Lawrence Of Arabia (Blu-ray) Official AVSForum Review - Page 3

 

I believe the "banding" kwok lau is seeing are the subtle vertical lines or stripes of wear in the negative which can sometimes be seen in the middle of the frame in the desert scenes. I noticed them as well. And a couple others (including Ralph) have also commented on this above. So it's definitely there in the image. I'd agree with Ralph that's a fairly minor issue in an otherwise mostly impressive transfer.

 

 

^ Bingo.

Adu, I agree with you.

Had a short audio dropout during the scene where Allenby is trying to talk Lawrence to go back to Arabia (not sure of time but it's the scene where you can see the blood on the back of his uniform). Forwarded it a minute or so and it was fine and after rewinding and re-watching the scene audio was there Just a strange little tic and was wondering if anyone else had this happen. Otherwise the disc is absolutely stunning on all accounts. Played on Oppo 103.

I'm a little late to the party in acquiring this wonderful BD.

One thing that I'm suprised about is that Sony didn't provide chapter breaks at the end of the musical prelude, so you can skip right to the beginning of the movie (0:04:15) and same for the intermission. There should have been one at 02:23:37, where movie resumes.

Instead, the first chapter jumps to 0:09:31 (Chptr 2) and the intermission jumps from 02:19:29 (chptr 21) (music playing) to 02:30:05 (chptr 22). Makes no sense to me whatsoever. Fast forwarding vs a chapter jump is a bit of a pain. I noticed that no one else has commented on this. Am I being too picky?

In fact, I would have preferred they leave out the prelude and intermission music altogether. We do have "pause" buttons after all. However, I imagine that "purists" of the film want it as originally shown.

I tried making a backup and inserting the above mentioned chapter breaks, but it threw all the other chapters off. I then tired editing/cutting out the 2 scenes which, of course, threw the chapters off even more. I suppose I could adjust all the times manually, in the playlist, but a bit of a pain and then still wouldn't match the clips in the scene selections..
Edited by shadowcaster - 1/29/13 at 12:56pm

I watched the first half of this movie tonight and I have a few issues with the sound and video. The picture does look very good but I did notice some vertical lines running down the center of the picture. Did anyone else notice that? The audio did seem harsh at times especially during explosions. The dialog does sound great though.

Stepyourgameup,
Yes. Please see earlier replies above.

Thanks. I hadn't read the entire thread. Stupid me.

No need to read from beginining. Just 4 messages above your message.

I just watched it. Fantastic in my opinion.

As this is my favorite movie of all time, I think i've watched it a dozen times in part here and there since buying the bluray.

Banding; yes, I noticed it later in the movie when some banding appears but I forgive it all due to age...

Chapter breaks: yes, this to me is the biggest negative of the disc, I do not like the chapter breaks on the bluray, not as smartly placed as on my SuperBit version...

Audio: best yest for this movie but not reference.

Amazing movie on many levels. Another tour de force in bluray presentation.

Watched the first half and it really is a beautiful movie. I noticed when the Turks are bombing the camp that the explosions don't sound distorted like on my dvd version (or tv version). And I was lucky enough to see it on the big screen when it first came out.

Jeff

It may be better than the DVD, but I'd agree with some of the other posters above that the sound is still showin some of it's age, and gets a bit distorted in some of the louder musical passages. So it may fall a bit short of some audio buffs expectations.

 

I'd agree with stepyourgameup and Safari Ken that dialogue sounds pretty decent though (for the most part). And Jarre's sweeping score + the HD imagery can still put a few tingles up the spine.

Edited by ADU - 2/19/13 at 3:22pm

Not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but I also noticed a few of "hiccups" in the video, mainly in chapters 2, 20, and 21. I'm guessin most of those were deliberate edits where footage was replaced, or damaged frames were dropped, as opposed to encoding or playback errors. Not really sure though.

 

Here are the timecodes where they occur, in case anyone else wants to verify what I'm seein.

