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Gary,
I read over the Dracula Blu-ray review. I was curious if you had any comments regarding the controversial color changes to the film. And why it wasn't addressed in the review.

Hi Luke,

I don't own the DVD - but you may contact the reviewer Luiz. Luiz [[email protected]].

Didn't Rob Harris at HTF say it was supposed to look this way though?

One new...

Euro Video (2-disc Limited Edition) - Region 2 - PAL "The Shawshank Redemption" vs. Roadshow Entertainment - Region 4 - PAL vs. Carlton (3 disc) - Region 2 - PAL vs. Warner - Region 1 - NTSC vs. Warner (SE) - Region 1 - NTSC

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/

Happy Holidays,

Hey Gary, since we know you'll read this thread: Fire Feng.

Gary, there's something off with your Blu-ray screencaps. They always look too blue and have blown out highlights. The cold hue is more evident in a black and white film, but it's there in your reviews of color films, as well. You may need to recalibrate your TV or check the exposure and white balance settings of your camera. Here are some comparisons between your photos of The Seventh Seal and mine:










The Tartan Blu-ray is better than all DVD editions. It looks wonderful, and I'd hate to see anyone pass it up thinking it isn't much of an improvement.

Thanks Don (and Domino for the fine suggestion).

Yes, the gremlin in the system has been uncovered!

Just to be specific - DVDBeaver caps above are the ones on TOP (and the last one is not an exact frame match).

I, too, endorse the BRD Seventh Seal -
"Actually I am a little encouraged by this high-definition release from Tartan. I think they did an okay job. Quite possibly as good as this masterpiece will ever look on digital. I appreciate the extras in the package as well. I'm now VERY keen to see Tartan's next Blu-ray release. The Seventh Seal looks and sounds better than I have ever experienced before."

Happy Holidays to all,
Gary

Okay I'm confused. Donald B came on here saying Gary's caps are Too Blue... so I figured looking at the comparitive caps that the BOTTOM was the beev and the top was Gordon's.

Turns out the reverse was true!!

Gordon's caps are so much more blue than gary's they look like tinted night scenes from a silent film!

HerrSchreck,
Mine were leaning to bluish - they have been redone with the system re-calibrated. Mine may exhibit a bit more brightness still but I expect this is a factor that I may not be able to remove from the capture process (always working though).

If anyone cares - in regards to Feng - I have replaced his review of Eastern Promises with my own.

Best of the season to all,
Gary

Gary Tooze wrote: If anyone cares - in regards to Feng - I have replaced his ridiculous review of Eastern Promises with my own.

=D> Thank God.

Gary Tooze wrote:HerrSchreck,
Mine were leaning to bluish - they have been redone with the system re-calibrated. Mine may exhibit a bit more brightness still but I expect this is a factor that I may not be able to remove from the capture process (always working though).

If anyone cares - in regards to Feng - I have replaced his ridiculous review of Eastern Promises with my own.

Best of the season to all

All the best to you too Gary-- Happy Holidays to you and all your loved ones from yours truly Nagging Silent Film Crazy Person In NYC. Thanks for another year of hard and often thankless work. You are appreciated, brother.
On the Bergamn, No I wasn't criticising you.. I was thrown that Donald was complaining that your caps were blue (I did notice a slight blue haze to yours, don't get me wrong)-- when his were even bluer!

domino harvey wrote:

Gary Tooze wrote: If anyone cares - in regards to Feng - I have replaced his ridiculous review of Eastern Promises with my own.

=D> Thank God.

Dang it, I missed the original review; what was wrong with it? If anyone doesn't mind a brief overview

eez28 wrote:

domino harvey wrote:

Gary Tooze wrote: If anyone cares - in regards to Feng - I have replaced his ridiculous review of Eastern Promises with my own.

=D> Thank God.

