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First Blu-ray Movie Titles Announced
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Sat Jan 07, 2006 07:34 PM
from the just-pick-one-and-run-with-it dept.
from the just-pick-one-and-run-with-it dept.
JorgeDeLaCancha writes "Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and MGM Home Entertainment have recently announced the release of the first titles on the Blu-Ray media coinciding with the Blu-Ray hardware release in the spring. Some of the films to be released include classics such as "The Fifth Element" and "Robocop" to more modern films such as "Black Hawk Down." Other corporations, such as Fox, have announced similar plans."
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Wow. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Wow. (Score:2, Interesting)
KFG
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Interesting)
That was back when blowing up a robot involved actual pyrotechnics.
Parent
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Funny)
Retract that comment. You have 20 seconds to comply.
http://cd.textfiles.com/carousel/GIFA/ED209.GIF [textfiles.com]
Parent
Screw 'em. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Screw 'em. (Score:4, Insightful)
Until there is a big enough screen affordable to the regular user to make content like that clearly better than content on a DVD, they can continue pounding salt.
Parent
Re:Screw 'em. (Score:3, Informative)
Though I do agree that the quality difference isn't enough to re-invest in all my movies.
Re:Screw 'em. (Score:3, Informative)
So that's at least a 5-fold increase in number of pixels per field. If you compare a DVD to a Blu-ray or HD-DVD of the same movie side by side, on a TV that can at least
Re:Screw 'em. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've thought about it, and in a way I'm wrong. Hardware formats will cease to matter.
CDs were the last major hardware "format" to evolve for music since the 80s. Attempts to supercede it and succeed it in that arena have failed. There will not be another major hardware format for music because it now comes as files. People are now so accustomed to music as files, that even joe consumer will download them from v
Re:Screw 'em. (Score:3, Interesting)
Plain old CDs from the 1980s already contain two channels of 40KHz audio, which happens to be almost exactly what a human is capable of perceiving.
In video, on the other hand, there is no such correspondence. Today's display technologies don't come close to filling your visual field, and if you try simply by blowing them up, they're hopelessly blocky. And they're still i
Re:Screw 'em. (Score:3, Funny)
No PS3 for you then? (Score:3, Interesting)
Furthermore, even if you have a non HD TV might you not be interested in the extra exttras the additional space allows for on Blu-Ray discs?
I'm not saying there are a lot of titles on that list I'm willing to spring for... but I will probably re-buy a few selected things and I know I'll enjoy renting them on Netflix (who I assume will be format neutral in this war and rent both
Even better (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Travesty! (Score:3, Funny)
Classic. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Classic. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
The vicious cycle (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The vicious cycle (Score:3, Informative)
Lot's of legal issues on that one. I'm waiting with bated breath myself. Here's [brmovie.com] a page that's tracking the (little) progress that is made on it. Guaranteed sales, don't know what their problem is.
Picture quality of Robocop? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Picture quality of Robocop? (Score:3, Funny)
It's called "film."
It's very old movie - it was made in 1989.
It's called "recent."
Isn't it kinda like putting
It's called "capacity."
It doesn't make any sense.
Ahhhhhhhh, it's called "troll."
IHBH
KFG
Film Buffs unite! to ignore Blu-Ray (Score:3, Interesting)
So the only early adopters will be the same gadget hungry geeks who invested in Laser Disc players. We all know how well that worked out. I'm really looking forward to watching this fall on its face.
Re:Film Buffs unite! to ignore Blu-Ray (Score:3, Interesting)
HA! (Score:5, Funny)
"Nearly 50" HD-DVD titles also announced (Score:5, Informative)
- The Matrix
- Batman Begins
- The Bourne Supremacy
- Aeon Flux
- Jarhead
- U2: Rattle & Hum
There are many articles about HD DVD/Blu-ray titles on Google News.Blu-Ray is marketlicious (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, but Blu-ray discs comes in a shiny blue box [ign.com]!
(Seriously, as much as I despise this "format war" and especially Sony, I think Blu-Ray has a much better marketing catch.
Robocop... (Score:4, Funny)
Sadly (Score:3, Informative)
nothing pissed me off more than buying the family guy dvd and having them tell me that it is bad to share movies. THANKS FUCKS, I JUST PAID $12.99 FOR THE FUCKING DVD.
Re:Sadly (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sadly (Score:3)
I hope most people would be smart enough not to think that a pirated movie would have a "please don't pirate" message included.
Great! Now use the capacity to fit more on 1 disc! (Score:5, Informative)
Slashcode bug # 497457 - unfixed since December 2001 - Go look it up [sourceforge.net]!
Future problems? (Score:3, Insightful)
Think about it, after hi-def what comes next? (and don't say internet distribution etc only, people want things they can actually own in their hands)
First it was video cassettes, then dvd and now hi-definition.. each with a definitive quality increase over their predecessor. Now however with high definition they've pretty much hit the wall, people don't need or won't want to buy super-high-deluxe-definition unless they've got a projector which projects the video onto a ridiculously large area.
It will reach a point where it'll be "good enough", you can already see a lot of people commenting about how they don't see the point of hi-def dvd (which people will eventually go over to) when dvd suits them fine.
