Bram Stoker's Dracula comparison *PIX* - Page 6

The CRT argument is for another day....but a CRT will not get rid of the ridiculously soft focus, washed out color, or lack of detail.

Guys, lets just be honest here, this transfer SUCKS. Period. Enough with the "directors intent" BS or whatever other mumbo-jumbo justification you try to come up with.

If it looks like a turd and walks like a turd....its s TURD!

Agree 100%. I don't doubt that technically the BD has more resolution than the DVD. Of course it does. I don't doubt the film has always had a soft look and shouldn't "pop" on HD. I just don't like the revisionist color timing and possibly clipped blacks.

What's your take on the darkness of the film theatrically? We should always get a slightly better black level at home, but I'm of two minds as to whether the film is genuinely too dark now, or just suffering some Lowry-like syndrome in which they tried to remove the generational shift of the brightness and contrast created by the optical FX, and in leveling it out nearly blacked out a lot of FX.

So I take it the moonlight was blue theatrically as well. That crazy Coppola. The shadows are even horribly clipped to dark blobs with no detail. Yuck.

Great stuff xylon! I am still most eager to see the infamous superimposed journal entry scene comparisons that Dave had pointed out. Please!!!

picked this up today but might not get to watch for a few days.. was only 21.99 euro.... which is quite cheap so i didnt mind taking a punt on it..

Nice work Xylon!

Look at the wonky arifacts in the background of the new BD... VERY digital and processed looking, like bad compression!







Although bluer, the SB looks much more natural.






BD




SB dvd

Every screen cap clearly shows that the BD has far more detail than the SuperBit version, and subtly more detail than the other HD versions. It was SHOT soft-focus and composited optically; what do you want them to do, reshoot the movie so it looks like Crank???

As for the color changes; this is obviously a matter of taste. For those of you who like the technicolor SB edition that's fine. I prefer the new darker look, but even if I didn't I would accept them because FFC went to great effort to achieve this look.

Whether he is responding the critics of the film release, or simply always hated the SB version (or a little of both) doesn't really matter to me. It's his film and I'm happy to watch it how he intends. If you don't like it, don't buy this version. But don't pretend like this transfer was somehow botched. It has more detail then other releases (and almost certainly as much detail as you're going to get) and greate lengths were taken for a year to get the color timing the way the director wanted.

That is all I can ask for.

Also posterization in her skin tone is a lot easier to pick out on the BD. Looks very badly compressed compared with the SB. Now maybe the coloring helped suppress this, but the BD looks like it was shot with a low quality digital camera! I noticed this phenomenon several times during the movie, but the caps here are a very clear example. Looks terrible!

On the SB it looks like firelight reflecting off her smooth, somewhat heavy (likely stage quality) make-up. The BD looks like it was processed to death...maybe oversharpened trying to put detail back after all the tinkering. Sorry, the old one looks better to me. Sad considering that's SD! Drain all the color and brightness out of the image and enhance it, expect an ugly result I guess.

Defend him all you want, but in my eyes Coppola, or whoever actually worked on it, ruined this film. Watching the BD was a depressing experience for me.

My pix were shot off my screen, not an actual screen capture and then reduced to 640x480 to post here so they are compressed but I was just taking these to show the color differences. Look to Xylon's much better pix to really see the full res. versions.

0:29:46

I am so interested in this, because on Dave's screen shots I kept thinking he must have his calibration off or something. But when I watched the BR, I was looking for this scene and then I almost missed it because I almost couldn't see the lettering and was looking for it! Of course the way my pj is calibrated could have something to do with it too, so I would really like to know what is on the discs.
Thanks so much.

while my calibration may not have been perect, if my calibration had been THAT off, you wouldn't have seen it on the DVD then either as I used the same player, PJ and settings

Shouldn't the BRD be more than just slightly better than crummy SD? They could've encoded the BRD at 540p (half of full HD) and the results would've been the same. In fact, I just tried it and they are pretty much the same. Almost no fine detail. Bogus.

Hey Xylon, Just wanted to say your shots are proper. I took some shots via PS3's output at 1080i, and they match up nearly perfectly (though mine have a slight tint of green which can probably be explained by the capture card).

Heres some shots for your own comparisons:

I'd say pretty exact.

Glad to see the conversation...resurrected.

Now, how about that 0:29:46 timestamp?! lol!

Blacks are absolutely terrible on this release. Looking at the photo of the guy in the carriage, it's hard to even tell what the hell is going on. On the doc the scene is actually recognizable.

We seem to have 2 or 3 issues here:

1) Detail: I don't see how anyone can complain; there is clearly more detail in the BD than the SD versions. It's not like the first release of the 5th Element, which used mpeg2 with too little disk space, this is a high bitrate AVC encoding. The movie simply will never look like Crank, and that's a GOOD THING.

2) Color Timing: This is obviously subjective. I like the creepier atmosphere of the BD, but I can see how others would prefer the DVD color timing.

2.5) Black levels (clearly related to the color timing): A lot of people seem to be most disturbed by the change in black levels in the movie. Since Coppola approved it, it's again fine by me (and mostly responsible for the "creepier" feeling I get from this version) but I can certainly see why some would prefer to see more details. Also, there do appear to be occasional artifacts from the black-crush process. Too bad these movies aren't all mastered in 12 or 16 bit color depth, but it's the reality we are stuck with. I can't imagine noticing those artifacts at 24fps, but that's just me.

Conclusion: There are a couple of reasons why people may not like this transfer, but they seem to have FFC to blame, not SPE or the encoding artists. I cannot imagine that there is significantly more detail to be had form this movie, so people complaining about that are doing so out of unrealistic expectations, or a lack of perspective.

I want to say that this is not like many earlier BD releases and some more recent HD DVD catalog releases, where QC seems to have been the problem (Disney's Dinosaur jumps readily to mind), there was every bit of technology, space, and bandwidth available. The detail from the original is there, it's just a soft-focus movie that was composited optically. In many ways similar to Sleepy Hollow, which has heavy grain and is shot soft-focus in smoke-filled interiors; Warner has been bad-mouthed over how SH looks, but in point of fact it's a good representation of the original.

Xylon, could you post a version that isn't expanded to pc levels? The pc levels function in the Haali renderer slightly clips black detail. Just to rule out that possibility because if it really does look like that then this disc is truly FUBARed.

What luma range setting is activated within Haali Renderer? There's PC (0-255) and TV (16-235) levels. Not sure which version you're using but on mine selecting TV (16-235) expands it to PC levels.

On a seperate note what YUV colorspace is selected within your Haali control panel? There's BT.601 and BT.709. If you're using Haali Renderer to play dvds and it's on BT.709 than that would explain the orange reds problem that's in a lot of your dvd captures.