yukichigai
Mar 2005
Video Tech Geek
|
Not a bad effort, certainly better than a lot of recent stuff. It has some issues, but they're relatively minor.
Video - 8: Props to the cammer on this one: the video must have been shot from almost dead center in the theater, and it's level as well. The colors are excellent, as is the contrast. Everything is visible and crisp. There's a slight vertical scan/sync line you can see going up the picture the whole time, but it's very slight. One of the risks of using a fast shutter speed to capture the film clearly, I suppose. The watermark in the top right is perfect for a watermark as far as I'm concerned: visible, but unobtrusive. Sure, you can't easily read that it says "20th" all the time, but you can't get rid of it either. No points deducted for that. The only real reason my rating is an 8 is because of the ludicrously high amount of block artifacts that show up anywhere there's dark space. It's not very distracting, given that you can mostly only see it in black areas, but it did get my attention a few times. Any of you who are planning on converting this to DVD might be in for a rough surprise; I suspect doing so will give you an absolutely shit looking video.
Additionally, while not exclusively a video problem, the movie skips about 15 seconds in one part and nearly a minute in another. The dialogue missed isn't terribly important, but you can tell it happens and it is somewhat jarring.
Audio - 6: The audio on this exhibits one of my biggest audio pet peeves: "fake stereo". The left channel is inverted compared to the right, and otherwise exactly the same. This causes a number of things: 1) your brain is fooled into thinking it's stereo, because your ears hear two slightly different things, 2) the soundtrack is littered with compression artifacts and other compression noise, as the perfect inversion means the bandwidth-saving features of joint stereo mp3 compression are never used, 3) anybody watching this on a standard TV or anything with only one speaker (or who are listening to their center channel output) will hear nothing but muted, muffled track noise, as the right and left channels mostly cancel each other out. Beyond this the audio is clear and audible, though not the best I've heard. Also, there's a minor issue (that I suspect is left over from syncing the audio with the video) where the sound will occasionally "drop out" during what you thought were silent bits. I didn't realize until then that there was a very mild background hiss to the audio, but when the sound dropped out completely it was rather jarring. This only occurs in 4 or 5 places, but nonetheless it is somewhat distressing when you aren't expecting it.
Movie - 7: Your typical romantic comedy, though slightly inventive in the premise. It follows "the formula" to a T though. However, I am awarding bonus points for the outstanding ass-wiggling exploits of Haley Bennett, who is hotter than a 7-alarm fire and makes me want to bend her in the bedroom like kama sutra pretzel.
Bottom Line: An overall excellent jorb by 20th, though they really need to get their act together on the audio; I've noticed a number of their releases utilize this "fake stereo" crap, which really brings the quality of a release down. The missing 1½ minutes aren't a real problem, and unless ADYWAN or someone else releases some kind of hybrid release that splices those missing bits in this is the release to get at the moment. Just make sure to unplug one of your audio cables if you plan on watching this on a mono TV.
Report this post to a moderator | IP: Logged
|
1 NO REQUESTING MOVIES OR SAMPLES (THIS INCLUDES REQUESTS FOR OTHER GROUPS TO RELEASE THIS MOVIE!)
* Newbie questions? Want some weird term clarifying? 
* General questions unrelated to this release? Internet LOL's? 
02-25-2007 06:20 AM