The human eyeball can only see so much.
Wait (Score:3, Insightful)
LOL, Ladies and Gentleman, the next Laserdisc (Score:5, Insightful)
The other truth of the matter is, for most intents and purposes, the average person has never exploited how good DVD looks in the first place. They use S-video at best. An anamaphoric-enhanced DVD release (as most theatrical DVDs have been since the 90's), on a progressive scan DVD player with component inputs on a widescreen TV looks damn good. Better than most people will ever wish to have in their home.
The big mistake all of the movie companies are making is that they think we are all itching for something new. We aren't. We don't care. Very few people care about this technology. We'll be well into the next decade before we start lamenting that Wal-Mart is carrying more Blu-Ray/HD discs than DVD. The studios and certain techies keep throwing numbers out there, telling us all what we are supposedly missing...and the joke is going to be on them when these things hit the market with a resounding thud.
Sneaking in through the back door (Score:3, Insightful)
That's actually a pretty interesting analysis, but wrong for two reasons:
1) Blu-Ray is going to be embedded in a very popular game system, which will in turn mean a lot more owners of players much more quickly and thus more people buying discs. With a greater market acceleration it will pick up fast enough to live unlike LD where it was hard for a long time to convinc
Re:LOL, Ladies and Gentleman, the next Laserdisc (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see the problem with upgrading to Blu-Ray. As consumers get
1080p (Score:3, Insightful)
After all, at any resolution, progressive looks better than interlaced because you have twice the data. Makes pans and other motion smoother, more detail, etc.
Too bad you have to buy a very expensive (right now) TV to watch 1080p. But Sony is pushing it with the PS3. 1080p Video games (if they deliver that) and 1080p video.
I still think Blu-ray will win. While this is a definite plus for them (I assume HD-DVD could do this, but I haven't heard of any of the movies or players being able to), if you combine this with the increased storage capacity, the soon to be massive installed base (the PS3), and the availability (within a few months of HD-DVD, and more importantly: before Christmas)... I think things are getting better and better for Blu-ray to win.
It is too bad the NIH syndrome is so big that the two groups couldn't suck it up and make one format. They didn't learn from Beta, I guess. And now that they have a VERY popular entrenched format (DVD) to compete against where Beta didn't (no previous home-video recording equipment), things don't look good on the whole.
Blu-ray will win. It will be a hollow victory. They will beat HD-DVD, but they will only beat DVDs because the studios will stop producing them/selling them. I don't think ANY high-def format is strong enough to take over DVD without resorting to cheating within the next 5 years, at least.
But that depends on the price of HDTVs. If they stay too expensive, then there is no point. If prices crash, then bring on the high-def movies at home.
And kiss theaters further goodbye.
Too bad it won't matter for 24fps film. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now when you upconvert an interlace source (which film is not) to progressive you can get terrible artifacts, but this also depends on the quality of the upconvert hardware/software. Some HDTVs are un-watchable trying to view NTSC, others actually improve the image HUGELY, it all depends on the upconvert algorithms and horsepower assigned.
If you have ever seen 1080I shot live like some of the BRAVO performances you will see that that the image is stunning fluid and better quality than 24fps film. 1080p will be even better when there is a lot of rapid motion of the whole scene. 1080I looks great when filming plays on BRAVO because they avoid exactly this sort of camera motion. 24fps stutters when you scroll and interlace breaks up into a nasty comb effect. 1080P avoids both. And yes this is why gamers are obsessed with frame-rate. Games tend to be nothing but fast motion and pans. Even 120fps isn't overkill for rapid motion. Granted your eye can't see changes at 120fps, BUT -- and this is a big but -- when you have large field rapid motion your eyes will track the apparent motion. The edges will blur as your eye tries to smoothly track a moving image that is actually a series of stills at the frame rate. The only way it could look un-blurred is if your eyes actually tracked them in with a motion that was a series of skips at the frame rate (not even vaguely humanly possible).
For 24fps film 1080I is much better than 720p. 720p is probably a good choice for sports however for all the reasons listed above. OTA transmission doesn't have the bandwidth for 1080p however (at least not with mpeg2). 1080p if pretty close to nirvana for me, past here the gains are so insignificant as to be pointless. But you can always go higher on the frame rate. Shooting stuff in 60fps or higher would likely lead to new filming styles as current ones purposely avoid things that make 24fps look bad.
The film industry should film everything in 60fps whether film or video (and progressive scan only for video). 1080P will look glorious once there is actually material available. This may be the ace in the hole that put Blu-Ray over HD-DVD in a couple of years. But only if content providers wise up and start making 60fps content.
Parent
Well, that's pretty subjective (Score:5, Insightful)
There have been film-based higher frame-rate systems in the past as well, but they never caught on. The problem, as I see it, is that frame rates above about 40fps or so look TOO real. Sets, even well built ones, look like sets -- your brain isn't as easily fooled at 60fps. Even acting tends to look worse -- it's strange, but all the visual cues that are used to convey action and emotion work differently. I suspect that it's possible to develop new film making techniques that would work for high frame rate cinema, but I doubt that it will become universal any time soon. Perhaps eventually when the current generation with its conditioned responses to 24fps drama passes on...
