Digital Archery

Warning: Unless you are a near-complete obsess­ive about both Powell and Pressburger movies and their present­a­tion in the standard-definition DVD and Blu-ray disc home video formats, you are rather likely to find this post quite wonky at best. Which is why the rest of it is going before the fold. 

Well, there. Now that we’ve giv­en suf­fi­cient notice to the non-obsessives, we can relax and chat a bit. 

The new Criterion Collection edi­tions of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948), two of the most extra­vag­ant, rav­ish­ing, hal­lu­cin­at­ory col­or cinema exper­i­ences of theirs or any oth­er era, are to be released on July 20^th. I am for­tu­nate enough to have received review cop­ies of these discs in both their standard-definition and Blu-ray ver­sions; thus inspired, I took one image from each of the pic­tures, rip­ping the screen caps with my com­puter, for a post I put up yes­ter­day called “Sweat it out.” This post yiel­ded two fairly urgent com­ments ask­ing if these new edi­tions are super­i­or to the excel­lent Region‑B locked British Blu-rays of the film issued by ITV in 2008 and 2009 respect­ively. Both of those discs, as European Blu-ray mavens and American Blu-ray adapters for­tu­nate enough to have region-free play­ers know, were/are quite splen­did. But I do think the new Criterions rep­res­ent an improve­ment. I haven’t had a pro­found exper­i­en­tial appre­ci­ation of that improve­ment, as I’ve only just got­ten these discs and haven’t had the time to sit down and watch each film in its entirety. But because of the afore­men­tioned urgency of the ques­tions I got, last even­ing I was inspired to take some pho­to­graphs of how these films looked on my home dis­play in Blu-ray, in both their itv and Criterion versions.

Taking pho­tos off of my plasma dis­play screen is not the ideal meth­od, but as my com­puters are Macs and one can­’t do dir­ect Blu-ray rips on such machines, it’s all I’ve got to go with at the moment. So for the first two images from Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes respect­ively, I begin with the image as it appears when ripped from the standard-def ver­sion with the DVD cap­ture soft­ware on my com­puter. The sub­sequent cam­era shots of my plasma screen are cropped so as to mask a cer­tain amount of lens dis­tor­tion. The ambi­ent light in my liv­ing room is turned all the way down so as to pre­vent reflec­tions; unfor­tu­nately this has the effect also of height­en­ing the appar­ent bright­ness of my pre­ferred pic­ture set­ting. Readers who have exper­i­ence with shoot­ing off a dis­play and have tips for bet­ter, “truer” res­ults should please feel free to share their tips with me. For all that, I do think my shots reveal some inter­est­ing dif­fer­ences, or else I would­n’t be put­ting them up.

The equip­ment used: an Olympus SP-55OUZ cam­era, moun­ted (indif­fer­ently in cer­tain instances; I had to change bat­ter­ies on the damn thing in the middle of mak­ing the shots and, well…) on a Digital Concepts tri­pod. The set­ting on the cam­era was auto. The dis­play is a Hitachi P50V701 50-inch plasma screen. The DVD play­ers are OPPO’s BDP83 and the Sony Playstation 3.

So. Here we go. Below, from the standard-definition Criterion disc of Black Narcissus.

Below, the same shot on the ITV Blu-ray disc:

And below, the Criterion Blu-ray disc:

Not stag­ger­ingly dif­fer­ent, but reveal­ingly so: there’s more sharp­ness and detail in the Criterion, a sharp­er focus, if you will in the detail­ing of the oval, orna­men­ted part of the rack that the two horns sit on. Look par­tic­u­larly at the part of that oval where the shad­ow’s falling. 

