Why I will NOT be going to blue ray (1 Viewer)

[David Deeb]

disregard / duplicate

 

[rich_d]

You have a strange way of defining a 'win-win.'

A 'win-win' to me is a technical upgrade that plays fine in your current player.

Not to spend hundreds of dollars more in the belief that movies may materialize on the format and the hope that the format will be around in five years.

 

[PaulDA]

I love films from every era. I like sci-fi f/x extravaganzas AND silent classics and just about everything in between (in terms of eras, not necessarily all genres of film). I have an HD PJ, an HD DVD player, an audio system that I consider far above the average system owned by most people (though in the sub set of audio fanatics, it is probably somewhere between upper entry level to middling--but I digress) and I have calibrated the display and, especially, the audio over many, many hours (far more on the audio side, admittedly--the video calibration has relied on DVE, not an ISF pro calibration). I collect hi-res audio and DVDs (now HD DVDs and soon Blu-ray) by the hundreds--as much as I can afford without being financially irresponsible. I enjoy my HT very much and will, barring any financial disaster, always have one.

Having stated all that, I can empathize with those who are deeply into the 30s-50s era of films and do not have much interest outside of that and their defence of SD setups. Last night I had to be readily available to nursemaid the kids and their mother so I could not retreat to the basement HT. I pulled a classic Hitchcock from my shelf--Suspicion--and plopped it into my SD DVD/VHS combo player connected to my 27 inch CRT SDTV in the living room (both from Sony, in case anyone cares) and kicked back and watched. It reminded me of "late night movie night" on cold Saturday nights many years ago (except the PQ was much better--the disc has an unrestored trailer in case anyone wants to know what late night movies USED to look like). The movie is mono, it's 4:3 and my TV, when I bought it and its 32 inch brother, ranked among the better CRTs of the time (actually not that long ago--2002). If 80% or more of my collection consisted of the same type of movie that I watched last night (Academy ratio, mono sound, significantly large number of B&W films), I might have a very different set up and attitude. I love the "big screen", but I may have opted for a 4:3 projector/screen rather than the current 16:9 setup I have in the HT (assuming I could find one that was sufficiently good with B&W images). Moreover, I may well have stayed with the SDTVs I have w/o adding a projector at all (the PQ really was quite good last night).

I realize that Casablanca (which I currently have in SD DVD and it gets ample viewings) probably looks spectacular in HD (haven't picked it up yet) but if I had so few films of that era to choose from available in HDM AND was not a fan of later widescreen films (I'm a fervert OAR advocate), I may not have bothered to upgrade (Casablanca in SD looks great on my SDTVs--I've watched it many times on them).

Essentially, while I have no regrets about adopting HDM and going HD in my setup (hockey in HD makes my setup worth it even if HDM did not yet exist), I can see that for a specific group of people, SD (both TVs and DVDs) have much to offer in terms of quality AND in terms of price. So while there are many arguments to be made in favour of upgrading, we should not be so cavalier in dismissing those who choose to wait.

I will say, though, for having seen what HDM CAN be in terms of quality, the argument that there is no reason to upgrade because of quality (on choice, it is another matter) is not tenable. The jump in quality may not represent a sufficiently large one to make it individually worth the effort, but the jump is there nonetheless.

 

[David_B_K]

Joe, because you are into classics, IMO, you should wait a while before jumping into Blu-ray. One reason I got into HD DVD was the classic movie selection, mainly from WB. The price of the HD player was almost justified IMO for Robin Hood alone (my favorite movie). I also picked up the others mentioned: Rio Bravo, the Searchers, Casablanca, Grand Prix, Mutiny on the Bounty, Bullitt and a few more. Mutiny on the Bounty has really grown in my estimation because the the visuals are so breathtaking, I feel like I get to go on an 18th century sea voyage to Tahiti every time I watch it.

However, I always heard that the classic films did not sell all that well on HD DVD in comparison with newer stuff. Those titles that WB had already made for HD DVD will like be made into Blu-ray equivalents (some already have been). But I do not expect to see any great number of classics roll out for some time. As the Blu-ray play of choice appears to be a PS3, I do not think movies made before 1970 are going to be in great demand for many PS3 owners.

I will wait before jumping into Blu until I see a fully up-to-date (and updateable) stand alone player that is not a gaming console, and when more titles that appeal to me are released. I have around 25 HD DVDs and there are not that many more of available HD DVD discs that I even want. I do not feel compelled to help get HDM established until I see more catalog titles released. Most new movie releases do not appeal to me, although they may appeal to the masses. I am 51 now, and have been a movie fan since I was a kid. Most of my DVD collection is of movies made before 1970. I realize I do not fit the mold of the average moviegoer or movie buyer, but I can only be expected to buy what pleases me (and my wife).

