Gladiator Region 1, got mine today, heres the low down.... - Page 3  

Seb, I'm not suprised that GLADIATOR outsold MATRIX. I'm amazed how fast, less than two weeks! GLAD is a much better movie....

Frank, you're dangerous again. A new amp? A few thousand watts I suppose. Let's hope the film about Carthage's Hannibal gets made. I love ancient times. Best wishes cats!

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Rachael,la gata del disco Grande

I love this movie so much Ive been watching it every day for the past 2 weeks since I got it.

Last week I decided to but a second R1 copy for safekeeping but only played it today. To my surprise, there were some differences in the navigation of the menus.

I always watch it in DTS and so here is what happens when I place the first R1 copy in my DV-S9:

1. Audio setup menu comes on (I then select DTS)
2. Dreamworks trailer plays in DTS
3. DTS "Sonic Landscape" trailer plays
4. Main menu
5. If I select "PLAY", FBI warning comes on
6. Feature starts

But with my second R1 copy this is what happens

1. Dreamworks trailer immediately plays in Dolby 2.0 (No Audio setp menu)
2. Main menu
3. I go to "AUDIO" and select DTS
4. If I select "PLAY", FBI warning comes on
5. DTS "Sonic Landscape" trailer plays
6. Feature starts

With my second copy, I dont get to the Dreamworks trailer in DTS.

Also, with my first copy, if I select commentary, I would be returned immediately to the main menu.

With the second copy, if I select commentary I get a sub-menu with an index of the entire commentary. No matter what I do with the first copy of "Gladiator" I cannot reach this sub-menu.

What is everyone else experiencing? Is this an issue with my player?

Rachael,

Hannibal, the Carthagese General who dared challenge the Roman might, to be put on film? You aren't referring to Sir Anthony Hopkin's new Doctor Hannibal Lecter flick, right? Have you any info about this movie?

A new 2000 watt amp to drive the eight SVS 46/16s is on order. I think that I will be needing my own power substation, though! http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/smile.gif Cheers...

-THTS

Eric, I'm just suprised at the speed it became the best seller.

Frank, this rumour about Hannibal of Carthage came from the HT Forum. I really hope it's true. I want to see elephants in the alps. How about Denzel W. as Hannibal maybe?

Eric, the picture quality of SPARTICUS might look dated, but the story, hardly! Great, great film! We need to look past picture quality more often. Most of the worst films of last year had great picture quality. RAVENOUS had great picture quality, none the less, it bites bar-b-qued baby butts, literally! Oh, how I love ancient times, I want more films in this genere. Best wishes cats!

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Rachael,la gata del disco Grande

Frank

You have EIGHT SVS 46 ????!!!!!! how many watts behind ??? I "just" have 2 JBL 4645C (18", good for 1600w continuous) with a mere 2x200w (soon 2x500) and it shakes my appartment violently. what room do you have for so many woofiers ???
Rachael: got to search on the Hannibal stuff, sounds terrific and Denzel would do well indeed! Hannibal the African ! (or Russel painted http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/biggrin.gif )
Gladiator is indeed a jewel! got the same impression reviewing Spartucus in particular: got so old.... but the ending is tear dropping, seeing Douglas crucified and his wife showing him the kid! Fabulously moving.
http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~madsb/wallpa...s/Image001.jpg
THis scene in particular stunned me: and I didn't know what to expect after. Fabulous. Peace and kindess, love of the Earth, then... HELL!
http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~madsb/wallpa...s/Image170.jpg
I don't know about you but I felt deeply for her. And I felt extremely angry and aggressive towards Phoenix, who I think played very well the demoniac Commodus. He should be nominated for supporting role.

David, it would seem that GLADIATOR has opened a door for the possibility of a similar film or two. Keep your fingers crossed! What a fitting ending SPARTICUS and LIFE OF BRIAN have. "Cruxifiction, good, one cross each, line on the left." Cruxifiction was so very popular, it's easy to see why. Judea, in reality, was the leading province, by all accounts, for dudes earning a ride on a cross. I'm planning on replacing my SPARTICUS LD with the anamorphic DVD that Criterion is supposed to be working up. Love's dat moving picture! One of Kirk D.'s great performances too. Best wishes!