Where I definitely DO see 60fps HD fitting in beautifully is for "experience" kind of things -- rides and simulations and such. It really gives that "looking through a window" feeling that can become really transparent in that situation.
Parent
Re:Well, that's pretty subjective (Score:4, Insightful)
I take in IMAX whenever I'm up to Navy Pier in Chicago and I have never said, "oh this would be much better if it looked less fluid." Sony would be smart to get the IMAX catalog quickly available to really distinguish themselves from HD-DVD, and make sure they use the highest bit-rates possible for highest quality 1080P they can achieve. This is the type of move that wins over the videophile early adopters.
Filmmakers will adapt to be sure to high fps formats. Hell, you can always display lower frame rates when you want. Films like Gladiator used a slower frame rate than 24fps for the battle scenes to give it a choppy disorienting feel. I Robot did this in several scenes as well, but in this case it was just annoying.
If you hadn't noticed films are becoming more and more like rides and simulations all the time, though I'm not saying this is necessarily a good thing in that is usually for game tie-ins. But hell if they're gonna do it, it might as well look good.
Maybe you could be the first filmmaker to do a 60fps remake of 1968's "Bullitt" [wikipedia.org] with Steve McQueen and redefine chase scenes.
Parent
Kickbacks? (Score:3, Interesting)
Bad movies (Score:3, Insightful)
Screw the whole bloody thing. (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to agree with what someone above said, there's not going to be any more 'formats'... It's all about portability and access of the 'files'. We're at a point now, where sooner rather than later, buying movies and music is really going to be a matter of licensing rather than owning something tangible.
This will be both good and bad. There are some people, me included, who aren't really going to notice the difference... I've actually downloaded DVD ISOs of discs I own, because I couldn't find the damned thing, or downloaded anime preformatted for my PSP. (Or at least, a DVD rip I can transcode.) So, with that becoming sort of the norm, I won't lose much sleep over it. (Besides, I treat physical media terribly to begin with.) But for some people, this will just break them, on a fundamental level. Sucks to be them, but they're simply not fit for the digital world. And I won't lose much sleep over them, either.
Now if only I had Verizon FIOS, and its 15mbps downstram for $40 a month.
No wait, better yet... If only I lived in Japan and could share a 1gbit fiber line with twenty other people for $50 a month....damn, the very thought brings a tears to my eyes... *wrings out his eyepatch*
By some definitions... (Score:5, Informative)
I liked it a lot but also have trouble thinking of it as a classic science fiction movie in the same way Aliens is a classic... but it is pretty unique and it has a lot of elements that show off sound and video features quite well.
Parent
Re:Whoop de doo. (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, they filmed that series with two cameras, a semi decent one that made the sets look a bit plasticy, and something they found in a dumpster. Watching the DVDs you can see the different cameras in use, scene to scene, cut to cut. Decent. Grainy. Decent. Grainy. And they always put the decent camera on the men, and the grainy character on the women. Unforgivable.
It is the last series I would have thought about putting on HD media. Indeed most TV seri
Re:No Fight Club? Booo!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
The people who own the DVD specs make a ton of money. Even better than a ton of money though, is a yearly stream of license revenue.
You get money from the hardware mfgs and money from the content people. The content people have to pay a license to get that little DVD logo you see on the packaging. Ditto for the hardware guys, but they also have to license whatever fancy encryption scheme you're using.
It is all about the licensing revenue. It is a long-t
Re:Smart consumers will stay out of the standards (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Most of the Hollywood studios back Blu-Ray.
2. Blu-Ray's native resolution in 1920x1080 progressive scan, with players currently capable of 720p/1080i video output through HDMI now and 1080p output through HDMI within the next year of so.
Dunno anymore... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nowadays, how sizable is the home porn video market compared to the more anonymous, the more instantly 'gratifying' internet porn market that has presumably overwhelmed DVD/VHS distribution due to the immediacy and anonymity the computer offers. If nothing else, seeing all the computers I've dealt with where people stick porn in places they perceive as obscure suggests they have higher confidence in hiding files on a computer than hiding tapes or discs in their home. Even for the television channels, I would wager people feel safer buying some porn network/pay-per-view and hiding the charges on their credit card they find easier than hiding discs/tapes.
In essence, as amusing it is to think of porn as a huge market force in such a context, it probably isn't realistic to consider it a 'killer app' this time around. However, I doubt Sony will be so prudish this time compared to the Betamax fiasco, just to be on the safe side.
Parent
Re:Classics? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Some education... (Score:3, Insightful)
It could happen that way, it depends on how they price the discs and the players. The problem with LD was that the cheapest players were $300-400 (and that was in 1990 dollars). If they can get an affordable Blu-ray *or* HD DVD player (that is, one that sells for a little over $100) available within a year or so of launch, they'll have people lining up to buy them.
Also, keep in mind that unlike VHS/LD, a Blu-ray (or HD DVD) player will also play DVD (so you get y
Artifacts? Restoration. (Score:3, Interesting)