Oh, I do think some classic releases would not benefit from a release to HDM. I recently bought the SD DVD of The Flame and the Arrow, and it apparently did not undergo a huge amount of restoration, and only looked OK (but still better than nothing). Likewise, those color Tyrone Power films released last year will likely look no better on HD than they did on SD. The WB titles that got the ultra-resolution treatment will look splendid on HDM

 

[Michael Elliott]

I'm glad the war seems to be over but this seems like a needless debate. It's a no brainer that stuff like GONE WITH THE WIND, THE SOUND OF MUSIC, THE WIZARD OF OZ and so on will be coming out on HD very soon. I'm more curious as to when something like BORN TO BE BAD or smaller Gable titles will be available. We've got a lot of classic titles coming in the next few months but it took over ten years for them to get here. If it took them that long on a bigger format then it seems like it might take even longer for them on HD.

Didn't some "classic" titles on HD only sell a couple thousand copies?

 

[MarcoBiscotti]

I'd reckon ALL of those films will be among the first we'll see of "classic movies" on High Definition disc... it's the b-noirs, thrillers, matinee westerns and obscure foreign and arthouse, exploitation titles that I'm concerned with. We've only seen many released in the past couple of years on ANY format and I don't expect the rush to BluRay to be soon if at all. That's why when I eventually do make the upgrade, it will not serve as a replacement or blanket medium for all home video purchases. But rather to serve a specific need. I think I'll wait to see how the classic Disney features are dealt with in high-definition and will likely upgrade with the intent to purchase newer releases, contemporary indie films and the Pixar/Disney stuff. I have no intention of replacing all of my DVDs and don't think I'll realistically ever be afforded the oppurtunity by the studios, so...

 

[Joe Caps]

I have some odd things that would make me get a new monitor and blue ray player immediately. Thinsg that I feel are sTILL not right on SD.

my Fair lady using a good sound source with outh the damn laser and dvd reverb added on every song.

The First two Harry Potter films retransfered without looking all orange as they do on sd (have barely seen any reviews of the new blue ray discs and the few reviews don't really tell me what they look like - just that they are sharper!!)

Camelot - with the original correct four channel sound track ( the current dvd uses an incorrect earlier mix)

Love is a many splendored things using an original 1955 mag instead of the current dupe mag that cuts off the high end.

Same thing for Affair to remember which is now in its THIRD dvd release with only a 2.0 mixdown and not the original 4.0 sound.

A good transfer of disneys Pinocchio with good picture and sound.

Also - If Fox released three of my favprite scope stereo films - The egyptian,
Garden of evil, and Untamed.


Also if Fox went back and got sound from original nitrate prints fro Captain from Castille and Prince of foxes. The current sound on the dvds is AWFUL. They should be ashamed.

 

[DanMel]

Sorry to not agree with you but the majority of classic titles being released over the last couple of years for the first time are not b-noirs, thrillers, matinee westerns and obsure foreign and arthouse exploitation titles although many of those type of movies have been released. Any movie that Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Better Davis (well maybe not the one's later in her career) and many others were not of the B type movie status. Those actors did not do b movies. Many award winning classic movies were only now recently released on dvd in the last year or so like Sergeant York and films like The Africian Queen have still not been released.

My view is that 70's to present movies will be released on Blue Ray for the first 5 years except movies like Gone with the Wind, Wizard of Oz, It's a Wonderful life and and some other super big movies from back then. However, the majority of the A picture list will not be released in High Definition until the 5-10 year mark. Movies like the one's that are currently being released in Vol 3 for Bette Davis will probably not see the light of day till after the 10 year mark and I certainly am not going to wait and already have that dvd set on my pre-order list along with several others like the Forbidden Hollywood Vol 2 collection. I persoanlly do not feel comfortable investing in all the expensive equipment so I can watch 20 or so movies over the next five years. I'll wait for five years when I can get a High Def TV cheap and a High Def player for 50-100 dollars.

