The Descent - 2 different Blu-ray versions CONFIRMED (MPEG-2 vs AVC encoding) - Page 27

http://www.avsforum.com/t/1267537/kick-ass-comparison-pix

The purple cast in Kick Ass, I take it that was a choice made due to the comic book feel?

Ugh! Kick Ass! Now there was a nightmare project. I've graded 3 films with Matthew and its a real challenge as he's colour blind. He found it very difficult to see the difference between the aqua suit and the yellow piping. On Stardust he saw the yellow gypsy caravan as exactly the same colour as the grass in the field. After 2 weeks of grading I threw the whole thing out and started from scratch, super-saturating the image, degraining the highlights and mid tones to create an airbrushed look, then adding sharpening to the whole image. Not what DoP Ben Davis or I planned for at all. They're prepping for the sequel now.

This is fascinating. The airbrushing that you see and is being criticised came about for a couple of reasons. One creative and one technical. As I said we needed to create a look for the film. Matthew Vaughn had originally wanted Kick Ass to look natural and real. After all the whole point of Kick Ass is he lives in the real world, not Gotham city, and has no superpowers. So the best way for people to relate to him was for them to recognise the world of the film as everyday and not stylised. The problem with this was it just didn't look very sexy, and Matthew's mantra became,'make it look like Transformers'. Now you have to realise this came after the film had been shot, so there was no strong backlight and this was Toronto in the winter, not L.A. in summer. Then the technical reason. The film was shot on film, mostly 500asa with anamorphic lenses. This meant fairly big grain to begin with. Matthew asked us to brighten the picture in the grade to such an extent that the grain was becoming really apparent, plus pushing saturation so much made the colours fizz, and it was the combination of trying to create a strong look and decrease the grain that pushed me to try a massive degrain. Matthew and the producers took one look and loved it. So there we have it. Horrible degrain that none of us like or intended became a creative look. The magenta feel for much of the movie also came out of the need to avoid a blanket warmth that was pushing the film into a tobacco world, so an increase in blue in the shadows forced it into a magenta direction.

Does the forum have a top 10 list of favourite or worst mastered films? Or perhaps the worst offending artefacts? Do you prefer grain, shadow detail, bright images etc? It would be great to know so I can take this into my sessions with directors and producers.
Many thanks

Fascinating, thought it was odd that after the way Layer Cake looked that kick ass was less gritty and I expected grit and grain from the subject matter.

I think this forum's very own Picture Quality Tiers would qualify, where a number of users have input into what are the best-looking examples of the format. The higher the rank, the better we've determined the Blu-ray looks. You'll be happy to know Kick-Ass is currently ranked in Tier 1.75 (the Gold Tier), just below the absolute reference level of movies like Pixar's CGI catalog. There are around 1800 movies ranked at the moment on it.

Not all of us rate those threads tho

That is true, but the Tiers are open to all opinions from anyone willing to comment. The top tier is built upon a pretty wide consensus as to what looks the best on the format. At the moment, the highest-ranked live-action films are Avatar and then The Tree Of Life, closely followed by The Thin Red Line. Then you start seeing the usual suspects like Sin City and Transformers.

It is more that they do not take into account what a film SHOULD look like, just how good the disc looks.
The film reference and analysis thread was more my thing.