yukichigai
Mar 2005
Video Tech Geek
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Watchable
Well it's definitely watchable, and listenable, and considering how goddamn awesome this movie is you should definitely watch it.
Video - 6: For a cam, this has issues. It's watchable for the most part, but there are some issues. Firstly, the compression is crap: macroblocks everywhere, probably due to the low light levels in the theater. Secondly, the significant left-side cropping is annoying at times, considering a number of visual gags seem to occur on the left side of the screen where you can't see. Thirdly, the camera goes out of focus several times, particularly in the darker scenes; obviously the camera was set to auto-focus, which is a bad move on the part of the cammer. Finally, there is an odd "temporal blur" which is applied to the film. For 90% of the content you won't notice, but in the action scenes, particularly the fights where the film's camerawork gets jerky, it's all but impossible to see what's going on at times. Now on the positive side, since the film is a european film it was filmed and displayed in the theater at 25fps, and since this was captured on a 25fps cam the video is free of the usual "motion blur" we all know and love. (Though replaced with a different, less annoying type as mentioned above)
Audio - 8: For a cam it's pretty clean. Not very hollow or echoey or even particularly tinny. There's some occasional background noise when people laugh, but I only remember three occasions when I could make out audience members laughing, and it wasn't particularly obvious. I am irritated at CAMERA for how they encoded the audio however: this is audio from a monaural source, and yet the file uses a 128kbps *stereo* mp3. It isn't even joint stereo either, which means that you're basically listening to a 64kbps mono mp3 soundtrack for double the space. I doubt the higher bandwidth would have made much listenable difference in the quality, but the principle of the matter makes this maddening. Hell, I think technically it's nuke-worthy.
Movie - 9.9: Funniest, most awesome goddamn film I've seen in a while. It's pretty much funny all the way through, though some of it is excessively dry for short bits. The action scenes are really quite well done, just as high quality as the original films that the scenes are mercilessly mocking. Honestly, I think this movie is better than Shaun of the Dead.
Bottom Line: If you really, really need to see this film RIGHT NOW then this release is perfectly acceptable. However, the focus and blur issues with the video, as well as the missing first few minutes of the film, might make it worth holding off until a better source comes around. True, it's only a few minutes of missing footage, but considering how funny the rest of the film is I bet those are two excessively funny minutes all the same.
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