criterionforum.org

eerik wrote:Good video players, such as VLC Media Player or Media Player Classic - Home Cinema, have built-in functions for taking screenshots. They can save the frame exactly as it is on the source file as uncompressed BMP or lossless PNG file, regardless of what monitor or screen resolution is used. This is a good and proper method.

Then there is special screen capturing software, such as FRAPS, that captures/saves what is shown on the screen in the resolution that it is shown. This is not a good method for taking screenshots.

Thank you for the reply. I've been trying to take quality screen caps and I will investigate the two you mentioned.

What were you using on the PC previously if you weren't using the likes of VLC and MPC?

Anybody picking this up?

knives wrote:I don't this has been mentioned yet, but the Gaumont releases seem to be the first region locked releases by Olive.

Doesn't surprise me. Major European rightsholders like Gaumont, Studio Canal and their Italian counterparts usually insist on region-locking.

knives wrote:I don't this has been mentioned yet, but the Gaumont releases seem to be the first region locked releases by Olive.

DVDBeaver is usually reliable about the region coding information but for some reason they've listed every(I think)Olive release as region A locked.I only own a region B blu-ray player so naturally I've skipped a lot of their releases.

I recently e-mailed to Olive about the region coding of Invasion of the BS but never received a reply...They probably don't like to be bothered by the paying customers.

JPJ wrote:DVDBeaver is usually reliable about the region coding information

The information they report is always correct, it's just that it often corresponds to something they reviewed previously!

I can guarantee at the least that all of their Paramount releases are region free. I don't have their other releases in front of me at the moment to double check though.

Mathew2468 wrote:

Anybody picking this up?

I might, but then again I have a thing for collecting truly awful films just so I can have fun riffing them with friends.

According to HTF, these titles are also due on October 2nd:

Train of Life (DVD & Blu-ray)
The Milk of Sorrow (Blu-ray)

david hare wrote:Once again Kauffman parades his stone headed idiocy ("Can't help laughing... Johnny Guitar"). This is a Ray so many people revere as one of the three or four greatest.

He takes over from Armond for me as most redundant dvd writer on the web.

I can't say I've ever enjoyed any of his reviews. His tone seems to come across as condescending and defensive. Pro-B isn't perfect (unmarked spoilers in his selections) but at least he's professional and seems fair.

david hare wrote:I've never understood this obsession with the literary/literal nicety of "Spoilers" as though you are only ever going to watch the film once ever, only.

One can watch a movie for the first time only once. And the person has the right to discover the plot points by herself.

david hare wrote:Personally I'm perfectly happy to read Svet's reviews INCLUDING the spoilers.

I've never understood this obsession with the literary/literal nicety of "Spoilers" as though you are only ever going to watch the film once ever, only. I would only observe them myself in deference to the apparently universal dependence on them which still mystifies me.

There are some films that cannot be spoiled. Last Year at Marienbad, Certified Copy, The Virgin Spring, for example. However, can you imagine someone reading about the ending of Pyscho before seeing it?

It's a common courtesy not to spoil a film. A scholarly film analysis is another matter.

DVDBeaver on the Bound Blu-ray

Olive was cheap an lazy. Two separate low-bitrate encodes (for something that could have been easily done via seamless branching) with lossy audio on a single layer disc. ](*,)

The two encodes is really no big deal, IMO. If it looks good it looks good, and there's plenty of room on a BD25 for ~3.5hrs of video with one audio track. Why that audio track isn't lossless is another matter, because there's no reason it couldn't fit, even with two full encodes of the feature.

The Olive version is slightly sharper but it looks a little too bright to me. The shadows in some scenes don't even look like shadows. Neither version looks that good to me, but since the other is zoomed, I'd have to go for the Olive and reduce brightness on the TV.

captveg wrote:The two encodes is really no big deal, IMO. If it looks good it looks good, and there's plenty of room on a BD25 for ~3.5hrs of video with one audio track. Why that audio track isn't lossless is another matter, because there's no reason it couldn't fit, even with two full encodes of the feature.

BD-25s have a size limit of 25,025,315,816 bytes (23,866 megabytes), which is awfully close to the 24,342,577,460 bytes (23,214.9 megabytes) of the Bound disc. DTS-HD 2.0 tends to clock in at about 1000 Kb/s, and by my rough calculations, replacing the lossy DD tracks with DTS-HD would've required an additional 900 megabytes, which is a few hundred MB into BD-50 territory. So either Olive would've had to cut further into the video bitrate or implement seamless branching. Or maybe the disc has some really elaborate menus they could've cut out, I dunno.

Good article, but the header with the Criterion comparison is absurd.

Haha, for one thing, Criterion hasn't contemptuously spurned any contributions from Tag Gallagher lately.

The article mentions they've licensed from Warner. I wonder if there's any truth to that or if the author is just confused by the fact that they've announced former Warner properties like Twilight's Last Gleaming and Fedora (now both licensed from Bavaria). I suppose the 1983 Casablanca TV series was probably licensed from Warner. Anything else?

knives wrote:Good article, but the header with the Criterion comparison is absurd.

In fairness, even the Olive guy who is quoted believes it's absurd. I'm guessing the writer must be getting free copies from them.

Headlines for articles are rarely written by the writer of the article, but rather by one of the paper's editors.

Actually, I don't find the comparison absurd at all. Olive may not be doing the restorations and the extras that Criterion does, but most of its releases are technically competent or better (I just watched the Despair Blu-ray, which is gorgeous), and if you limit the comparison to just the title line-ups, I think Olive might be coming out ahead this year.

watched Numero Deux yesterday, so great after years of blurry VHS. Thanks, Olive \:D/

October 16th
Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948)
Three Secrets (Robert Wise, 1950)
The Slender Thread (Sydney Pollack, 1965)
The Sterile Cuckoo (Alan J. Pakula, 1969)
Up Tight! (Jules Dassin, 1968)

All five are both Blu-ray and DVD.