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Rachael,la gata del disco Grande

David,

Eight subs about equal or even surpass the sound pressure level output produced by four 18 inchers in large enclosures. Your JBL 18-inchers are stupendous drivers and have no doubt you are moving that much air to cause such havoc in your apartment http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/smile.gif (do your neighbors complain? I hope not!).

The HT room where these are located is on the large side so to have room-filling bass throughout it was necessary to get that many so clean "reference level" playback, low distortion, and extended frequency response could be achieved. I am actually contemplating adding at least two more 46/16s. Crazy? http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/smile.gif Umm...well, I know of some folks who use well over that number of drivers enclosed in either whole lofts or attics and/or basements. I understand bass output is more than just prodigious; it is said to be rightdown scary!. That is something I am aming at attaining. Anyway, this subject really belongs in another Forum...

As far as Spartacus, Ben-Hur and such great silverscreen epics looking "dated" well, they should as they were made 40 or 50 years ago. I can just imagine if Wyler were to film Ben-Hur today...with current technology...and same cast...results would be eye popping...much like Gladiator can be! Even so, great acting took place in those movies and such high caliber acting is very hard to come by now days, although Russell Crowe could possibly play the roles Spartacus, Ben-Hur, El Cid, Marc Anthony, Alexander The Great, et al...if he only had a wider acting range and emotional depth. And as Rachael says, a viewer has to pass over and ignore the "dated" look that older epics have and just enjoy and truly appreciate the reasons why they have become TRUE film "classics"...

-THTS

[This message has been edited by Frank J Manrique (edited 12-02-2000).]

Rachael and Frank: I hear you! great thinking.
Frank: seems we share big HT rooms indeed, compulsory for low frequencies to "express" themselves ( wavelength = 340meter/sec / frequency, so 20hz needs 17meters, unobstructed to "express" itself). my HT room is 17meter long, 250cubic meter. I guess I got lucky finding such an appartment...
I love the JBL indeed, massive, powerful... love them. (cut at 20hz, booster above).
cheers and strenght and honor guys!

[quote]Originally posted by Frank J Manrique:
[b]uncle eric,

non-existent. Images are sharply defined, and had no trouble seeing even the smallest details as resolving high resolution is attainable with this set up. Colimetry mimics closely that of film prints and in fact I think is about the same as I recall. I did find some edge enhancement bothersome in some scenes, but for a scope ratioed film image quality just doesn't get any better...


Why? I found the overenhanced edges distracting as well. It does get
better by simply keeping that enhancement button alone. Why do these
video engineers have to apply edge enhancement at all? Actually
they don't. It's a stupid practice from the VHS days that belongs
in the garbage can these days when you transfer with state of the art
telecines and from brand new film masters. Edge enhancement that creates
visible ringing and halos has no place in high quality transfers.
If the people that do this could only see how bad it looks when you
project the DVD with good equipment. Very frustrating.
Michel Hafner

Michael,

I am in complete agreement with you in that the so-called "edge enhancement" is something that should never be applied to DVD transfers. This is analogous to the early days of the Compact Disc (CD) when recording engineers kept on applying too much treble EQ to the top end of the frequency spectrum, much like they had to with the vinyl LP, which needed it badly for several reasons. CDs did not needed such amounts of EQ'ing and the sonic results were very "hot" high frequencies, causing many audiophiles to resist that paradigm shift with a vengeance.

The problem becomes even worse as the size of a display device becomes larger. On front projection systems like ours, where screens usually exceed six feet (mine is a 12 foot wide "scope" screen), edge enhancement can wreck havoc with the projected image, greatly lessening the viewing experience. That old axiom of "garbage in...garbage out" indeed still apply...AARGH!!

-THTS

I noticed edge enhancement ( I checked on my PC, rather than the projector, in 1024x768, GeForce, 256SDRAM, 733mhz, not a big one but decent ) on the snow when Maximus escapes, on the armors, on wide shots of Rome and on the inside of the Coliseum. maybe if they had just put a DTS track and boosted the video data space....

Exactly. Mastering studios should be forced to watch their DVDs projected
on a big screen progressively with high end equipment while mastering them,
instead of small Sony monitors. Many eyes would not believe what they see
and change their habits. Not that a Sony studio monitor does not show all
problems, but they are not so obvious on them. DVNR desasters like "Witness" and "Ten Commandments" could no longer happen then.
regards
Michel Hafner

Hi,
I tried to check these scenes, can't confirm anything like that. What Software-Player are you using? I tried with WinDVD 2.3, Elsa Erazor X, 800x600 on a Cinema ONe and 1024x768 on the PC Monitor. Maybe you are confusing ringing artefacts with scaling artefacts (I guess there will be always small scaling artefacts until we have higher DVD resolution).

