DVD Review HTF DVD Review: Blade Runner: Five-Disc Ultimate Collector's Edition (1 Viewer)

[Ken_McAlinden]

Yes, but none of those millions of films are this film. When most of the interesting ideas are on the periphery, it practically begs for sideways glances.

We can move the discussion of why Bryant never defecates to the films forum if you want to go into detail. I have not heard that theory before. Perhaps someone will discover an unused ending revealing that he has a prostate ailment giving him, ironically, only four years to live.

Regards,

 

[Lee-c]

What I don't understand is why the overall image quality is excellent on the original U.S. theatrical version, the international version and the director's cut, but not quite as good as this final cut. Why is there any image quality difference between these versions? When the restoration was taking place, why wouldn't all the various cuts of the film be taken from the same fully restored master film prints and then get new optimum DVD transfers for each cut which all look equally good?

I can understand if there are slight differences with any newly filmed scenes used for the final cut, but shouldn't the other 99% of Blade Runner look just as good in all the versions of the movie on DVD?

 

[mike kaminski]

Final Cut is taken from the original negatives, and the original FX elements. The other versions are not; I imagine they come from an IP or whatever reference prints the studio had.

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

The Final Cut was scanned to 4k and digitally regraded to Scott's circa 2007 specifications. It looks cleaner and more detailed than the other versions of the film, but the color timing is noticeably different. I though there were a few scenes where the contrast manipulation pushed things a tiny bit too far, but otherwise it looked as good or better than the other versions in almost every technical respect. One's aesthetic response to the tweaked color and contrast scheme is a different matter, of course.

In any case, my understanding was that the intent for the three archival versions was to present them free of any significant revisionism, which I believe they did in high quality presentations.

Regards,

 

[Lee-c]

Thanks for the interesting info. I'm certainly very much in favor of the idea of presenting the 3 earlier cuts of Blade Runner (the original U.S. theatrical version, the international version and the director's cut) without any revisionism in terms of their color timing and so on. It's just that I think many were expecting the general clarity, detail, etc. to be equal among all cuts. With any differences in the final cut being due solely to recent creative decisions on the part Ridley Scott as to the color timing and other things that might affect the picture.

Since this is supposed to the *ultimate* Blade Runner collector's set, I'm surprised that new meticulous transfers from the recent 4k scans from the master film prints weren't done for each cut of the film, so they all look equally great in terms of general image quality. And *then* any revisionist type changes that Scott wanted to make to the transfer for the final cut version could then be applied to the transfer of the final cut only.

Doing it this way would provide the best possible picture quality for each cut of the film, without altering the color or anything else in the 3 earlier cuts of the movie. I'm just wondering why it wasn't done this way. Any guesses?

 

[mike kaminski]

Its practically impossible to present the previous three version of BR in the same quality as the Final Cut. You can't use the original negatives for the theatrical, international and directors cut, because the negatives don't exist--theres only one original negative, and it was cannibalised for the Final Cut, so anything would be a generation removed. The only way is if you actually scanned the negatives and then re-edited it to match the previous cuts, but this is an enormous amount of work, and technically you'd be recreating the previous cuts not actually archiving them (besides which its not even known if theres a proper edgecode edit list to accomplish this). What is on the DVD is the highest quality that the previous versions will ever be because you can't simply go back and use the o-neg, its always going to be at least a generation degraded which is why the Final Cut looks so much cleaner and more detailed.