Saving Private Ryan on HBO HD 10/7/06 at 11:35pm (PDT)

Nice. Thx for the headsup.

Yes, its been on, but several years ago. It not a spectacular transfer.

Thanks for the heads up, its 1.85 so any cropping will be minimal!

Ok I saw it tonight -looked pretty dang good. I think all these so called experts,who are freaking jerk elitists that know nothing, that saw it years ago and comment that it is not that good are full of big time BS and have bad equipment. Silly asses. It is on again next Monday -the 16th at 8PM Central time.

I agree with you. The PQ was excellent on C-band. I had previously seen it on
Cinemax on COMCAST and it was the same then. I think it would be nice if people
who comment on PQ mention the source they are viewing from as people seem
to constantly complain about movies shown on DIRECTV or sometimes DISH.

How do you really feel?

Looks decent...not great (on my display).

But then again, this from one of the few people that think StarzHD via Dish looks "pretty dang good" and seems very deep rooted in their posts of DVD quality, why am I not surprised?

I was very pleased with the presentation on my 92" screen. It looks MUCH better than the dvd and no annoying edge enhancement. I doubt this film was shot in a way to look stunning anyway. Nice to add it to my DVHS, D-Theater and HD DVD high def collection.

Tom

The PQ was quite impressive on my C-Band feed; no idea what it looked like after D*/E*'s recompression and conversion to HD-Lite

FWIW, Examining this tonight, it certainly had a much higher bitrate than it did when it aired years ago on HBO.

Also, iirc, I believe it was not in 5.1 when it aired years ago and that was another one of the sticking points, besides the weak transfer.

Thus most probably it is a new transfer (the same one that was made for ABC and TNT-HD) that also has 5.1. If so, its literally a first for HBO and very promising if indeed HBO is changing out some of the weaker earlier transfers and audio dubs.

I missed it and checked TiVo to see when it was coming on again and it didn't list any upcoming showings. Are you sure it's coming on again on the 16th?

Edit: Well, it shows it on the HBO web page schedule. I'll have to figure out why TiVo didn't find it. Thanks for the tip.

And on PQ, wasn't this film shot specifically with lots of different camera types and film types to produce a grainy/gritty look on purpose?

I missed this one too I wish they would release this on HD-DVD soon along with Band of Brothers.

OH YEAH! The soundtrack on SPR was killer on DD/DTS, I can't imagine what it will be like if they do TrueHD.

And I'm embarrassed to say that I've had the BoB box set for a few years now and have never watched it. I think now I'll just wait for the HD version.

You should be arrested for not watching Band of Brothers, especially if you like Saving Private Ryan. Do yourself a favor and watch it as it is about 5x as good as SPR ever could be.

Agreed! Band of Brothers was an exceptional miniseries and should be required viewing for any WWII fan. If they released this on HD-DVD with a TrueHD soundtrack, I would be in heaven

I know, I know, but don't you think I should wait for the HD-DVD now?

I just watched a little bit tonight. It started at 9pm EST. I just had my display ISF calibrated and was watching scenes from my DTS DVD today. IMO my DVD looks alot better from what I'm seeing on HBO-HD, go figure. Most of the time HBO-HD has some terrific transfers such as Star Wars Episode III & Charlie And The Chocalte Factory

The picture quality sucks compared to what it looked like when HBO showed SPR a couple of months ago. It looks to me like they are using a non HD version.

HBO didn't show it several months ago - what were you smoking?

PQ was good on my cablesystem feed. Not the best I have seen...but given the way the movie was shot...very good. The 5.1 is mind altering.

I' m watching it as I type (west coast here...). Picture is good, but not outstanding. Could it be that they used some filters as to make it look "semi" black & white... vintage kind of?
Also colors are well coordinated as "pastel type", by no means vibrant as in SW EPIII.

Either that, or someone put some other type of mushrooms in my pizza tonight!

Its much better than the DVD.

Haven't you ever seen the film before?

The film was purposely desaturated and artifacts added to make it look like WWII combat footage taken with WWII combat camera equipment.

That's what I thougth....

I know that director of photography Januz Kaminski used intential flaring and desaturating to give the picture its realistic look. The picture quality on HBO-HD to me looked like a SD upconvert. It looked better on TNT-HD and on ABC-HD IMO.

Looked like an upconvert to me too. I was very disappointed. Oh well.

Cable HD Moto 6412 to Altinex Transcoder to Barco 808. Did not like the picture quality at all.

Yeah they PQ was pretty horrible. DVD looked way better than what they showed last night.