'Spose we'll see any of the Disney Treasures material on Blu-ray? (1 Viewer)

[Dick]

Blu-ray was MADE for this sort of thing. Disney could easily put all of its Silly Symphonies, individual character series, etc. on one disc (or at most, two).
I'd love to have complete collections of these on single sets, looking glorious as only Blu-ray can make them. Wonder if Leonard Maltin is pushing for these...

 

[Ed St. Clair]

Sure.
(I'm thinking w/o tins tho)

 

[Kris Z.]

I would love this, if only for the fact that they'd have to go back and properly re-transfer all the shorts, unlike with the DVDs, where they just stopped bothering after a couple of waves (which not-so-incidentally was also the point where I stopped buying them.)

I don't see it happening for a very long time though, they had enough trouble with the Treasures line already on DVD.

 

[MatthewA]

They would have no excuse to use old transfers, so it'll be awhile.

 

[Reagan]

One encouraging sign is that Disney took the trouble to do high def transfers of the relevant Disneyland TV show episodes for the Sleeping Beauty BD. They could have cheaped out and just done the bonus features in SD, but they went all of the way. I was impressed.

For the record, the only animated Treasures for which they used 1980s era laserdisc masters were Donald volumes 2 and 4 and Rarities. It's not as if they gave up at a certain point. It was hit or miss.

-R

 

[Brian Kidd]

Yeah, most of the Treasures transfers were quite good. There were a few hiccups here and there, but with that many releases over that many years, it was bound to happen. I suspect we may eventually see some of the animated shorts on BD, but I wouldn't count on full Treasures being released any time soon. They've been limping along for several years now and Disney is really trying to pull in Joe Schmoe by only releasing popular mainstream films on BD so far. I do have to say that the few Disney BD's I've seen so far have been wonderful releases, esp. the SLEEPING BEAUTY one. The "Visual Commentary" is wonderful, as is the Castle Walkthrough section. This release of the film, in general, was much lighter on the fluff factor than almost all of the previous Platinum releases except for SNOW WHITE and FANTASIA (which was essentially a Platinum release before they called them that.)

A nerd can dream, though, can't he? Sweeeet sweeeet HD Treasures.....

 

[Ethan Riley]

What gets me is that Disney isn't releasing BD on the same day as SDs. Where is the sense in that? They already ballyhooed Peter Pan on SD a couple months ago--no BD. Mary Poppins is coming out AGAIN pretty soon--no BD. What da hell's wrong witchoo, Diz?

 

[Brian Borst]

Disney wants to release the classic films properly on Blu-Ray. Peter Pan was a half-assed PE to begin with (not good for the BD format), and Mary Poppins still looks awful too. They would need to completely re-do Mary Poppins, if it's to be released on Blu-Ray. Then it would look amazing.

 

[Ethan Riley]

Well they should be doing that now instead of wasting everyone's time with yet another mediocre SD release of Poppins. Now as I see it, Mary Poppins is probably their most famous live-action feature of all time. You'd think they'd get off the dime and do it right. The most recent Special Edition (2004?) was rubbish--it looked no better than the previous release, and they "enhanced" the sound effects.

So we get another standard release. But there's no upgrade? Do they mean to tell me that they don't have the original elements of MP to work with anymore? I don't believe it--Disney is famous for saving everything. Maybe they need to sit down and do a frame-by-frame HI-DEF restoration...and maybe they need to make those rabbits running around Dick Van Dyke's feet non-transparent this time.

And I'll tell you something else, Disney was one of the big studios that was so gung-ho to back BluRay in the first place. So why are they so stingy in their BD releases?? I thought they were trying to make BD work.

 

[Mark-P]

If they didn't fit on one disc on DVD, they won't fit on one disc of BD (in high-definition.) While it's possible to compress the hell out of anything to get longer running times, I think 4 hours is about the maximum for BD in high-definition. Anything longer begins to suffer in picture quality. Unless you meant for them to be released in SD on BD in which case a BD could easily accommodate 20 hours.

 

[MatthewA]

I will wait for this material to be treated right in BD. Quality over quantity.

Keep in mind they are still working on 100GB BDs and greater.

 

[Brian Borst]

Like MatthewA said: "Quality over Quantity". Of course Disney could release all the Classics they have (an HD master was probably already made for them anyway) and just add some bonus features, but Disney wants their Classic films to be something special. They started out the same way with SD and look at the recent Platinum Editions (not counting Sleeping Beauty) they were mediocre at best. So enjoy it while Disney's effort lasts.

 

[MatthewA]

Disney didn't exactly get in to DVD firing on all cylinders. It took them four years to even do anamorphic regularly on widescreen titles of the so-called "Gold Collection". But even after that they were maddeningly inconsistent. Even with the Treasures sets.

 

[Kris Z.]

I think Blu-ray is slightly more efficient when it comes to running times though, even in reasonably high quality. 3½ hours on one DVD is not a great idea, but on BD it's doable.

For example they should easily be able to fit all of the Mickey Mouse colour cartoons on two discs instead of four, especially since they don't have to deal with multiple high-resolution, high-bitrate 5.1 tracks.

 

[MatthewA]

Even if mono tracks for 7 minute cartoons were presented in lossless, how much space would they take?

Furthermore, most of this material is Academy Ratio and therefore would take up less space (hopefully they won't dare do MAR versions of this material).