Cheers

Christoph

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http://www.berlindvd.myokay.net

hi

I meant in fact pixelisation/shimmering on the snow and shimmering/ringings on the armors. I in fact still use the Hollywood video car as I don't have Windvd on my PC ( should get it to use the GEFORCE !!!)

cheers
David

Dave,

Does you HT-PC do the anomorphic squeeze automatically? What you describe seeing (shimmering, etc.) sure sounds like letterbox downconversion artifacts. I did not see any of those artifact problems when I viewed Gladiator on my Crystal Image video scaler processor/Sony DVP-S7000 standalone DVD player combo (set to anomorphic to handle enhanced DVDs), and it is not as good in this regard as my AVS 733 MHz, GeForce 256/ ASUS/WinPower/Toshiba DVD-ROM HT-PC, which is just amazing playing DVDs.
I just noticed some edge enhancement ghosting in certain scenes, which varies in magnitude, but not throughout the movie. That is why I said although being a scope flick it just doesn't get any better (I know it SHOULD look better less the edge enhancement and such, but let's leave it a that for now)...

Hope you can get your PC to work correctly so you can enjoy viewing artifact-free video images. Happy Holidays! http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/smile.gif

-THTS

hey, Merry Christmas to you too Frank.
Well, true that on my pc, I don"t have the software to see it in 16:9 indeed but this is not what I meant. I really think these are problems of compression/encoding, perhaps because the audio tracks are both on the same discs and thus left the video with slightly too less place for the 154minutes. I checked the disc on one buddy's CRT in anamorphic (dremvsisin 505) and those where still apparent but you have to focus on the scene. pixelisation is evident on the snow when we Maximus escaping with the two horses.

Merry Xmas to everybody!
I stick to my judgement that Gladiator RC1 is maybe THE best DVD I have ever seen (better than the 5th element or Damage). Let me put it like this: If you dont use optimal source conditions (i.e. a decent HTPC with a GeForce graphics card and WinDVD 2.3 or at least a small Faroudja Scaler) you just cant make any final judgement on a DVD!
Sorry if I sound opinionated...I can just report what I see, and what I saw with Gladiator is just amazing (i.e. even considering that I have only 800x600 pixels resolution with my Cinema One).

Cheers

Christoph

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http://www.berlindvd.myokay.net

uncle eric,

FYI: Fox will be releasing DEMETRIUS AND THE GLADIATORS in mid February, 2001. Read a new thread I'll be starting soon about this movie as well as The Robe...Cheers!

-THTS

Exactly. Mastering studios should be forced to watch their DVDs projected on a big screen progressively with high end equipment while mastering them,instead of small Sony monitors.

Why? Where's their incentive? 99% of the DVD viewing public views DVD on direct view analog TV sets via sub $300 dvd players. Check out any of the recent market surveys on dvd (digital bits has some good ones). I mean, look at the Ps2 for God's sakes - as a dvd player it is marginal, yet if Ps2 sales are only a third of Ps1 sales in a couple years there will be more of them then there will "regular" dvd players. THAT will be the DVD standard, not the HTPC I hand crafted and tweaked over the last 6 months to give me a picture so good I notice the smallest flaws in any given transfer.

I'm sure engineers are all for quality and would love the kind of "reference" x-fers that you and I do but we are a very, very small part of the market they are catering to. Edge enhancement may suck for 6 foot screens but it's good for Joe Sixpack on his 27' 6 year old Panasonic, and there are a lot more Joe Sixpacks than you or I.......especially for mass market DVD's, which let's face it, Gladiator is (I love it, don't get me wrong).



