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Technical question for us North American households, is there any reason streaming couldn’t be at 25 FPS? Will our TVs handle a 25 FPS stream?

Many will not, depends on the TV

domino harvey wrote:Many will not, depends on the TV

Do you know any way to look up a tv model to find out if it would?

Google your TV model and see if the manual is available online (mine was, even though I bought it in 2010), it will tell you what frequencies it can display

Criterion's site lists the total runtime as 902 min while the DVD packaging says 940 min - which is exactly the time difference between 24fps and 25fps.

movielocke wrote: Thu Nov 15, 2018 9:53 pm Blu-ray is four discs and a list price of ONLY 99.95!

That’s a big improvement over the 7 disc $125 of the DVD edition

The Second Sight set was (still is?) five BDs for about 60 USD, and, well, I doubt the Criterion will be mastered by the likes of David Mackenzie.

Strange of Gary to say that both releases have positives and negatives when he doesn't mention any negatives in the Second Sight portion of the comparison. Seems to me he doesn't want to outright say that the Criterion is somewhat inferior to the Second Sight release after Criterion crammed the last part of the film and the extras onto a fourth disc, resulting in artefacts and softer shots.

According to Gary, Criterion encoded the film in 1080i50. Last time they did Baal in a 1080i60 transfer. They seem pretty experimental with these German TV productions.

It's not, I just looked and it's 1080/60p. North American players and televisions cannot handle 50hz content. Gary probably just copy and pasted without double checking.

So is the 15 hour runtime (as opposed to 15 1/2) also inaccurate?

cdnchris wrote:It's not, I just looked and it's 1080/60p. North American players and televisions cannot handle 50hz content. Gary probably just copy and pasted without double checking.

Chris, I suppose you mean 1080/23.976p? Because Blu-ray doesn't support 60p. It's either 60i or 24p.

If it's showing as 1080p60 on the TV then either the player is not set to output 24p OR Gary is correct and it's 60i*. Obviously it cannot be 50i but the runtime can be original if Criterion have added duplicate frames to get up to 30 from 25.

(*though as we've seen plenty of times in the UK, something that is flagged as 50i on a disc doesnt necessarily mean it's interlaced, and the same can be said of anything flagged 60i)

andyli wrote: Sun Feb 03, 2019 4:34 am According to Gary, Criterion encoded the film in 1080i50. Last time they did Baal in a 1080i60 transfer. They seem pretty experimental with these German TV productions.

It can't be 1080i50 as you wrote. I suppose Gary is used to European 1080i discs and assumed it was 50i here too. Baal was indeed 1080i 29.970.
I don't understand why Gary, who is clearly scanning with some BD Info type softwares all these discs, doesn't simply copy paste the whole info instead (ie like this : MPEG-4 AVC Video / 23984 kbps / 1080i / 25 fps / for instance).

Finch wrote: Sun Feb 03, 2019 4:28 am Strange of Gary to say that both releases have positives and negatives when he doesn't mention any negatives in the Second Sight portion of the comparison. Seems to me he doesn't want to outright say that the Criterion is somewhat inferior to the Second Sight release after Criterion crammed the last part of the film and the extras onto a fourth disc, resulting in artefacts and softer shots.

His conclusion is strange since almost the entirety of its "technical" section for the Criterion is quite negative, especially about the encode, and offers no positive element. It's concluded by "The Criterion is also darker than the Second Sight with marginally less detail and looking softer in some scenes."

Sorry, meant 60i. Just pointing out that Gary probably just copy/pasted from elsewhere and forgot to fix it.

The UK disc is 25fps (thus 1080i50), that might simply be where the mistaken C+P comes from.

andyli wrote: Sun Feb 03, 2019 4:34 am According to Gary, Criterion encoded the film in 1080i50. Last time they did Baal in a 1080i60 transfer. They seem pretty experimental with these German TV productions.

The first three words there tell you where the error lies

Second Sight it is for me given that the Fassbinder-related BA extras boil down to (ignoring the extras on both):

• 'Fassbinder: Love Without Demands’ - The acclaimed 2015 feature length documentary by Christian Braad Thomsen (1:47:10)
• An appreciation by writer and critic Tony Rayns (44:26)
• Fassbinder's Phantasmagoria - - A Visual Essay by Daniel Bird (6:10)
• 'The Restoration' documentary including ‘before and after’ (7:28)
• The Original Broadcast Recaps (4:19)
• Berlinale 2007 trailer (6:59)

vs

• Interview from 2007 with Peter Jelavich, author of “Berlin Alexanderplatz”: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture (23:54)

You also have to weigh up having fixed subs (removable watching on a PC), losing the Jutzi version, but getting a better transfer.

So Criterion's Berlin is indeed 1080i60, following Baal's example. I wonder if this will be their norm from now on for 25fps contents. It seems they figured out a way to maintain the speed by converting every five frames into six. After some googling there are 2:2:3:2:3 pull down and 1:1:1:1:2 pulldown methods at their disposal, or they had some other magic up their sleeve.

I'm interested in seeing if there's any noticeable artifact in motion, but I'll probably just grab the Second Sight edition.

Interesting. It sounds like the Second Sight still presents a more "pure" version of the film though, frame for frame, on top of being less compressed.

It seems it's not too different from keeping the correct runtime on a NTSC 29.97 DVD or a 24fps BD. Technically, both are able to maintain the proper runtimes, but one does it in a direct fashion while the other one uses a trick to achieve that.

Correct me if I'm wrong but DVDBeaver seems to mistakenly imply that Phil Jutzi’s 1931 feature-length film is included on both versions (during the review of the Criterion edition). I'll check my Second Sight copy when I get home, but I don't think it's on there (at least it's not advertised as such).

I think it's Gary's wording which is (as too often) not very readable. He's starting the paragraph by "Criterion have some of the same supplements as the Second Sight." but I don't think he's doing any comparison past that, just listing the Criterion extras. Also, when you look at the extras listings just after the discs specs, it indeed states that the Jutzi feature is on the Criterion set but not the SS one.

Sorry I should have been more specific. I actually meant this line that's in the same paragraph:

Included, as on the UK edition, is Phil Jutzi’s 1931 feature film adaptation of Alfred Dublin's 1929 epic novel Berlin Alexanderplatz

But like like you said its in properly omitted from the specs.

Is the picture quality on the blu worth the upgrade? After years of eyeing it, I got the DVD for Christmas, only to have the blu come out a few months later (along with the sting of it being $20 cheaper.)

Obviously not a film I’ll have time to watch a lot, but it is the upgrade worth trying to sell my DVD set?