Blu-Ray/HD-DVD JP release dates

[Ollin]

AV Watch (http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/bdhdship/) has a page up for release dates on upcoming releases for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD's. Just HD-DVD releases so far. No anime releases yet as well.

[DeadlyMessiah]

Okay, and what movies are those?

[Ollin]

Click on the link for more info on the title. There's only 2 or 3 Hollywood movie titles but nothing really to get excited for.

[HyugaKojiro]

DDD has a list of HD DVDs and BRs as well:

HD: http://www.deepdiscountdvd.com/format.cfm?classID=1

BR: http://www.deepdiscountdvd.com/format.cfm?classID=2

no anime as of yet either. I'm wondering what the first title will be for NA and which company will come through first.

[Ollin]

I don't know if this news is old or not. No release date or anything but Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex has a coming soon to HD-DVD poster (http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/20051004/ceat2_22.jpg).

[inu-liger]

Yeah, it is quite old news.

[DeadlyMessiah]

Is that Resident Evil I see in the corner???

[Skywise]

[ QUOTE ]
Ollin said:
I don't know if this news is old or not. No release date or anything but Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex has a coming soon to HD-DVD poster (http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/20051004/ceat2_22.jpg).

[/ QUOTE ]

It's been announced for Blu-ray as well I believe.

[danhawk]

any site i can order blu-ray moveis from japan from. and is the resident evil movie going to be realsed on hd-dvd and not blu-ray

[Ollin]

[ QUOTE ]
Skywise said:
[ QUOTE ]
Ollin said:
I don't know if this news is old or not. No release date or anything but Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex has a coming soon to HD-DVD poster (http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/20051004/ceat2_22.jpg).

[/ QUOTE ]

It's been announced for Blu-ray as well I believe.

[/ QUOTE ]
I know it was playing on one of the Blu-ray players in Tokyo Fair a few months ago. I haven't read it on any of the sites that it was being released on Blu-ray though. It probably will be one of the first anime to get a HD release any ways.

[ QUOTE ]
dark angel of death said:
any site i can order blu-ray moveis from japan from. and is the resident evil movie going to be realsed on hd-dvd and not blu-ray

[/ QUOTE ]
Check the first post for a link for Japanese releases. I didn't see any upcoming Blu-ray releases. Your normal retailers will most likely carry them. Amazon Japan, CDJapan, and HMV.JP when ever they start churning out releases.

Yes that is a Resident Evil poster as they are using the same R2 cover art. It's going to be released on HD-DVD.

[perigee]

DDD (http://www.deepdiscountdvd.com/format.cfm?classID=2) lists 30 Blu-Ray titles, not all available yet.

[callman]

[ QUOTE ]
perigee said:
DDD (http://www.deepdiscountdvd.com/format.cfm?classID=2) lists 30 Blu-Ray titles, not all available yet.

[/ QUOTE ]
Problem is, none of them are japanese releases.

[perigee]

[ QUOTE ]
callman said:
Problem is, none of them are japanese releases.

[/ QUOTE ]
I must have misunderstood. I thought the original poster was just looking for a source of Blu-Ray releases. Is there any reason one would specifically want a Japanese BD, other than interest in exclusively Japanese movies?

[callman]

[ QUOTE ]
perigee said:
I must have misunderstood. I thought the original poster was just looking for a source of Blu-Ray releases. Is there any reason one would specifically want a Japanese BD, other than interest in exclusively Japanese movies?

[/ QUOTE ]
Exclusively Japanese movies, yes. Like, tons of anime. Take a peek in the R2 (Japan) discussions to see what I'm talking about.

[Wagg]

Well, we can only hope that those Japanese BD Anime releases will have English subs on them, but I really doubt it, even though the US market shares the same region.

It would be nice if they did though.

[Black Jack]

[ QUOTE ]
perigee said:
I must have misunderstood. I thought the original poster was just looking for a source of Blu-Ray releases. Is there any reason one would specifically want a Japanese BD, other than interest in exclusively Japanese movies?

[/ QUOTE ]

Apparently so. Did you miss that the title of the thread was Blu-Ray/HD-DVD JP release dates?

[Black Jack]

From the reports I've been reading the Japanese HD DVD releases have been pretty less than stellar (extremely soft among other things). That combined with the pretty low quality of US BD releases it isn't boding too well for future JP releases.

[kakugo]

What reports have those been, out of curiosity? And for what films?

I don't doubt that a great number of Japanese films wouldn't look exactly stunning on HD-DVD: a great number of Japanese live action films are on the low budget side anyhow. But I can't imagine that Japanese releases of something like The Last Samurai look notably worse than it's US counterpart.

[Black Jack]

[ QUOTE ]
Kakugo said:
What reports have those been, out of curiosity?

[/ QUOTE ]

Reviews from AVS Forum, japanese reviewers and other sources.

