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-- Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix *REAL PROPER* *XviD* - TELESYNC - PUKKA (http://www.vcdhq.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=77608)

Video - 8 For a TS it's certainly good. Very watchable

Audio - 8 Decent sound, no synch issues and voices very clear. Slight warbling when the music kicks in but nothing much

Movie - 8 Love the books and love the films - fans won't be dissapointed with this one.

Just finished watching, couple of glitches when I watched.. could be my software but nothing major.

Some night scenes are hard to see which is a little shame but hey its pretty dang good considering this movie came out 1 week ago.

Sound generally good throughout although does lack the Bass and the Music is a little erm "slow/fast" so you do get some odd sounding music at some points.

overall all I would say

7/7/7

Movie was alright, but felt very long for what it was!

Thanks Pukka!

V: 6,5
A: 6,5
M: 7

V 6.5
A 7
M7

Too dark in the dark spots, sound a bit flat, movie was okay.

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Video: Dark in some spots making parts of the scene hard to see. Color is better than the other releases though, by far. Resolution is also a bit crappy too, but that may be because it's on a computer screen. I'll post back about it after seeing on a plasma TV.

Audio: Damn good, can hear everything clear. Some parts such as when music kicks in is slightly scratchy, but only a few times. Definitely good audio for only being out a week.

Movie: I liked it, I've been growing up with these books/movies, so it's all good to watch. Some of it dragged, and things could've been explained better, but that's why I have the books in the first place.

V: 7
A: 7
M: 9

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The show must go on...

Now here's a group that knows how to post-process a source

Once again, Pukka impresses me with their competent work on post-processing cam video.

Video - 7: The best video out there yet, though a good R5 will definitely fix that problem quickly. What's interesting about this video is that it's been de-skewed, something I'd long hoped release groups would start doing to cam video shot from a bad angle. (For proof: if you check around the 20:50 mark on cd2 you'll see a typical DV datastream error, except the strips of frozen pixels are angled. That's evidence of a de-skew) Unfortunately the de-skew was done at a low resolution, leaving a highly visible "stair-step" effect on certain angled lines, and in particular round objects like the rims of Harry's glasses. (If you're going to de-skew video, you can avoid that sort of effect by upsampling to 720p or so, de-skewing, then downsampling to your encode resolution. Makes your encode take a bit longer though) Colors are decent and a bit washed out at times; contrast is a minor issue for things with lots of white surrounding them, like the TV seen in the Dursley's house. Focus is a bit off at times too. Still, everything important is perfectly visible; this release is quite watchable.

Audio - 7: There's a hum to it, for one, but it only seems to get noticably bad during certain mostly silent scenes. There's also some distortion that occurs when there's a lot of sound effects happening; it's not distracting, but it does bring the quality of the sound down. Oh yeah, and it's mono, but just about any direct audio is mono these days. Fortunately this audio has decent bass to it, so you don't feel like you're listening from a tin can. Despite the shortcomings, everything is audible and understandable.

Movie - 8: I wasn't blown away, but that's because I'm one of those annoying "book fans" who already knows what's going to happen and gets all twitchy about the stuff they leave out. I will say the magical fight that kicks off towards the end was a lot more exciting than I'd imagined it when I read the book, but nonetheless faithful (mostly) to the written version. Good filmmaking there.


Bottom Line: Despite the low-ish rating this is the best release out there. It's very, very watchable, and more importantly shows a level of video workmanship I find rare anymore. Now that Pukka has shown by example that a badly angled cam can be fixed in post-processing I would hope that other groups would take notice and follow suit.