When I wrote about the ITV Narcissus back in 2008, the post got a very nice response in com­ments from Bob Hoffman of Technicolor, who provided this inform­a­tion: “The HD mas­ter for the new Blu-ray ver­sion of Black Narcissus was cre­ated at Technicolor in London, from it’s digit­al ima­ging cen­ter at our West Drayton lab – near Heathrow. (That facil­ity is actu­ally mov­ing in the next weeks to a new loc­a­tion in Soho.) The mas­ter was pro­duced for Granada International (part of ITV), and was first pro­jec­ted at the Cannes Film Festival two years ago in the Classics sec­tion and its trib­ute to Michael Powell. Later, it was shown at the Academy in Beverly Hills, with Jack Cardiff in attend­ance. Jack was very involved in the re-mastering of the film with our team in London. I can­’t stress how great this was – first the oppor­tun­ity to work with one of the greatest liv­ing mas­ters of cine­ma­to­graphy but also to have has know­ledge of what was ori­gin­ally inten­ded by Mr. Powell and Mr. Pressburger.” It would seem then that the itv ver­sion would have been a standard-setter, and it was. Why is the Criterion a little stronger? The mys­tery deep­ens a bit when one reads the “About The Transfer” note in the book­let of the Narcissus Blu-ray, which con­tains cred­its for ITV Global Entertainment, Technicolor, and notes that the trans­fer was cre­ated “with the par­ti­cip­a­tion of cine­ma­to­graph­er Jack Cardiff.” (Thelma Schoonmaker, Powell’s wid­ow, is also acknow­ledged in this respect.) Could the Criterion ver­sion be the same trans­fer that Hoffman illu­min­ated for me? Could be… So why the dif­fer­ence? This is where the DVD Beaver habit of look­ing at a dis­c’s lay­er­ing and bitrate yields its most sig­ni­fic­ant res­ults. “ITV did a single-layered Blu-ray in 2008 that estab­lished it as the bench­mark for the film[,] but Criterion’s new Blu-ray with a super­i­or bitrate and the fea­ture film tak­ing up almost 30 Gig [on the disc] advances bey­ond that 1080p present­a­tion.” FYI, the Beaver-reported bitrate for the ITV disc is 6.71 mbps, while for the Criterion it’s 34.99 mbps. That’s a big dif­fer­ence. (UPDATE: Commenter Zack McGhee, below, points out that there’s com­pel­ling evid­ence to sug­gest that this repor­ted bitrate is erro­neous, which stands to reas­on, giv­en the dis­crep­ancy between the two Red Shoes ver­sions isn’t nearly as large. I’ll see what I can dig up about this.) A vis­ible one, as it were. 

The Beaver review of The Red Shoes also shows that the Criterion edi­tion devotes more disc space to the feature—36,569,591,808 bytes to ITV’s 23,430,383,040. And that the Criterion has a high­er bitrate: 31.56 mbps to ITV’s 20.02 mbps. Here the dif­fer­ences are not so great (the actu­al res­tor­a­tion of the pic­ture which is the basis for both Blu-rays is a UCLA ven­ture in part­ner­ship with Janus—Criterion’s par­ent, as it were—ITV, the British Film Institute and the Film Foundation). The main dif­fer­ence as dis­played on my Hitachi is a bit more vibrancy, at least in this show where Marius Goring’s Julian pon­ders just what to do about Professor Palmer’s plagiarism. 

Below, from the standard-definition Criterion disc of The Red Shoes:

The ITV Blu-ray:

The Criterion Blu-ray:

A couple more shots give an idea of dif­fer­ing col­or val­ues. Below, from the ITV Narcissus:

And here, the Criterion:

Note the bor­ders of the nee­dle­work seem suf­fused with a blue tint in the ITV ren­der­ing, and come off more prop­erly neut­ral in the Criterion rendering. 

Below, the blue sky of Monte Carlo in the ITV Blu-ray of Shoes:

And here, the Criterion ver­sion, where the blue is a little blu­er and the stone a little more pink: 

I’ll have more to say on these in my July Blu-ray Consumer Guide, and per­haps in oth­er posts as well. It isn’t as if I’ve even begun to exhaust the interest in these films.