Punch Drunk Love + Bonus Features = 7.8Gb - Why 2 discs, Columbia!? (1 Viewer)

[Yumbo]

hard 8 it is on price drop.

my gripe is that the SuperBit packaging is always changing!
consumers will not care about branding if it is inconsistent.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I picked up a copy of PDL today at BestBuy for $17.99, so as far as price goes, no complaints. Wish it had a commentary, though.

 

[Jeff D Han]

I just ordered this without seeing it. This is
something I don't usually do, but I like the other
three P.T. Anderson films, so I guess I won't be
disappointed. It will be a change to see Sandler
in an intelligent movie with an intelligent script.

 

[DeeF]

How far could you go with bit-rate before there were diminishing returns?

For instance, if you used a super-high density disk, like Blue-Ray, but you transferred using regular old 480p, but the bit rate was, I don't know, 20Mb/s. Would the movie look that much better than if the rate were 7.58Mb/s?

I do think Superbit is a bit overrated.

Still, the Punch-Drunk Love DVD can hardly be criticized. It isn't overpriced, it looks great, it's a great movie.

 

[Gordon McMurphy]

Good point about the bitrates there, DeeF.

I wonder how compression will indeed be handled with HD-DVD? And will Columbia/Sony go through a similar Superbit-type period of marketing?

Anyway, is Punch-Drunk Love a good blind-buy? The reviews I have read paint the film as a fluff piece - is it? I like Boogie Nights, but I find Magnolia pretentious, annoying and even quite exilirating in places.

Cheers.


Gordy

 

[Damin J Toell]

Anyway, is Punch-Drunk Love a good blind-buy? The reviews I have read paint the film as a fluff piece - is it? I like Boogie Nights, but I find Magnolia pretentious, annoying and even quite exilirating in places.

PDL definitely isn't a fluff-piece. I seem to basically share your opinions of PTA's films (dug Hard Eight, loved Boogie Nights, found Magnolia to be a pretenious re-tread of Short Cuts), and I loved PDL. I'd give it a shot.

DJ

 

[Aaron Cohen]

This movie is wonderful/charming. I definitely suggest it. The thing with the pudding is based on a real story if you did not know that. A guy on my father's frequent flyer message board was posting about it all during production. He had been paid to come on set and give Sandler tips. Everything having to do with the pudding was lifted straight from him. Pretty interesting. He apparently invested a LOT of time getting all the pudding.

 

[TonyD]

has anyone noticed the picture on the inside flipcase?

it has a screenshot of sandler looking at emily watson.
you can see how bad the edge enhancement is from that screen shot.

 

[Jeff Kleist]

double

 

[Jeff Kleist]

DVD is limited to a 10mb/sec (1.2MB/sec) bandwidth with a realistically sustainable bitrate of around 9.2.

At max bitrate, you can fit 113min film on a DVD-9

Considering that PDL is 95min, you still have a ton of space left over even if you totally maxed the bitrate out. I swear, the next medium is going to have dummy files like Dreamcast discs did to make the disc image reach the full disc capacity just to stop such complaining

 

[Aaron Cohen]

I agree Tony. Many have praised this disc's picture but I found the EE in several scenes to be horrible.

 

[JulianK]

Considering that PDL is 95min, you still have a ton of space left over even if you totally maxed the bitrate out.

Even if the bitrate had been maxed out - which it isn't - the point is it's still unnecessary to have the extras on a second disc, when they could have fitted on the first.

 

[Marc Colella]

I don't really understand the big deal with the fact that the extras could've been added on the first disc.

The amount I paid (and I'm sure others have also) for PDL is the same I would pay for other single disc DVDs. The fact that it's on a second disc (as unwarranted as it is) makes no difference to me.

The problem I have is with the first disc being underutilized with 3GBs of unused space. This defeats the purpose of it being a SuperBit - and realistically, it's false advertising.

They may seem like the same complaint, but (for me) if the disc wasn't labelled a SuperBit edition - then I wouldn't think anything of it. Because it is, I feel like I've been duped (even though I knew SuperBit is nothing more than a marketing ploy that brings in ALOT of suckers).

 

[Robert_eb]

Does the production costs rise when encoding a disc to it's maximum potential? That's the only reason I can think of for not utilizing the full potential of the bit rate.

 

[Billy Fogerty]

I would put Once Upon A Time In America in this category. It could have been dvd 18, at least for the movie.

 

[MarkHastings]

Maybe the disc with just the movie was produced first, then they decided to do "Extras"? So instead of rerunning the discs they already made (and adding the additional info), they decided on 2 discs.

I know I may be reaching for straws here, but it's been known to happen.

 

[Jeff Kleist]

Robert, it's not how many bits you use, it's what you do with them. Some of the most hailed reference transfers out there come in well under 6Mbps

The point of Superbit is having enough space on the disc to achieve the best possible picture quality. Whether or not you agree with the filtering used, more bits would likely not change the PQ

 

[Jon Martin]

The only problem I have with the PDL disc is the thought after looking at the extras, "That's it?"

There was a big deal made when the disc was first announced that it would be the film only because PTA was too busy doing European press to work on it. They were going to release a special edition later.

Then, they decided to delay the disc so he could do it right the first time and not release two versions.

So, all that wait for less than 30 minutes of extras? The MAGNOLIA documentary is still one of the best DVD extras, but there is nothing on this disc close to that. Frankly, it could have been a film only DVD and we wouldn't have missed much.

I don't mean to sound like I'm complaining as most extras are things you'd watch just once and forget about. But in this case, when they delayed the disc for the extras, and put them on a disc of its own, it wasn't worth it, I don't think.

 

[Yumbo]

perhaps they couldn't decide on packaging.

 

[Billy Fogerty]

Well,here we go with another piece of crap from Sandler. This was an awful movie. Has this guy ever made a good film? Happy gilmore was about his closest, and that wasn't to good.