Just got finished watching it on Blu Ray and I never teally noticed the stunt packs being so prominent…Man you can clearly see the difference.
I actually just checked out a scene on my Blu-Ray this afternoon. I too had no idea how clear the Proton Packs are visible. You can see just about every detail you could possibly want to!
This thread is annoyingly making me want to buy the Blu-Ray version.
Be warned: if your TV has a crisp enough picture (if the contrast is too high, your sharpness it cranked, you have no noise reduction, etc) you WILL notice a horrible amount of grain during a few choice scenes.
Staypuft’s effectswork looks a bit cheaper to due to the 1080p. Next time I watch it on Blu Ray I might just crush the brightness down about 10-20%.
This is partially what makes me dislike HD stuff.. for new movies, sure, no problem.. but sprucing up old movies into HD sort of takes the magic away.. you can see how certain things (like the stunt packs) are just cheaper props.. Usually for me it’s with horror movies that it drives me nuts; when it’s not HD, the effects of older horror movies can look pretty good.. but as soon as you pop it up to 1080p you can see the mold lines, the tubes squirting blood, the ropes holding up the monsters, etc..
It’s great for the prop builders to get super-high-detailed shots of the props, but IMO more often than not it ruins the overall movie experience by making it too obviously a movie.
wow. high resolution film transfers ruin the film experience…
quote of the year? quite possibly.
Older films would probably benefit from a bit more cleanup and processing, but it’s unlikely studios would pay for anything beyond the standard color correction and optimization that’s done in a DVD or Blu-Ray transfer.
The studio exec doesn’t care if it looks like ■■■. Just crank out the little plastic discs and sell them for $35. The plastic discs are the product to them. It has nothing to do with what’s actually on the disc.
Maybe you didn’t bother reading any of the rest of the post; high-resolution transfers make props/effects on older movies (and more recent low-budget movies) look too obviously fake. Mold lines on latex parts that you couldn’t see before, the wires holding up flying monsters, the tubes where blood/goo comes out of, etc..
Before HD, the stuff looked at least somewhat passably “real”; just like the OP mentioned, you can really tell when they’re using the lower-quality stunt packs in the BR of Ghostbusters, and that IMO takes you from watching something that could be potentially real/realistic, to “Oh hey, look, it’s a prop that they didn’t put much effort into”
HD can be great for some stuff (Avatar, for example), but when it comes to older movies, more often than not it ends up exposing visual flaws that we couldn’t see before on the SD video, so now instead of being sucked into another world while watching, you end up being constantly reminded that all of these gadgets/monsters/etc are just props/makeup/effects.
My only issue with the 1080p transfer was how obvious certain mattes looked and some of the grain… things I believe Sony could have cleaned up more.