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Ix (That would be the planet of technology in the book Dune for the geeks out there)
Former IP Engineer, all around citizen, and badger-hater. Since 1963.
www.tognet.com
<A HREF="http://www.maximumgamer.com
ix@tognet.com" TARGET=_blank>www.maximumgamer.com
ix@tognet.com</A>

If you think DVDs should be mastered for the masses with tiny TV sets,
why bother about anamorphic? New Transfers? 5 channel digital sound..?
As soon as you leave this level of presentation where anything goes
it becomes very hard to justify any overenhanced edges. Neither makes it
look the picture better nor does it cost less. It makes compression more
difficult. It's a silly habit that annoys people with quality equipment and adds little to no benefit for the others.
I don't care what studios use to check the DVD quality. But if their
engineers can't see on their monitors that overenhanced edges are ugly
they need some more revealing equipment or a course about how to properly
judge the output of a Sony reference monitor.
MH

uncle eric,

Demitrius And The Gladiators was a sequel to The Robe, the first film to be photographed in the then brand new CinemaScope widescreen process (1953-1954. It was also shot with flat or spherical lenses, thus full frame. American Movie Classic and Fox Video broadcasts The Robe in its full frame aspect ratio occasionally. Also, these two films were about the last ones to be processed in the IB Technicolor dye transfer process before Fox opted to go with the infamous Eastman Kodak film stock, one that has faded with time unlike the former which has not faded in most cases, or little in others).
It starred the absolutely and stunningly beautiful Susan Hayward and Victor Mature (he also starred in The Robe), as well as the actors who portrayed Emperor Caligula (can't remember their names now, but the one who did Caligula wound up hospitalized in a mental institution after doing the role; he took it too serious...no kidding. He eventually wound up starring in the TV series Lost In Space) and the Apostle Saint Peter, both of which also appeared in the first film.

DATG was not as good as The Robe, in my opinion, but is most entertaining nonetheless. And, of course, then there is Debra Paget, another stunningly beautiful actress of the era. I suppose Fox is releasing it before The Robe because all the current hoopla with GLADIATOR, so they want to capitalize on, and ride the latter film's coattails...Cheers! http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/smile.gif

-THTS

uncle eric,

Indeed...Amen to that! http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/smile.gif

-THTS

So has anyone else here compared region 1 ntsc to region 2 pal? I own both, but can only view region 1 for now, until I get my HTPC working. Then I can form my own opinion.
From what I read earlier in this thread, the PAL transfer wasn't as good of quality as the NTSC transfer, thus the 100 or so extra lines of resolution in PAL didn't make a difference.
Can anyone in PAL land tell me what is a great PAL reference dvd, where the extra lines really show?
Thanks,
Bob C

Hi Bob,

I have had about 500 RC1 DVDs over the past 2 years and I have never seen one single anamorphic PAL DVD that was superior to its anamorphic NTSC counterpart. In my experience the extra PAL lines do not really add anything, most of the time they only soften the picture (due to bad transfers that might even use the NTSC master tape).
Other than that PAL DVDs run at a 4% higher speed than the original film speed which is an absolute deal killer for me http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/frown.gif

Cheers

Christoph


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http://www.berlindvd.myokay.net

Hal90000 (!),

Frederick March and Richard Burton starred in Alexander The Great, another great historic silverscreen epic of the late 50's...so it was done already. A widescreen version was released by MGM on laserdisc some years ago. You say another movie about this great conqueror is being made? Who will play the Alexander part? Who will portray the role of his father? Who is directing it? Inquiring minds wants to know! http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/smile.gif

BTW, could not access your webpage so I was not able to read your stuff. How can I access it? Happy Holidays!

-THTS

Come on, There's gotta be at least ONE reference PAL disc that blows the best NTSC disc out of the water!
Bob C

Bob,

don't get me wrong, there are PAL DVDs that are well done. For instance, I think "Enemy of the State" was better than its NTSC counterpart. The explanation is simple, the PAL version is anamorphic, the NTSC version is not.
But I have not found one PAL DVD that I would rate higher than the best NTSC DVDs (i.e. Fifth Element, Damage, etc. and of newer release date: Shanghai Noon and also The Gladiator!).
I have checked the PAL version of The Gladiator yesterday, and it is a little softer than the NTSC version, but the difference is very subtle. However, the sound is utter crap (first time I really hated the 4% speedup of PAL).
Now: What I would be interested in, where are the real problematic scenes in Gladiator where the alledged enhancement shows? I have not found any yet (maybe it is me....).
BTW: My equipment is an HTPC with GeForce Graphics card and WinDVD 2.3 and a 800x600 Davis Cinema One DLP projector.

Cheers

Christoph



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http://www.berlindvd.myokay.net