[ QUOTE ]
Kakugo said:And for what films?

[/ QUOTE ]

Finding Neverland, Chronicles of Riddick (especially worse looking compared to the US release) and others in the first batch of HD DVDs were apparently less than stellar. Now while there have been a few bad US HD DVDs it seems that no one has anything good to say about any of the Japanese releases so far.

[ QUOTE ]
Kakugo said:
I don't doubt that a great number of Japanese films wouldn't look exactly stunning on HD-DVD: a great number of Japanese live action films are on the low budget side anyhow. But I can't imagine that Japanese releases of something like The Last Samurai look notably worse than it's US counterpart.

[/ QUOTE ]

It wasn't for Japanese-made films it was of US films released in Japan. And yes, for the ones that are already released here they do look worse and quite notably.

[Black Jack]

[ QUOTE ]
Kakugo said:
I don't doubt that a great number of Japanese films wouldn't look exactly stunning on HD-DVD: a great number of Japanese live action films are on the low budget side anyhow.

[/ QUOTE ]

Any movie shot on film will look better in HD unless it is poorly mastered. Blazing Saddles is an old film and from what I remember not a huge budget and it looks excellent on HD DVD.

[kakugo]

I shouldn't have said "budget"; that alone has little bearings on how good the film looks, apart from what film stock is used. Blazing Saddles was shot on 35mm anamorphic for a scope picture, so it should look good in HD. On the other hand Full Metal Jacket was shot 35mm spherical, but looks almost no better on HD-DVD than it did on DVD (according to popular report; as of yet I've seen neither in HD). I'm not saying the improved resolution won't help matters in most situations, it's really more a question of how much "detail" was in the film (the frame, not the celluloid) to begin with.

The anamorphic version of The Evil Dead, which was mastered in HD, is a lot softer than the fullframe DVD due to noise reduction; but wither this was done at the HD stage or not is anybody's guess. Also, the anamorphic version of Takashi Miike's Audition doesn't have much more - if any - visible detail than the non-anamorphic original DVD. The DVD release of Miike's Chinese Mafia War is also just as fuzzy and unimpressive as the VHS: this is due to the film stock and lighting it was shot on. This is the sort of thing I was trying to say, not "all Japanese movies look bad" or "only new expensive movies benefit from HD". I know better. I just know that not every HD transfer is good, and not every film looks good at the celluloid level either.

If they're recent American films and don't look good though, I'll chalk it up to bad encoding for one reason or another. A real shame, for years Japanese VHS and LD's were usually the best looking tapes you could get, and R2's are still often nicer than their R1 counterparts.

Edit: The Fifth Element is another film that supposedly looks no better than an upconverted DVD in HD. I don't know, I've not compared the two or anything, but I like the theory that the film was simply softened at one point to make the live action and CGI footage mesh better: this explains why it looks so awful and something like Kung Fu Hustle looks amazing. If that's the case, HD isn't much better in every situation. I agree in theory, but the execution is still a bit lacking thus far.

[Black Jack]

[ QUOTE ]
Kakugo said:
I shouldn't have said "budget"; that alone has little bearings on how good the film looks, apart from what film stock is used. Blazing Saddles was shot on 35mm anamorphic for a scope picture, so it should look good in HD. On the other hand Full Metal Jacket was shot 35mm spherical, but looks almost no better on HD-DVD than it did on DVD (according to popular report; as of yet I've seen neither in HD). I'm not saying the improved resolution won't help matters in most situations, it's really more a question of how much "detail" was in the film (the frame, not the celluloid) to begin with.

[/ QUOTE ]

Full Metal Jacket didn't look good due to poor mastering. That was entirely my point. It along with a few other releases by Warner were bob deinterlaced from a 1080i60 master rather than being mastered from a new 1080p24 master. This is what caused the lower resolution picture, but even still it does look better than the DVD version. If it had been mastered properly it would have looked many times better.

[ QUOTE ]
Kakugo said:
The anamorphic version of The Evil Dead, which was mastered in HD, is a lot softer than the fullframe DVD due to noise reduction; but wither this was done at the HD stage or not is anybody's guess. Also, the anamorphic version of Takashi Miike's Audition doesn't have much more - if any - visible detail than the non-anamorphic original DVD. The DVD release of Miike's Chinese Mafia War is also just as fuzzy and unimpressive as the VHS: this is due to the film stock and lighting it was shot on. This is the sort of thing I was trying to say, not "all Japanese movies look bad" or "only new expensive movies benefit from HD". I know better. I just know that not every HD transfer is good, and not every film looks good at the celluloid level either.

[/ QUOTE ]

All the things you talk about are due to less than optimal mastering. And yes, anything shot on film will look better on HD if done right due to the fact that film stores much more detail than HD resolution can capture.

