yukichigai
Mar 2005
Video Tech Geek
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As usual, I'm late to the party
Okay, so I took my time to watch this release, but I'm very informed now. Hooray.
Video - 8: Highly watchable, though not perfect by any stretch. I suspect if this wasn't an animated film the clarity would be much, much worse. Fortunately for us the cammer managed to pick up the action fairly well, though we're missing the opening bit with Ralph Wiggum singing the Fox theme. There's some minor image distortion in the video; hard to notice as it may be, some things like the scrolling notice about 10 minutes in show the problem perfectly. There's also the aforementioned brightness issue, which seems to vary depending on the area of the screen. My guess is the above two issues are due to the cammer sitting too close to the screen. There's also a noticable "scroll" to the image (someone described it as an invisible bar); this is due to the shutter speed of the cammer's rig not being adjusted properly, though to be fair very few small digicams have adequate shutter speed settings. Also, the "motion blur" on this movie is remarkably high, but I suspect it's simply more noticable due to it being an animated film, rather than there being something wrong with the capture setup.
Audio - 9: Really quite good. There's an incredibly light hiss to it in a few places, but everything comes through loud and clear. There's even some decent bass to it, and while the sound isn't really stereo, it isn't precisely mono either. Certain effects like crowd noises will often have different left and right channel elements, though most of it is mono audio. The only other issue is that the audio has been lightly stretched in a few places to match up with the video, resulting in a sort of "quickly repeated" or "skipping" effect when this happens. All of these generally occur maybe a few seconds from what would have been a silent or mostly silent section of audio that would have been a better place to stretch the track. I suspect though that Pukka's syncer had to rush to get this thing out before the rest, hence the less-than-perfect job. Oh well, quite listenable all the same. Much better than what I expected for a TS.
Movie - 8: It wasn't the funniest thing I'd ever seen, but it was pretty entertaining. A lot of really good jokes, particularly some that just couldn't be made on broadcast TV. Unfortunately the absolutely hilarious bits have large chunks of just "normal funny" in between them. Still, I think it was a worthwhile film and I hope to see more Simpsons movies in the future. Oh yeah, the subtitle file mentioned earlier does add enough to the film to make it worth it, especially since it's all of 500 bytes in size.
Bottom Line: As best I can tell this is THE release to get at the moment. Certainly the audio is better than anything else out there right now, and will probably remain so even after the R5 inevitably comes out. (Actually, I suspect Pukka will just use the same source for their R5 Line release of the film) The video seems to be about as good as it gets at the moment; I've seen the iND release and it honestly looks the same to me. (Of course, iND is the release group equivalent of Alan Smithee, so who knows if I got the right iND version) Regardless, make sure to download the subtitles for this so you get the captioned jokes. It's only 500 bytes, has been linked to on page two, and has been uploaded to OpenSubtitles as well. No excuse not to pick it up.
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07-29-2007 10:17 PM
