palermo]

I'm honestly surprised at all the commotion over how grainy this transfer is. Even if you didn't know the grain was intended, it's hardly bad at all. Why do people expect all movies to look exactly the same in the first place?

 

[Bjoern Roy]

Very good transfer. Very little EE, only visible in 3 or 4 shots. Nice shadow delineation, contrast, color saturation. Natural displayal of grain, which is a great compression achievement, considering how much grain the film has (and had in the theater).

People who complain about this transfer are probably the same who didn't like the transfer of 'Traffic', which was an even better transfer than AI.

The lack of appreciation for film and artistic cinematography and the ignorance about the differences of film, transfer and compression artefacts is amazing.

Every movie that doesn't have poppy colors like Fifth Element, Austin Power or Toy Story is 'bad'.

 

[Eujin]

Bjoern, I am in total agreement that the transfer of Traffic was very well handled, and given the subject matter, I was hardly surprised by the stylistic use of grain in that film (which I saw in the theaters). However, not having seen AI in the theaters, and not really expecting grain to be a terribly obvious sytlistic choice given AI's themes and content, I was completely taken aback by what, for me, was a very distracting element of the movie.

If the amount of grain that I saw on the DVD was what is intended in the minds of Spielberg and Kaminski, all power to them. I didn't start this thread to debate the merits or demerits of AI as an artistic endeavor, merely to find out if others had the same conclusion--mistaken or not--that I had arrived at.

Let me put it another way, if you hadn't seen a certain Sci-Fi movie in the theater, and the film lacked a cinema verite style or even the drama-as-documentary approach of a movie like Traffic, and then saw all this grain in the DVD transfer, would you automatically conclude that this is what the film was supposed to look like? I suspect that this is where many opinions diverge. Many of us who had not seen AI in the theaters probably didn't expect a futuristic Sci-Fi film to be shot with such a grainy look to it. Those of you who saw it in the theaters already know that it is inherent in the film. Not having seen the movie, and not having seen an artistic reason for the presence of the grain on the DVD transfer, I (and probably many others who have a perfectly working appreciation of artistic cinematography) thought that the flaw lay with the transfer itself.

 

[DarrenA]

Aliens on DVD has a lot of film grain that was intentional based on the film stock used, and yet I never hear many complaints about the picture quality of that DVD.

I found the image on the A.I. DVD to look very film-like and a wonderfully accurate video representation from the film I saw in the theater.

 

[Michael Lee]

Aliens on DVD has a lot of film grain that was intentional based on the film stock used, and yet I never hear many complaints about the picture quality of that DVD.

I thought there was hardly any grain on this DVD when compared to the previous versions on LD.

 

[Kajs]

Grain sucks.

Yeah, I said it.

Grain on DVD for me equals pixelation. The first scene of the waves looks nothing like it did in the theater. It looked digital, not filmlike.

 

[RobR]

I saw A.I. in the theater and there were grains present. They're normal. I wonder how many people here are going to complain about Harry Potter (also very grainy) when it comes out on DVD?

A more important issue should be the quality of the film itself, not the transfer. I, for one, dislike both A.I and Harry Potter.

 

[Max Leung]

Those of you who think the grain is "way too much", try reducing the contrast and/or the brightness of your television sets. If your television isn't properly calibrated, any grain found in the transfer will stick outlike a sore thumb if the brightness and contrast are too high.

I suggest using AVIA or Video Essentials to correct this problem. It is also very possible that your DVD player's gamma control is set too high...this washes out the image and will also cause grain to come out too much.

I found the A.I. transfer nearly perfect...it matched exactly what I saw in two different theaters in two different cities. I am very impressed. Also, consider that Kaminski loves to use smoke and fog, and it is used very heavily in this film. This will exacerbate perceived graininess on an improperly calibrated TV.

