Total Recall Review Thread - Page 3

Agreed...on both counts.

We need a new transfer or even a restoration on Total Recall.

Total Recall is one of my favorite sci-fi films. It does an excellent job of keeping you guessing as to what is reality & what is a dream or implanted memories, etc. The action is good, and has some great Arnold one liners.

But because of the reviews I've read about the BD transfer, I'm sticking with my standard def dvd for now. I'd absolutely love to get a top quality transfer on BD and would double dip in a heartbeat, but I'm not double dipping for the current BD transfer.

It's also got the raised pitch issue.

No thanks.

i did a back to back comparison watching the SD DVD and the UK HD DVD... the pitch issue is not all that noticable with one exception... shattering glass

It looks better than the special edition DVD.

Perhaps with the UK HD DVD, but the French HD-DVD is very distracting. This may not be the place for it, but the soundtrack gets very off by the end of the film. Luckily, I treasure this movie enough to buy a new copy when a re-issue is released on whatever format in whatever year the powers that be see fortunate. Luckily, the Studio Canal release doesn't look terrible as compared to the first DVD release I owned.

from what i've been told the UK disc is the french disc repackaged

I hope they remaster this film at some point.

You trust that site for reviews ?

No way. Will keep an eye on reviews from other U.K based sites like avplay, dvdtherapy, hdwars, dvdtimes etc.

These two classic films really do need a facelift, however I'm not sure which versions (that are region 1 or free) should I be looking at? I'm not going to get the Predator Ultimate Hunter Edition, and we really don't need to bring that up. Can anyone help?? Many thanks

I own both the US and UK versions of this film.

I rented the US version before buying, and since my expectations were so terribly low, I wasn't disappointed by the PQ; in fact, I was mildly surprised by the level of detail. This is likely because so much of the first ten minutes of the film consists of very tight close ups. Sharon Stone being featured in just about all of them didn't hurt either, lol.

My initial impression was that the blu ray looked A LOT like the film I saw in theaters: it was fairly dark, the colors were not terribly saturated, and there was a bit of dirt evident as well.

When I BOUGHT the movie, I noticed the dirt, the specks, the white spots, the hairs. But these appear primarily, if not exclusively, in the first 5 min. of the film. There is also some obvious and distracting fluctuation in the brightness level in different parts of the frame due to the optical effects work I would assume.

These problems largely disappear after the first five minutes, leaving you viewing a blu ray based on a print that looks much like the original theatrical release.

Also, the notion that you are getting dvd quality with the blu ray is completely erroneous. Despite the numerous issues with picture quality, level of detail is quite good.

--

The UK release is much, much cleaner. You're no longer looking at a dirty print and the brightness fluctuations are largely gone. Whether this is because the print was physically cleaned or whether it was remastered using an algorithm is unclear to me.

The UK release also receives a big boost in contrast as well. The colors are more saturated as well, such as the red on mars. There are some strange issues with color accuracy; Quaid's skin looks green-ish when he is working at the construction site. In other words, there are strange variations in color and contrast, but given the choice between this cleaner version an the darker, duller, dirtier US version, the UK version is definitely better.

I spent a little over $20 total to get both versions, so I didn't invest that much. The film is still enjoyable regardless of which copy you buy.

The Optimum UK release was "repaired" digitally using automated scratch removal. Somewhere I have screenshots showing where it painted out things it shouldn't have. A lot of the dirt and such was probably baked into the opticals originally.

There's another European release in some countries, a Special Edition where they slightly redid their version with a new AVC encode instead of the original VC-1. I think the French steelbook mentioned above is one of these. Looks like it's getting re-released in AU too: http://www.ezydvd.com.au/blu-ray/tot...-ray/dp/813896

The UK version has a summary on back which actually contains spoilers, lol.

The UK BD looks pretty good to me, far far better than the us release at least which I chucked.

Is there a speedup in the audio in studiocanal version though? I thought when I bought it the audio was normal.

The UK version has an odd green push throughout: you can see it in skin tones, in people's hair, everywhere really. Can anyone confirm if this is intentional (directorial) or simply the result of a botched digital mastering job?

I'm thinking there is a small chance we will get a new Blu-Ray release from Lionsgate (hopefully not a re-package like what they did with Rambo and it's ancient DVD-era material) given that both the Total Recall re-make and The Expendables 2 are coming out shortly. Chances of a new transfer? Who knows, but I think it may happen simply because a new high-resolution master is needed for future home theater release with the upcoming 4K format.

