blu-ray: are old films a ripoff?

brightonman123

seeing some comps on MSE which inclue older films on bluray made me think- is it just the old format copied onto a new disc,

or were the producers holding back a whole wad of hi-res content, for 20 years or so?

charging OTT b/r prices for dvd or even vhs quality stuff is just not on!

jackieb

I've watched old dvd's on a Blu-Ray player, and even they look better when viewed with a Blu-Ray and a good TV.

brightonman123

my thinking is that any ropyey film will look worse, AND you've paid ove the odds for the sake of it being a new fangled system!

'you can't polish a turd'!

david39

I think that many old films are being released on Blu Ray now and are better than their older DVD or VHS counterparts.

One of the reasons is that, with the introduction of modern video enhancement techniques, it is now commercially viable to restore these old films to much closer to their original definition and colour tones. A few years ago, the process would have been prohibitively expensive as it needed to be done by hand, frame by frame. Now, much of it is done electronically but in most cases this is re-started from the original film print and not by doctoring a previously produced disc or tape.

Much more information on this can be found at:
http://www.thedigitalbits.com/

pealy

Surely the film would have been shot in something with a much higher resolution than VHS in the first place, projecting to a huge cinema screen would have looked like ZX81 graphics otherwise. Presumably they could now transfer this to Blu-ray and offer and 'HD' version?

Acehole_2

are old films are better on blueray?, for an example they have released the bond films on blueray, the colours are outstanding. they were shot originally in technicolor and were very vibrant, which is picked up on blueray, so in my humble opinion old films are better on blueray. as earlier suggested they were filmed for a 50ft screen so on a 42" there is great clarity

Psychofly

As far as I'm aware due to the limitations of the broadcast tecnnology and VHS stuff has for a long time been filmed in far higher quality than it's been possible to play it back so there will be a difference even on old films. Can't remember where I read this but it makes sense to me.

Nilrem

Old films will have been shot, on well film

Depending on the film stock used it can be the equivalent of much much higher resolutions than Bluray can cope with (from memory they are currently scanning old films in at about 4k horizontal resolution compared to 1080p for "full HD", restoring it, then downscaling it for "HD" releases to blu-ray).

They can also do the same for TV programmes that were shot and edited on film, but not so easily on anything that has been edited in any form on video (due to the limitations of the video editing stuff used until fairly recently) - hence the re-release of the Star Trek TOS on blu-ray, they were able to use the original film stock and redo the special effects for a HD release.

Whilst it's true that a lot of broadcast quality video masters are/were considerably better than VHS, they weren't/aren't that much better (still limited in resolution to lower than HD, but on much better storage mediums such as digibeta* compared to VHS)

However it is worth noting that some Blu-Ray releases are basically just the DVD version upscaled during the authoring of the blu-ray disk, a practice that I think is becoming less common now, and mainly affects (from what I understand) early blu-ray releases of older films (with some getting new releases using proper HD quality masters).

Of course, any new HD release of films with dodgy affects will probably just show up how dodgy those affects really were.;)


*An oddity of the video recording systems is that Betamax is/was actually the better format for quality than VHS, but lost out in part due to cost/size, however for broadcasters the quality meant they kept using variants on it including a digital version.

S0litaire

With every new format their is a 3 to 4 year period for the industry to catch up with the Quality of the releases. When DVD's first came out, they were just re-encoded VHS (lots of DVD mags at the time were actually spending half of the reviews for new DVD's complaining about the encoding and breakup in action scenes caused by the direct encoding from VHS).

It took a few years for the industry to get back to the negitives and clean them up for "direct to DVD" conversion and encoding. Then the quality of DVD's increased hugly!

The same is happening with Blu-Ray's, they are just upscaling the old DVD masters. It takes them a few years to go back through their back catalouge and clean up and use the the origional film masters for "direct to Blu-Ray" you should see them coming on to the market in the next few years (usally tagged as "Digitally Remastered"or "Special Editions").

mr_fishbulb

Blu-ray disks are a rip off full stop.

OK so they have to pay off development costs etc, but the mark ups are extortionate over dvds for something which costs the same in raw materials to produce:

Valkyrie DVD £12.68, Blu-ray £17.98
Defiance DVD £10.98, Blu-ray £16.98
Pineapple Express DVD £5.98, Blu-ray £15.98

(prices on Amazon)

Fliss_M

mr_fishbulb wrote: »

Blu-ray disks are a rip off full stop.

OK so they have to pay off development costs etc, but the mark ups are extortionate over dvds for something which costs the same in raw materials to produce:

Valkyrie DVD £12.68, Blu-ray £17.98
Defiance DVD £10.98, Blu-ray £16.98
Pineapple Express DVD £5.98, Blu-ray £15.98

(prices on Amazon)

If you can. Go back and look at the % mark up of VHS on DVD. I suspect it was the same. the older the film, the bigger the %. Prices will come down. I remember when DVD took off, mum got me 2 new film vids for xmas as they cost her £20 rather then £50 for the dvd. And am sure new releases on blu ray started out at £25, there about £20 now.