*** Official Warner Archive DVD Review Thread (1 Viewer)

[BillyFeldman]

Are you basing this on the screencaps? Don't. Three Sailors And A Girl, while having decent color, does not look like those screencaps when viewed on an actual TV.

 

[soop.spoon]

Just received:
- Captain Nemo & The Underwater City
- Doc Savage
- Sindbad The Sailor

All are anamorphic. Nemo looks good... better than I expected. Haven't had a chance to watch the others yet.

Some other things I noticed:
- The disc labels are very well done.
- The cover art is serviceable, but not as good as a store-bought DVD. The "cutting" isn't precise and looks a little sloppy.
- Original poster art isn't being used very often for the covers
- Menus are extremely budget affairs
- Shipping envelope was adequate, but not great. Because these aren't shrink-wrapped, the cases get that familiar "shelf ware" scuffing in transit.

In conclusion:
I'm delighted to be able to own these, but the price is just TOO HIGH for the quality we're receiving. There are a great number of titles I'd be interested in seeing, but I'm not going to drop $20+ very often on a title I'm not familiar with.
I was looking on my shelf at last year's WB scifi and horror double features... two films on a professional DVD for about $10. It really saddens me that those days are over.

 

[David_B_K]

Posted by Billy Feldman:
Yes, I was responding to the screen caps posted for 3 Sailors and The Mating Game. That's sad if it is only TCM material. I was also hoping for an eventual Archive release of Small Town Girl to replace the TCM version I recorded, but now, maybe not so much.

 

[Art_AD]

Has anyone purchased "Idiot's Delight" or "Love" do they include the alternate endings?

 

[Timothy E]

Kudos to Pete York for posting a summary of reviews in post #72.

If HTF gives out awards for outstanding service by members, I nominate Pete.

 

[Jay E]

dvddrive-in has a review up of Captain Sinbad

Captain Sindbad

 

[Bob Furmanek]

THREE SAILORS began production on January 30, 1953 and was composed for 1:37 presentation. Warner Bros. did not switch to widescreen cinematography until May/June of 1953.

 

[ahollis]

The Three Sailors and A Girl filmed aspect ratio is 1:37:1, so it is presented in It's proper aspect ratio on DVD. The film was released in November of 1953, but filmed before the change in aspect ratio. It may have been shown in the 1.66:1 ratio at the time of it's release.

 

[Robert Crawford]

I finally got done with "Purple Hearts". I had no problems playing the DVD and thought the video presentation looked good considering this movie was low budget and filmed in 83/84 timeframe with that ugly film stock they used back in those days. The color is not vibrant at all and it's a little murky especially the night scenes, but at least, it's anamorphic widescreen and looks relatively clean. It's the best we're going to get for this little title and I'm happy to finally have it in my collection in its OAR.





Crawdaddy

 

[David_B_K]

I received Bhowani Junction and Quentin Durward today. I glanced at both, but watched Quentin Durward in its entirety. It is fairly low bitrate, and suffers from egregious edge enhancement. The day for night scenes are very dark (at least on my set). The soundtrack was 2.0 surround.













The picture was not particularly sharp, but I do not think it was "fake anamorphic". The edge enhancement caused halos and sometimes strobing. The studs on the French armor would strobe if the character was in medium to long shot. There were some speckles, but it was not an especially scratchy print, though no cleanup was done. Before I buy anymore, I am going to wait to hear about some improvements in the encoding process, or else a price reduction. I will post some Bhowani Junction still after I have had time to look at it at take the captures.

 

[David_B_K]

I will not have time to watch Bhowani Junction until this weekend, but here are a few grabs:

















From just glancing at the film, it looks pretty good; a little more stable than Quentin Durward. Incidentally, Bhowani Junction includes a fullscreen trailer, and Quentin Durward included a non-anamorphic widescreen trailer.

Quentin Durward was presented at a ratio of 2.55:1 and Bhowani Junction at 2.40:1.

 

[Pete York]

Thanks Mike and Timothy. As I said, I'm keeping track regardless, so in case anyone wants to see it again, just give a shout.

 

[Simon Howson]

Thank you very much for the captures, I'll definitely get this when international orders are allowed.

 

[Randy Korstick]

Finally received my titles.
1.) Captain Nemo
2.) Captain Sinbad
3.) Crescendo
4.) A Distant Trumpet
5.) Darby's Rangers
6.) El Condor

I scanned through all 6 titles and they all play fine. I'm happy with the picture quality on all and all look as good as normal pressed DVD's. Distant Trumpet did have soft colors though. Definately not something I could have recorded off TCM myself. It appears as though the widescreen transfers are new masters while many of the full screen films are older masters. Happy with my purchase but I will not buy that many in the future for more than $14.95.

 

[Simon Howson]

I just measured the capture for B.J., and the ratio is 2.5:1. So I think this was transferred from the full CinemaScope aperture, not an optical soundtrack (2.35:1) element.