[ QUOTE ]
Kakugo said:If they're recent American films and don't look good though, I'll chalk it up to bad encoding for one reason or another. A real shame, for years Japanese VHS and LD's were usually the best looking tapes you could get, and R2's are still often nicer than their R1 counterparts.

[/ QUOTE ]

And the ones I mentioned were recent American films and they look bad. The Chronicles of Riddick Japanese version looks notably softer and has worse blacks than the US release.

[ QUOTE ]
Kakugo said:
Edit: The Fifth Element is another film that supposedly looks no better than an upconverted DVD in HD. I don't know, I've not compared the two or anything, but I like the theory that the film was simply softened at one point to make the live action and CGI footage mesh better: this explains why it looks so awful and something like Kung Fu Hustle looks amazing.

[/ QUOTE ]

Fifth Element is another example of bad mastering and encoding (what with Blu-Ray using mpeg-2 rather than a more advanced codec like VC-1). If it had been mastered and encoded properly it would have looked much, much better.

[ QUOTE ]
Kakugo said:
If that's the case, HD isn't much better in every situation. I agree in theory, but the execution is still a bit lacking thus far.

[/ QUOTE ]

All things you mentioned are due to mastering/encoding errors which is why I said in my post:

[ QUOTE ]
Any movie shot on film will look better in HD unless it is poorly mastered.

[/ QUOTE ]

So to sum it up, all the things you mention would have been fixed and looked better if they had been given proper mastering and encoding (that is excluding if the film is intentionally soft in parts due to artistic license). So far the Japanese HD DVDs without any exception I can see have been both either poorly mastered or poorly encoded and in the case of ones that have also had a US release a quite noticeable PQ drop.

[kakugo]

I wonder if "proper mastering" is really all there is to it. The Fugitive was also bob-deinterlaced and most reviewers didn't even notice. Everyone who reviewed Full Metal Jacket complained, and the majority of reviewers who watched The Fugitive didn't notice any major problems. I've also seen mixed reviews on The Perfect Storm, another HD-DVD that had the same problem. If the drop in resolution due to deinterlacing were as detremental as it should be, shouldn't every reviewer have noticed the soft picture from the start? I'm not arguing that it's a mastering error. I'm simply arguing how detremental it is, and how much better these HD-DVD's would have looked either properly IVTCed or released in their native 1080i resolution. Would a properly mastered HD-DVD of Full Metal Jacket look as good (as detailed, as colorful, etc.) as a properly mastered HD-DVD of Jarhead? Full Metal Jacket was shot in mono with a very limited color scheme, and looks quite a bit like a documentary which was clearly intentional. Regardless of well mastered and encoded it was, it would have looked unimpressive compared to movies like Doom or The Terminator. This is all I was trying to get at.

And while this is slightly off what you were talking about, I also think the argument that MPEG-2 is strictly to blame for Blu-Ray's unimpressive picture quality isn't totally accurate: I've seen the Blu-Ray demo myself, and while I agree that most of it's pretty weak compared to HD-DVD's demo, the Kung Fu Hustle trailer looks about on par with what HD-DVD/VC-1 are delivering, whereas Ultra Violet and pretty much everything else looked like a slightly more detailed/less filtered DVD with low bitrate issues. They're all using the same codec, so why does only one trailer look good? (The footage of the jeweler is pretty good too. Everything else... not so much.) Surely the codec can't be to blame if not everything on the format looks the same. It's either bad HD telecines, bad mastering (as you've said), or something in between.

I agree that a 1080 HD master should be better than a 480 SD master... trouble is, some of them aren't by the time we can get them, and short of us seeing the uncompressed HD master tapes we can't be sure if the HD master is as flawless as everyone assumes it is. This isn't strictly a codec issue, and I honestly beileve that the film source can have a deciding factor on how nice the final encode looks. Nobody seems to believe me though, so I guess we'll just have to wait for the VC-1 BD-50 Ultrabit release of The Fifth Element and see.

[Skywise]

[ QUOTE ]
Kakugo said:
Edit: The Fifth Element is another film that supposedly looks no better than an upconverted DVD in HD. I don't know, I've not compared the two or anything, but I like the theory that the film was simply softened at one point to make the live action and CGI footage mesh better: this explains why it looks so awful and something like Kung Fu Hustle looks amazing. If that's the case, HD isn't much better in every situation. I agree in theory, but the execution is still a bit lacking thus far.

[/ QUOTE ]

I've seen the Fifth Element in both broadcast HD and WMVHD, and it looks a lot better than the DVD. If the BD version doesn't measure up to that then they've screwed something up really badly.

[Chris Beveridge]

They did; they used a poor master to strike the HD transfer for and they did it back in the late 90's when Sony started creating such masters. It's looking like a lot of their early HD masters are not in good shape and that the process has evolved a lot since then. Sony's launch titles were NOT good. Lionsgate upped the ante (though with a DTS related problem) and Sony's NEW films like Underworld and Ultraviolet look spectacular.