It took 10 years to get a bunch of the classic movies released on dvd but the problem is even bigger with the new format. First a clear winner has not claimed total victory yet and that may take a year or more. Also, there are 10 years of newer movies out now to add to the release calander for high def that were not out when regular dvd came out. So you have nearly four decades of movies from the 70's to present that will probably take priority. I have been around and following the dvd releases ever since they were developed and remember very clearly that Gary Cooper only had about three or four titles out on dvd for a very long time and only very recently in the last three or four years have over 40 titles been released of movies he was in. The same is the case for Bette Davis and many others. If anyone thinks the case will be different this time around, I guess time will tell, but I won't be holding my breath on it. Standard dvd's will be with me for a very long time to come.

 

[DanMel]

So I guess I think what I will do is wait until 10 movies are released by each of the below actors and actresses before I upgrade:

Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Jimmy Stewart, Alfred Hitchcock, Humphrey Bogart

That's only a hundred movies. I wonder how long it will take? Actually I should have put Jean Harlow on the list as well but I don't think there are even 10 of her movies out on dvd at this point.

 

[MarcoBiscotti]

Dan, I'm not quite sure what you mean by when DVD came out there was not 10 years worth of new releases behind the format but there is with HD...??

Unless motion pictures were invented in the late 1980's than that is obviously not true. Of course there were hundreds of than unreleased contemporary films; there's no difference between the formats in that regard.

And there are indeed MANY b-movies, noirs, westerns, horror films, new wave, etc. that have made their debut on this format. There are also dozens upon dozens that have yet to be released, yet were available for many years on VHS. There are hundreds of more titles available on DVD than there ever was laserdisc. The selection today is far greater. And in the medium of animation alone, it's practically been a revolutionary format for classic film.

I agree that we could expect to see the big movies like Gone With The Wind, King Kong and the major John Ford westerns alongside stuff like Cleopatra, Ben-Hur, Kane and the already available Casblanca, etc. But as you said, it will be another decade before we start to see a more obscure film selection and I do not intend to spend the next ten years upgrading the same fifteen-to-twenty movie titles that I'm quite happy with my current editions of given the context.

And of course Gary Cooper started out in several b-westersn like 'Fighting Caravans' as did Cary Grant in the late '50's and Bette Davis was indeed involved also later in her career. I'm not sure what this has to do with my statement regarding the unforeseeable release of such pictures in high-definition? Just because an established actor is starring in a role does not automatically elevate such to the level of an "A" feature. What about Bogart or a more obvious choice like Karloff who made a career out of such roles in the 1950's?

Anyways, the point is that it will be a good half decade at least before we start seeing lesser noirs and crime thrillers and obscure foreign titles and the like in the hi-def format. At which point, the back library of standard-def titles will have been greatly expanded and I personally do not foresee any time in the near or even distant future where "older films" will be newly introduced to the hi-def medium bypassing standard DVD. Until that occurs, I'll see no reason to throw in my support because I'm a fan of CINEMA and not merely TECHNOLOGY. As a film enthusiast, presentation in any given medium is very much important to me, but if the only films we see released are superhero movies and teen comedies than really who cares? I'll continue to build my DVD library and will eventually upgrade on select titles as I see fit. I'm looking forward to seeing how Disney handles it's classic catalogue titles on BluRay as frankly I've been more than disappointed with their current SDVD releases and yet with all the revisionism, I fear the worst in the new medium. This is the one studio that will greatly affect my decision to go hi-def and spend money on a BluRay unit.

 

[DanMel]

"Dan, I'm not quite sure what you mean by when DVD came out there was not 10 years worth of new releases behind the format but there is with HD...??"

It's simple, DVD came out around 10 years ago. They concentrated on the majority of titles from 1970-1998 for initial releases. Now there are 10 more years of new modern fluff era movies (1970-2008) for them to concentrate on for the high def format before they bother with most of the movies that we are interested in. This should make it even longer for the movie companies to get around releasing movies from the golden era in large supplies in Blue Ray. I don't expect to see movies like Sergeant York (an A movie as are most of the the 250 classic movies I own) released in Blue Ray until 2015 at the earliest.

What I am hoping is that a clear winner in the high def format does not slow down classic movies in the SD format. I would persoanlly love to see the High Def wars go on for another 5 years so that movie companies are forced to keep on releasing classic movies. I think a window of classic movies was opened up to us with the high definition wars going on where movie companies were not selling the modern movies in large supplies so they were forced to go into the classic movie libaray for SD releases. I hope this window does not close up anytime soon. If there is a chance of this happening I hope the war goes on for a long long time.

 

[MarcoBiscotti]

Okay, I understand you now.