 

CHAPTER 2

10:08

11:35

 

CHAPTER 20

2:15:21

2:16:46

 

CHAPTER 21

2:26:02

2:27:02

2:27:37

Edited by ADU - 2/20/13 at 8:27pm

I agree with ADU's analysis. The audiotrack for the restored Lawrence of Arabia BD does, indeed, show its age a bit. Nevertheless, It is solid and the dialog is particularly clear. Those who have seen, and tried to understand what the actors are saying in, The Deer Hunter will understand just how important clear dialog is.

I also would agree that the sound quality has not come off as well as the picture quality.. But I have some early (1961) Deutsche Grammophon CD's of Beethoven symphonies (Herbert Karajan conducting) and the restored sound track of Lawrence is certainly better than these, so the restoration has certainly achieved good results. To be fair, the CD's I am talking about are the original releases, not claimed remastered versions. But you would not pick the sound track of the Blu-ray Lawrence as being 1960's vintage. Not up to today's best, but very much still acceptable to todays ears.

The picture quality is really something else: sharp; beautiful colours etc

As noted it's heat damage on the original negative. If you compare this release to the Superbit DVD you will see that they reduced the banding somewhat, but did not want to overuse digital tools to completely fix it. It is a fine compromise.

John K.

I'd agree with you John, re the subtle vertical lines/stripes of wear that are sometimes visible in the middle of the frame.

 

The "hiccups" I referred to in my last post are a different issue btw. The video appears to skip one or more frames at the timecodes I listed above. They go by quick though, so you have to pay pretty close attention to notice em. The hiccup at 11:35 in Chapter 2 is fairly easy to spot because it occurs as Lawrence turns to walk up a stairway, just after he says: "Tell him I've gone for a chat with a General". I'm guessin these were probably necessary/deliberate edits made during the original editing of the film, or in one of the restorations. Not 100% sure though.

Edited by ADU - 5/2/13 at 4:51pm

I noticed this ‘banding’ as well. I didn’t know exactly what to attribute it to, but I guessed that it was on the film itself and transferred to the scan – however that is accomplished; and it just wasn’t restored out. It’s probably only more pronounced because the image quality is otherwise spectacular!

I bought this and Samsara from Amazon and got them in for the weekend and frankly enjoyed the color from this more than Samsara personally. I’m not sure if they hyper saturated the colors in the restoration or if that is the accurate color (I tend to oversaturate my RAW files from my still camera and like them that way). I questioned in a few scenes if there were perceivable artifacts of the restoration against the night skies as well from my experience with Adobe Lightroom and color correction with it. Very slight if so and it wasn’t a reoccurring element.

The natural contrasts of the desert sands and the elaborately colorful adornments of the camels and horses, costumes, blue skies, etc. were pretty fab! The soundtrack was a little dry, but I can appreciate that they did a good job at working with what they had. There were more surround and lfe elements than some modern movies that I’ve watched for that matter.

I’m on board with no chapter point to skip that intro music; I actually thought something must not be right with my video lol. It’s like nearly 5 minutes of sound with no picture and that might have been a clue to this movie being nearly FOUR HOURS long that I didn’t notice until I was about 45 minutes into it. Thank God for the bookmarks! I quit it and picked it back up several times over the weekend to finish it (resume worked for the most part for that matter). Not that the story sucked or anything; the story was fine, but I didn’t plan for over 3.5 hours to sit through it in one sitting.

I would definitely rank this as one of my personal best video quality reference discs to show off what even an older film can look like on Blu-ray.

Agree with many of your thoughts above Fastfwd. (See my full review here.)

 

I don't think this is exactly the way Lean intended the film to look. But there is no doubt that he and his cinematographer both had great eyes for color and composition, and provided some great raw material (even in its badly degraded condition) for the restorers to work with.

I didn't fully appreciated the color in some scenes in this until after recently doing a fresh calibration of my TV, to get the grayscale closer to D65 across the full luminance range. There are some really nice pastels (esp. creams, blues and oranges) in many of the desert scenes for example, which are probably harder to pick up/appreciate on a poorly-adjusted display. There are times when the film looks almost like a pastel drawing come to life.

Edited by ADU - 5/2/13 at 4:48pm