 

[Joseph Bolus]

I just received my "Sweet November" (1968) MOD DVD in. I'm going to be viewing the entire movie over the weekend with my wife, but in the meantime I decided to "try it out" on a variety of different setups I have around the house. The provided transfer was 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen. (I know this because when played on my projector with zero overscan there were no black bars whatsoever. With a 1.85:1 transfer, I usually see very small black bars.)

First the really bad news: The disc absolutely refused to play on my Vista SP1-based HP Pavilion Laptop. The disclaimer on the package states that "This disc is expected to play back in DVD video 'play only' devices and may not play back in other DVD devices including recorders and PC drives." This was rather disappointing as I use my laptop as a portable DVD player on occasion. Just for the heck of it, I booted into Ubuntu on the same laptop (it's set up in a "dual-boot" configuration) and tried playing the disc with the Linux version of the VLC media player (which normally plays just about anything). It still wouldn't play.

Next I tried the disc on my den system. This consists of a 2008 Philips HDMI 1080i upconverting player mated to a 32" LCD 16:9 Vizio HDTV with a native resolution of 720p. With this configuration the movie looked ... pretty good! In fact, for the most part, it had a nice "film like" quality to it -- which is really all I ask of a transfer. Yes, there was some grain and occasional "speckles" due to print damage but the color was good and even vibrant in places. MPEG-2 compression artifacts seemed minimal. The Wide shots were a little soft (typical of DVD), but closeups looked good and sharp. (Keep in mind that I was viewing this about 8 feet away from a 32" screen.) I would say the resulting picture was about on average with the way good quality commercial DVDs from this era looked on this setup.

Next up was my bedroom system. This very modest setup consists of a vintage 2004 Panasonic DVD player/recorder connected to a 22" 4:3 LCD EDTV (native resolution 480p). I was relieved to find that the MOD DVD played just fine on the venerable Panny recorder. However, the provided 480p component-fed picture appeared pretty bland on the 4:3 LCD set. Since the resulting picture was also dependant on the DVD player's anamorphic downconversion circuitry it was difficult to be too judgemental regarding the transfer; I can say, however, that the picture looked only "fair" compared to good quality commercial DVDs that I have played on this equipment. (Occasional moire' artifacts on close-ups and very slight edge enhancement visible on wide shots.)

I then took the DVD downstairs to my main viewing room. The equipment in this room consists of an Optoma HD-65 DLP front projector which is set up to provide a 96" 16:9 image; and a Toshiba HDMI XDE-500 upconverting and enhancing DVD player. I normally keep the Tosh in "sharp+color"1080p/24 mode (for DVDs properly flagged as film) since I've calibrated a user pref setting on the Optoma around that mode. Well ... The movie immediately started out looking more like "video" than "film" when viewed with this setting. EE was visible (although not too obtrusive) on all wide shots; and most closeups had moire' artifacts around anything with a cross-hatch pattern (like Newleys' collar in a phone booth in an early scene). Turning off all XDE modes and dropping the upscaling back to 1080p/60 helped a lot -- but the transfer still never approached looking like film. The grain and print defects also looked a little worse on the projector, but I expected that that would be the case. Grain and print defects don't really bother me unless they become too intrusive. On the plus side colors looked stable (even the reds) and the resulting picture was definitely viewable. If I was assigning a grade based on comparable commercial DVDs, I would give it a C+. Keep in mind that I'm use to good quality DVDs looking close to 1080i HD cable quality with this setup.

The bottom line is that I'm happy to have this film in my collection. It's still the best that I've ever seen this movie look. I'm disappointed that it won't play on my laptop, and I wish it looked better on my front projector. (I'm pretty sure now that what member Chuck Pennington posted earlier in this thread regarding the supposition that these transfers are "interlaced-based" is true. As he indicated, the people handling the encodes are probably responsible for this.) While I certainly hope that Warners improves the transfer quality a bit on future films added to the Archive Collection, I still intend to continue to purchase favorite films on MOD DVD for the foreseeable future.

 

[KELLYBOY]

I also purchase 5 discs from WB but have only watched one: SO THIS IS LOVE (The Grace Moore Story). The last time I saw this film was in B&W on a small TV set. I don't think TCM has run this one before. I was very impressed by the color print and sound. Colors in the film seem quite vivid and even more so towards the latter part of the movie in the musical numbers. The sound seemed almost stereo-like for the musical sequences especially in the opera finale. There are a few flaws in the print, minor scratches but nothing to get upset about. There was no trailer included on the disc. I am very happy to finally have this film on DVD. The four others I have purchased are:

ON BORROWED TIME
BHOWANI JUNCTION
INTERRUPTED MELODY
THREE SAILORS AND A GIRL

I too would like to continue to purchase titles and hopefully the archive will have more specials @ $14.99.

 

[Mark B]

Oops. My bad. I didn't realize such there was such a lapse between filming and release. I allowed the "new" WB logo and the positioning of the credits to fool me.

 

[Daniel BARBIEUX]

Would you please let us know if the subtitles in English are also included, thank you.

 

[Jobla]

I haven't seen any subtitles on the five titles that I have purchased.