Not entirely sure I agree as it also took a while for the studios to "understand" the marketability of the format which factors in a lot of the junk we saw when DVD initially launched, but it is true that we'll probably be playing catch up longer on newer blockbusters. Afterall, the epic CGI boom really came after the launch of the format with all the LOTR type live-action films and revival of superhero franchises and so on. These are exactly the "type of movies" that people use as referance to show off their new HD displays and demo the technology so there's no doubt we'll see the studios putting more focus towards these titles. But at the same time I think that some of the studios, Warner in particular, have wisened up as to the viability of classic catalog films and as we've seen with stuff like The Searchers and so on, we'll likely see more cross-format releases with bigger classic titles that wasn't possible with DVD when it existed as an exclusive commercial market. It really depends on the amount of money and resources the studios put into new restorations that will determine whether these films are released in HD-DVD as well. Unlike the early SD-DVD format however, I doubt we'll see a rush of 80's and 90's comedies and romance drama junk like the bargain bin crap you see at chain stores now (stuff like Nothing But Trouble, White Men Cant Jump, Doc Hollywood). These were all horrendous movies that were among the first to be released as part of the studios back catalogs on SD-DVD. I reckon we'll surely see some of our more top-tier "classics" before this trash gets released again; I hope.

 

[rich_d]

Less than 100, when you consider film with multiple stars e.g. Hitchcock/Cary Grant films.

It is an interesting question to speculate on.

Harlow has more than 10 film out on DVD per IMDB.

I don't really think there will be much of a market for older films in hi-def format unless there is a significant technical advance in film restoration. If studios don't get us to buy them in hi-def ... they won't release them. And I think the reality of seeing the blemishes on an older print made even more pronounced in high-def won't be much of a selling point.

Sure we'll see the big beautiful color films such as Lawrence of Arabia and Singin' in the Rain and even the popular b&w films of Hitchcock ... but 10 films of Jean Harlow in hi-def?

Could be a long time ... 10 plus years is my guess.

 

[Mark Zimmer]

There was a decent possibility of catalogue titles such as Joe yearns for on HD DVD. But since Blu-ray is a gamer's format, with Warner's switch the chances of seeing such things is nil (you will notice Warner didn't bother releasing Adventures of Robin Hood on Blu-ray, only on HD DVD). So the studios have spoken to lovers of classic film with their middle fingers, and I return the salute.

 

[Jeff_HR]

Are you going to be one of those persons who dumps their entire library of "older" format titles? I would not do it.

 

[rich_d]

Well, Sony demo'd Lawrence of Arabia on Blu-Ray (at least) two years before introduction into the U.S. .... so why wasn't it one of the first titles to go?

More importantly, after the large format and/or sweeping landscape releases such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (done), Lawrence, Bridge over the River Kwai, Dr. Zhivago and the like .... what's next? Are they going to release the films that aren't demo material for projection systems? How soon?

 

[Robert Crawford]

They demo'd it as I was there for one of those demonstrations at Sony, but from what I've heard it wasn't ready for release until this past year, but chose not to do so due to the lack of market penetration. I've been hearing whispers that later this year it's coming out.

 

[Steve Armbrust]

I guess what worries me is that at some point in the future, studios will not release films in SD only, just coordinated SD and HD releases. And because there's such a backlog of existing SD titles to re-release in HD, they won't release any "new to DVD" films until they work through those backlogs. So it might be ten years before they get around to releasing in any format the films I still want, such as "Yolanda and the Thief," Wheeler and Woolsey, or fill in your own wanted titles. And by that time, some new format will come around and we'll start all over again.

 

[rich_d]

There are so many films that have never been released in any video format. There's much released on VHS that never made it to DVD (the Jean Harlow stuff that's not on DVD is at least on VHS, for the most part).

So it seems probable that much released on DVD won't make it to Hi-def.

Part of it is fear. There are plenty of small video companies that would love to get their hands on some of the smaller films in the big boy's libraries. But studio execs are afraid to license out much of their stuff, even if they won't do it themselves. They are afraid of something becoming a hit and having to answer hard questions as to why someone else is making money off of their asset. So they don't allow stuff to be licensed away or put such a steep price tag on it that the small guy's can't afford it.

Yet, where are the hard questions to these same guys about what they are doing about films gathering dust versus producing cash?

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Haven't gotten around to watching the 2nd HP movie on BD yet, but the 1st one looks much better all-around than the DVD version, including the color. The opening night scene w/ fog is no longer the big mess it is on the DVD either. Definitely worth the upgrade for this title.

_Man_