Universal's Alfred Hitchcock Collection - Page 2

Universal has changed the release date of the US edition to October 30

Official E-Mail from Universal:

Good Afternoon,

Universal Studios Home Entertainment is postponing the Blu-ray release of "Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection" to October 30, 2012.

Certain imperfections with the product have come to light and, as a result, we are delaying the release date to correct these points. Our goal is to always deliver the best possible product to our consumers.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Consumer Relations
UNIVERSAL STUDIOS HOME ENTERTAINMENT

Since the problems were discovered initially with the UK release discs, I expect this delay to affect that too.

^^^ well at least they're doing something about it.

Agreed. Hopefully they can get it right!

Heh, nothing like using reviewers to be the final QC for product.

There's a *lot* of issues with the various movies in this collection to "fix" in just over a month's time. Add the fact that it is Universal we are talking about, makes me very skeptical this amended release will address enough of the problems to make most Hitchcock fans happy.

Translation: We completely forgot to run the second DNR pass. We need to go back and do that. Just to make sure, we'll run it through twice more. After all, more coats of wax are better, right?

"Just finishing the second coat, Mr. McFLy..."
"Now, Biff, you wouldn't be trying to cheat me, would you?"
"Oh, sorry Mr. McFly - I meant I was just starting the second coat..."

Granted not Universal but I could not find a more suitable thread.

Dial M for Mordor (stereovision not covered):

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompare7/dialmformurder.htm

Overall the caps appear film-like and promising, need some png to great a better clue. Is that red dress padded??

Dial M looks really good. Thank god it was WB and not Universal.

I can't believe i just said that but WB does good transfers sometimes.

WB kicks Universal's butt at least nine times out of ten. And Dial M is probably my favourite of the "lesser" Hitchcocks so I'm pretty happy. I've already written off the Universal Hitchcock box, I just hope some of the titles are good enough to buy separately (Vertigo, Rear Window, Rope).

DVD Beaver has begun posting screenshots from the US Universal set. So far, they have Vertigo, Rear Window, The Birds, and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) up along with North By Northwest and Psycho. North By Northwest is the same as WB Digibook release, and Psycho is the same as the previous Universal release complete with only lossy mono audio.

Pleasantly surprised that Vertigo, Rear Window, The Birds and The Man Who Knew Too Much seem to look pretty OK (apart from DVDBeaver softening) will get them when they're available separately.

Beaver caps, as has beens stated ad nauseum, are simply not reliable. Ever. So, I have to wait until I see the set, which is always the best way anyway.

The new ones all look similar in the beaver caps, maybe some light EE in some images, Pervert Window has the most noticeable EE. 'The Man Who Knew Too Much' seems to have some teal applied in the caps. Overall in the caps you can see film grain.

I am confused by this, reviewers say it's identical but the 'Feature' bytes numbers are different:
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDCompare5/northbynorthwest.htm

Wuther, does Gary Tooze pay you to advertise for his site?


But then, to be fair to Beaver, you don't believe that ANY caps EVER have been even remotely close to the content of a blu-ray, right?


("Never ever anything bloody ever. That's my motto, Nicolas, I've lived my life after that." Name the TV show! )

''

I have stated over and over that caps I see on the Internet do not resemble, for me, what I see when I watch the disc. There's no being fair to the Beaver because HIS caps are normally the worst of the lot. You do understand that I'm not the only one saying this?

Have you ever, just for fun or out of some morbid curiosity, tried displaying caps from, say, Blu-ray.com on your TV and that way getting a more direct comparison between the cap and the disc? I have, and what I found is that there's virtually no difference. (Though the blu-ray.com logo was a bit of a give-away.)

But yeah, I agree that Beaver's caps are bad.

I saw that too but it's probably just an anomaly in the way the disc scans or some hidden files or playlists etc that don't show up. The numbers in every department show as identical. It's happened before with other releases (sometimes of the same film) in which everything appears identical but there's a discrepancy in total disc or feature size.

No I haven't because that takes time and energy and if that's the only way that screen caps can be viewed accurately, then the majority of the people looking at them on computers are clearly not getting to see what they should and my suggestion would be to do away with those sorry things forever.
Edited by haineshisway - 10/23/12 at 8:32am

Freny EE:

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film4/blu-ray_reviews_58/frenzy_blu-ray.htm

In the caps you can see quite noticeable EE and waxy faces, I do not know why the reviewer bothered with a zoomed in image, it's quite apparent in the 1 to 1 image.

Go look at your neighbors through binoculars and see what they call you, after the beating that is.

I guess we have different ideas of what constitutes time and energy.

Have you tried playing a BD on your PC to get a comparison that way?

No, I don't have a Blu-ray drive.

There are no special problems with seeing stills on a computer monitor and see exactly what is on the disc. If your display is not calibrated you don't see the proper image whether it's on a computer monitor, a TV set or projected on a screen. Computer monitors are usually not calibrated for HD, though, so I would not judge colour/contrast on them before calibration. The rest is no problem provided 1:1 pixel mapping.

So you have no way of knowing whether this large discrepancy you see between the stills on your PC and the Blu-ray playing on your TV, have nothing to do with the quality of the stills, but is perhaps caused by differences between the setup of your PC and TV? Considering how much time and energy you've devoted to writing about the uselessness of screen caps, don't you think it would have been reasonable to find out if this is perhaps the case? I think it would. You might have found, like I wrote earlier, that there's virtually no difference.

(This still doesn't include Beaver's flawed caps, of course.)

You apparently missed the POINT, the point being clearly stated in one of my posts - but happy to state it again: If I have to go to all that trouble to have what I see on my computer (a beautiful imac 27 inch desktop) match what I see when I actually run a Blu-ray - what is the point of the caps. The majority of people do exactly as I am doing - and if it takes all that other work to have them even approach being accurate then what IS the point? If I can't look at a cap on my computer and get a good idea of what a transfer looks like, then I'd prefer never to see a cap - well, I prefer that anyway because, you know, I like to watch MOTION pictures not still frames taken who knows what way.

Yet another thread going down the toilet.

Exactly and simply because there are certain posters here who continually delight in baiting people over and over about senseless things - opinions are clearly stated and then they do this baiting thing and it's so tiresome, but, sadly, it's been going on since Year One of the Internet. I now return you to the Hitchcock box set and I will once again try to be stronger about not responding to the trollish baiting.