It's a good question, though given how badly BD catalog sales have been, I don't know. There are remastered (and quite good looking) versions of the Rambo films Studio Canal released overseas -- maybe Lionsgate would bring them here, but I wonder how these double-dips have gone in a format that hasn't generated great sales on the catalog end in the first place. I certainly wouldn't be expecting a slew of 4K movie-remasters for general public consumption in the forseeable future. The public has been slow to adopt to Blu-Ray outside of new-release titles as is -- why would they be rushing to the latter? 4k may be nothing but a high-end niche situation for a long, long time even after it comes on the scene. It's going to be costly for studios to remaster everything in 4K, especially if there's not much of an audience for it.

What is the upcoming 4K format?

I would like to see a true remaster, but I recently watched this (U.S. version) on a 65" display and didn't think it looked as horrible as some have said. It could have looked much worse if they wanted to process it and color boost it. I've seen some of the UK screenshots and the colors did look odd in some scenes. The U.S. version looks like an older film print which is a much better alternative than a wax/EE fest.

I'm not sure there's an "official" product yet, if that's what you're asking. 4K video is already possible on regular Blu-ray (device/software dependent), however, Blu-ray XL (BDXL) has the capacity to hold feature-length video with comparable compression and it is possible for some current drives to upgraded via firmware. HDMI 1.4 includes 4K support already. However, I doubt any players will actually be upgradeable in reality. After all, if you're spending $7,000 on a new display, what's another $500 for a new player? It's still all up in the air right now, but we know 4K displays will be all around us soon enough. For all I know, we'll have to wait for 8K displays so that we can get glasses-free 4K 3D. LOL I hate technology.



Agreed. It's not beautiful when projected at 90", but it looks way better than the DVD and isn't ruined by DNR/EE/boosting. I'll take an old unmolested master over a "new and improved" master any day. Same goes for Predator.

Definitely! These non perfect, older masters still look fairly film-like if they are not abused - the original Predator another good example.

I have the newer AVC encoded disc. Got it ages ago, from Australia, incidentally.

Looks a hair sharper than the VC-1 release, that's only thing 'Special' about it.

Never noticed any scratch removal shenanigans on the Optimum release, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there.

4K Blu-Ray at the end of this year to go with the initial offering of 4K TVs from Sony and others that will likely be available in the holiday sales period. There is also RED-Ray from RED Digital Cinema, but they will most likely not show it until the 4K TVs announcements begin or Sony, specifically, announces their 4K Blu-Ray TV and 4K Blu-Ray player product line as that is when RED will also unveil their 4K home theater laser projector to go with RED-Ray which will sell for $10K.

Interesting...is this another potential format war? Ughh.

The Studio Canal HD DVD had an audio pitch shift problem that sounded similar to the effects of PAL speedup (though the disc played at the proper 24 fps speed). This was an issue with most of Studio Canal's HD DVDs.

When they ported that transfer to Blu-ray, Studio Canal "pitch-corrected" the audio, which essentially means that they took the problematic tracks and pulled the pitch back down after-the-fact. It sounds better, but it's still not quite right.

The UK Blu-ray's audio also sounds to me like a stereo source that's been processed into 5.1. It's not unlistenable by any means, but the disc is pretty middle-of-the-road in terms of audio. The video does look much better than the domestic Lionsgate edition, though. I prefer the UK Blu-ray overall.

Possibly, but not likely as Sony has the entire movie industry in their camp and RED hasn't made any claims about anyone backing their format. RED's solution appears to be technically superior, from a codec standpoint, but they have made no actual statements about their RED-Ray format other than there will likely be a consumer and professional version for digital cinema and post-production work and that it may use high-performance flash memory media instead of discs with movies encoded with their in-house developed codec and lossless audio, though it was initially stated several years ago that the format would be optical disc based like Blu-Ray. RED's policy is to no longer say anything about their products until they can put them in your hand, so we'll have to wait and see what is going on with them.

Most studios have their HDCAM-SR masters at 2k, not 4k. I highly doubt studios are going to pay to have new masters created at 4k from the source files or a new scan anytime soon.....

There are quite a few recent films that have 4K masters as they have been doing them for the better part of a decade but there still aren't that many of them at this point because of the resources and time required to do 4K post-production work when it was a new thing and most of the existing 4K masters are older completely film-based catalog titles that have been digitally cleaned up and restored by Warner, Fox, and Sony. Paramount is also getting into 4K with their catalog titles as well. Yes, some recent works will never make it to 4K, but it is a trivial amount considering the overall number that will.