Dang it, I missed the original review; what was wrong with it? If anyone doesn't mind a brief overview

Love conquers all

Here's the complete text of the review courtesy of Google's cached version of DVD Beaver:
[quote="Feng"] Eastern Promises is my first exposure to David Cronenberg. (I'm not counting the director's re-make of The Fly, which was clearly a populist effort rather than what Cronenberg's reputation promises.) Color me impressed. This movie is a slick, brutal drama about Russian gangsters in London .. Naomi Watts plays Anna, the heroine who stumbles upon nefarious deeds when trying to return an orphaned baby to her family. I've always been bored by Viggo Mortensen's somnambulant performances, but in this movie, he's enjoyably sly and funny. He's also credible as a man of action in a memorable steam-bath fight scene. In fact, all of the performances are first rate. I consider this an ensemble effort.

Unfortunately, this isn't a perfect effort. For some reason, the filmmakers decided to get mushy and sentimental during the finale. The best way to describe the ending is, “Love conquers all.â€

From the front page of DVDBeaver:

Eddie Yunda Feng will no longer be reviewing for DVDBeaver. Best of luck Eddie!

\:D/ Merry Christmas one and all!

HerrSchreck (who's Gordon?), Gary's caps were ice blue before. The hue of the Seventh Seal Blu-ray is quite neutral on my display. I fired off a few shots quickly, without using a tripod and without optimizing my own camera settings, to give a brief impression of the vast difference between the original Beaver caps and what I was seeing on my system.

For reference, here are the original Beaver shots, followed by mine:









Neither Gary's nor my photos are doing the disc justice. When I have the time, I'll try to optimize everything and take more shots to give a even more accurate reflection of the it. It's really lovely.

Donald Brown wrote:HerrSchreck (who's Gordon?), .

What, you never knew that when he was the mere Chancellor of the uh Exchequer Gordon Brown was an innovator in the zone of screencapping and a regular contributor here?

Actually just brain bleed. I did the same thing the other day, me and my brothers were goofing around in email to my father, and I said (I had been doing some reading on Welles the past 48 hrs), in mock disgust after some bad joke-- "Well, they're your prodigy pop."

Gary's caps were ice blue before. The hue of the Seventh Seal Blu-ray is quite neutral on my display. I fired off a few shots quickly, without using a tripod and without optimizing my own camera settings, to give a brief impression of the vast difference between the original Beaver caps and what I was seeing on my system..

Dude I'm just remarking on what you reproduced here, above. Instead of capturing and demonstrating the disc's content in a less-blue temperature, your caps were more blue than Gary's. That's all I'm saying: like saying "Geezus Khrist Garrie, I hav bin notissing a lot of sperring errors on your sighte."

No big thing, man.

HerrSchreck wrote:Dude I'm just remarking on what you reproduced here, above. Instead of capturing and demonstrating the disc's content in a less-blue temperature, your caps were more blue than Gary's. That's all I'm saying: like saying "Geezus Khrist Garrie, I hav bin notissing a lot of sperring errors on your sighte."

Excuse me? I've edited my previous post to include Gary's original photos to clear things up for you. Please have a look.

Donald Brown wrote:Excuse me?

Did you burp?

(Seriously.. there's a difference there in the above example between the first comp you posted... but they still all look pretty bluish to me. Whereas in the first comp yours were a bit bluer than the light blue in Gary's, now you two did a reverski and now yours is sorta periwinkle while Gary's orig is like Navy.

It must be the "Blue" in Blu-Ray..)

Allow me to clear this up.

Don posted links to my caps (on Beaver) - which were originally very blue. I re-did and replaced the old files making his comments about the posted caps temporarily invalid. Schreck you saw after I had 'fixed'. He then reposted the bluish ones so you could see. Don is absolutley correct and I thank him for inspiring me to find my tech culprit and replace. He is also correct in identifying that Tartan have created a good release here (which I agreed - even before I fixed the caps!).
BOTTOM LINE: If you like the film an have Blu-ray - BUY!
Best,
Gary

Thanks G.. Don's last post got that pretty much across. I was just remarking on the fact that-- since he was trying to clarify the record as to the look of the film-- what he basically did was confirm, via a variety of cap-passes, this disc without question has a blue tint in places.

