Gladiator Master Blu-ray Comparison and Review Thread - Page 10

to be honest with you i haven't frequented dvdbeaver for a couple of years (although when i *did* i found them a reliable source of information).

in this case though, i would have thought that the reviewer would express their disdain at the lackluster quality of this release.

and.. in my experience most reviews are sloppy or misleading.

Fair enough, just asking.

in all fairness tho, that release is really a pan-european Studio Canal disc (it has approximately fiftytwelve subtitles), just branded with their UK label Optimum. If it'd been up to Optimum themselves, i'm fairly ceirtain they'd managed to foul it up.

Otherwise i agree, truly a shame that a fairly recent movie w/ a humonguos production budget can't be made to look better than this, when those funky frenchies could cram soo much juice out of highlander, which i don't really believe anybody expected to look more than decent.

such a shame, a movie like Gladiator really deserved to be benchmark material =(

indeed.. and rubbed in so annoyingly with those absolutely gorgeous non-filtered screens on the first page.

Great work Eric!

Give us some more if you can spare the time.

So they know about DNR and EE?

Hmm...

The EE is obvious and unfortunate... but if that were the worst flaw I would probably be able to get past it and enjoy this BD.

The real issue for me is the missing detail (e.g. the arrows shot).

Does anyone know whether the arrows were similarly missing on the R1 DVD? I want to gauge whether the BD is actually a step *backwards* from the DVD in terms of level of detail.

- Maybe they'll have new dubbing too. "At my signal, unleash a little hell."

According to the Insider the encoding team is doing zero filtering. They are not adding any DNR or EE. It has been added earlier in the production cycle. Again, this was concerning Warner, not Paramount.

On the subject of DNR (and sometimes EE) they are very unreliable but, as noted above; they do try.
They did go through a period (after several readers pointed out the DNR in their 5-star reviews for Patton, Dark City, etc.) were they really started paying more attention to DNR. But, with Gladiator they've got a little sloppy again.

Ultimately, your very best resource is screencaps and knowing what to look for.

Interesting. Warner's use of DNR always struck me as a little unusual. I'd even call it (with quote-marks) 'responsible' DNR. It's there as a genuine effort to improve the quality of the picture, in the days before there were clear ground-rules for how much grain was acceptable.

So, it sounds to me like you're saying sometimes it's baked into the original intermediate (basically, stuck there. But probably the Director's Intent, so that's ok) and other times it's done at the scanning stage (which seems to be the same situation as Paramount's Gladiator, were the DNR could be removed, but it would be mean rescanning the film.)


Now what this has really got me wondering about is the slight DNR in 'Eyes Wide Shut,' no DI obviously, and presumably the film had just recently been rescanned.


Certainly explains why "Batman Begins" and "Letters from Iwo Jima" both look so similar in the grain-department (despite different film-stock, different use of digital-intermediate, etc.) They were presumably both just scanned around the same time and with the same attitude towards grain removal.

For $30 we should be getting great.

Every time.

This shot is what tells me everything.

Normal, untouched reference quality:

http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/3623/1exb.png

And now, magically, scrub-a-dub-dub, DNR in my tub, grain speckles and skin pores are wiped away because it's impossible for such algorithms to tell the difference. Too clever by half! Result: actors transformed into wax droids! Why? Because we can!

http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/1090/1th.png

I think every cap tells the same story..

Touchups should be made by hand with an infrared scan of the film assisting.

Its "Spock" all over again!





Ok not so its not THAT bad, but still...

^^^ Holy cow, is that Spock cap for real?!

Ever since the screens came out a few days ago I've been waffling back and forth on this disc. Even though I really want to own the movie again (gave away my DVD in preparation), I find that once you really notice DNR, you can't UN-see it. I watched the Dark City disc once and could barely focus on the movie because the PQ drove me nuts. I think I'd feel the same about Gladiator.

Damnit.

No, they are not missing on the DVD:



There are also no weird blue blobs added to the picture, no vanishing spears, and no fire streaks erased. If there are already that many defects visible in just the few screenshots by the OP, they are probably all over the movie.

It's so painful looking at that group of extended screen shots and knowing that this movie could have looked wonderful throughout the whole film. I mean the grain structure looks wonderful and not noisy by any means.

If the grain is so fine then why would you need to add DNR?

That, my friend, is a question for Mr. Owl.

Ok, I have to ask; is that a real screenshot? This isn't just a parody of DNR or something like that?

I should probably thank the folks who mastered Star Trek for saving me $70 with that unpurchasable dreck.

Awesome.

There goes the "filtered for DVD" argument. The painted-out details are intact on this PAL DVD just as they are on the broadcasts. Likewise, the DVD doesn't have the DNR smearing and I think it has less EE.

Someone asked for mouseovers of the arrow shot; the open-matte BEV doesn't make for good mouse-flipping, but I've turned all the OAR broadcast shots from the first page into mouseovers:

http://comparescreenshots.slicx.com/...2353/picture:6

Distribute the link around.

eric.exe, have you had any trouble with the mouseover site accepting links? File upload never works for me, and I had to upload them to my HTTP server temporarily and use those as a URL source, as it screwed up random frames using the ImageShack links.

Yes, the Spock screen shot from Star Trek VI is real/legit, and yes it's Paramount at their best again...

For what it's worth, the earlier movies fare better, especially once you get back to The Motion Picture through The Search for Spock. Apparently the Trek movies were produced in reverse order; in other words they started with VI (the screen cap is from VI) then worked their way back to the first one. Part way through they came to their senses apparently and dialed back the DNR machine.

Anyways, enough slightly OT discussion from me. :P

You have to differentiate between noisereduction and sharpening on one hand, and image cleanup on the other. The HDTV versions do show some signs of noise reduction and sharpening as well, which is probably "baked" into the master. However, when "remastering" for the BD, they did some further "enhancements" and apparently ran the video through some kind of automated cleanup software to remove dust (you can see a dust speck e.g. in eric.exe's picture 16 above Ralf Moeller's left sholder, which is gone in the BD version). Obviously they went way overboard to the point where the image is seriously damaged.

Absolutely priceless
Arrows, now you see me, now you don't!

The open matte with masking added would be better. The OAR broadcast has ugly ringing the open matte does not have.

Not really possible since the horizontal framing of the open matte is also altered. Sometimes it's more zoomed than the OAR and sometimes less.

Well, screen caps are still shots and the movies are moving... doesnt this mess up using screen shots as a gauge for image quality. I was always curous about this since a screen shot can be scrutinized at will for hours on end. A movie cannot.

In other words... is anyone actually watching this as oppopsed to just using screen caps to determine how good or bad it supposedly is?

Ouch!

I still think I'll probably buy it nonetheless, as it's one of my favorites, but those disppearing arrows...

The studio is counting on 99% of people saying this. I think i'd like to rent this out and see how it looks for myself.

If this movie sells well and it probably will then Paramount will continue to release even more horrendous catalog titles on Blu Ray.

My experience is that bad looking screenshots usually correspond to a bad looking movie (in motion). And if the screenshots look good, usually the movie does, too. Of course there are artifacts that are less visible in motion. But there are actually also artifacts which are MORE visible in motion. In my experience DNR and EE are about equally visible in screenshots and motion. Really bad DNR can sometimes even be worse in motion.