For the record, I have an Panasonic RP91 DVD player, with the vertical edge and horizontal edge enhancement settings set to -1 each. I used the AVIA sharpness test screen and determined that the RP91 was introducing too much noise in those areas (shimmering in the horizontal and vertical stripes). This will soften the image somewhat, but I think this works well for film material.

 

[Mitchel Kagawa]

Not having sceen this movie in the theaters I was not expecting the movie to have so much "grain" as you guys put it. Infact it was so noticable that I though something was wrong with my gear... I stopped the movie 1 minute into the first scene to check that everything was in working order (which it was). I even went as far as popping the dvd into my computer to check the video bitrate which comes in at > 5mbits/sec (higher than most dvd's). So I figured out 20 minutes after I originally started watching it that that's how it is meant to be.
I'm not saying that the "grain" was a bad thing (barely noticable after I stopped caring) BUT it was a distraction at first when I wasn't expecting it. It left such a bitter taste in my mouth (probably because my popcorn was cold by the time I made it through the first scene) that I ended up disliking the whole movie. Maybe if they rolled the credits after the underwater Blue Ferry scene I would have enjoyed it more

But hey.... that's just my opinion

 

[GerardC]

I concur with Max Leung: having your TV properly calibrated does wonders for the grain control with dvd images. And on my setup I think A.I. is a stellar transfer of a very original looking movie.
Grain is often supposed to be there (I like 70's movies so there you go) but like many in this thread I have experienced it as intrusive on some dvd's (for example Badlands, one of my fave films).
Not so any more: even with just a 28" widescreen Sony Wega I went for an ISF calibration and besides many other things it has improved it has totally solved the 'too much grain' problem: I would almost call the A.I. image smooth were it not for the bold use of contrasts.
I don't think the bigger your screen the more these grain 'problems' stand out: I think the bigger your screen the more you're in need of a proper calibration

 

[Michael Lee]

There is grain evident when viewing with my ISF-calibrated Sharp 9000 projector on a 9' screen. I never saw AI theatrically, so I do not know what was the director's intent.

 

[Aurel Savin]

I agree that the film was grainy ...

Having seen it for the first time last night .. I noticed the grain right away ... but then the story sucked me into the movie so much that I was not paying attention.

I think the grainy, "movie-like" look worked better than let's say an edgy polished TPM style transfer would have.

As far as I am concerned though, the movie was too great and the transfer works well.

 

[Jack Briggs]

I think Michael is closest to the truth here: We're dealing with the psychology of screening and watching a film. We're more critical of what we see in the home-theater environment.

 

[Josh Dial]

Without getting into a deep discussion of the movie here in the wrong section of the forum, I hold that the grain was very intentional, in a metaphrical sense.

If you agree with the position that the movie was told in a "story book" fashion, as if a future "super-mecha" was telling David's story to someone else (offspring?), then the grain makes sense.

If you notice, scenes which involve David directly are very clear and crisp, whereas scenes in which he is off camera, or even out of the scene entirely (with the exception of scenes such as the first one, where the events would have been documented some where), are grainy.

I believe this is to show how the super mechas have essentially downloaded David's experiences to make the fairytale, and spots where David had no memory, the guesses, extrapolated, et cetera; thus, those scenes are "fuzzy" so-to-speak.

Lastly, if you look at the last scene, where David gets his "wish", the scene begins grainy, but becomes more and more clear, as if the super mechas are "fine-tuning" the scene (since they are creating it real-time).

just my thoughts

cheers!

Josh

 

[Luc]

Boy you guys lost me: you're saying that sometimes grain is good in our movies as long as it was intended to have grains in the original? I like my movies crisp and clean and yes even those from the early days.

I can understand arguing against someone saying that they prefer "Blair Witch Project" camera not to shake so much. I can't sit through that movie because of the camera movement but if that's the way it was meant to be, so be it. I'll skip it but I understand. I also understand aspect ratio, coloring like the Matrix, ect., but the grain I don't understand so someone please explain. If some of us don't understand, why would a Joe-6-Pack perfer a graining picture at home or at the theater?