The differences in color temperature from cap to cap notwithstanding, the disc (either thru telecine or authoring) definitely seems to have an unmistakably blue hue.

Herr Schreck - are you viewing on a calibrated monitor? I am, and Don's caps look neutral to me in the latest set posted. The others are indeed very blue, especially noticeable in highlights and midtones. An uncalibrated monitor can introduce all sorts of color casts and tonality issues. One of the first things I impress on my Photoshop students is the fact that they *must* use a calibrated monitor for any type of high quality PS work.

No, the disc itself has no blue hue. If anything, my screencaps have a faint green tinge.

Are you by any chance viewing this on a LCD monitor? They tend to skew toward the cold side and are not ideal for critical judgment of color. When I look at photos on my laptop they do appear faintly blue, but on my color calibrated CRT desktop monitor, these captures are just slightly green. Even that isn't a fully accurate representation of the disc's image as it appears on my television. There are so many variables when using a digital camera to get a screen capture off of a television that getting everything perfect is nearly impossible, and anomalies are easily introduced. Look, for example, at the chroma aberration on the roof and on Max von Sydow's face in the second shot. That's not on the disc or on the television, it's introduced by the camera. And if a camera's white balance is off, even by a fraction, as mine was when taking these shots, it can result in less than ideal color.

Until hi-def computer drives are available to the Beaver for getting standardized screen captures for reviews, the best we can hope for is a mere approximation of a hi-def disc's quality through digital photography. This is admittedly quite a compromise.

[Edit: Danny beat me to the point of the importance of calibrated monitors. Thanks for sharing your insights, Danny.]

Never have I been so thankful for my colorblindness...

On one brand new supergigantoid hi-end Dell monitor just calibrated, they look slightly less blue in some caps, some almost normal, some look like they have a superslight touch of algae green. On one "average, few year old Toshiba nonspecialized Regular Person Computer" they look like they're tinted blue.

I don't know what to construe when this "colorizing" phenom is not present on other titles SD or HD. Surely when the vast bulk of the existing HD & SD library look normal on Average Equipment, and a single title exhibits color anomalies, suspicion should magnetically drift in one specific direction. If white reads White and black reads black (we're talking a simple monochrome image here-- no "color" involved on the source end)-- consistently-- and suddenly a single title comes in black white and blue... is it the monitor?

What does this say for all other titles which have looked perfectly pure b&w without a touch of blue? (I'm not kidding since you've got me interested now and my equipment has been called into question). Ninety percent of the titles viewed on my monitor are b&w films, and I've never experienced this phenomena.

Sorry your thread has been hijacked Gary-- mods feel free to slice this off somewhere if necc.... though perhaps since screengrabbing/viewing technology is under discussion perhaps this is the correct spot?

New...

Madman Entertainment - Region 0 - PAL "The Tracker" vs. Facets Video - Region 0 - NTSC

and in our review of Eclipse's Postwar Kurosawa Boxset - we have compared to existing editions (Masters of Cinema's Region 2 NTSC editions of Scandal and The Idiot and the single-layered PAL BFI in the case of I Live in Fear).

Those keen may wish to check out our DVD of the Year poll results for 2007.

20th Century Fox - Region 1 - NTSC "An Affair to Remember" vs. RESTORED 20th Century Fox - Region 1 - NTSC vs. 20th Century Fox (50th Anniversary) - Region 1 - NTSC

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/

Best,

Hey Gary,

I don't mean to nitpick, but is there any way you can link directly to reviews when updating this thread? Not that it's that big a hassle to visit the website and find them ourselves, but it'd just make things easier.

Cheers.