Thoughtful "impact of Blu-ray" article

...and yet 2009 was a record year for Blu Ray...including many of those same "older titles" mentioned in the article.

In addition, most trade publications are predicting another surge growth year for BD in 2010 and again in 2011.

 

I also find it interesting all the old catalog titles that are being given a full restoration treatment for release on Blu-Ray. The top two that come to mind are of course Gone With The Wind and The Wizard of Oz. Both have never looked better and in the case of Wizard, maybe even better than it's original theatre release. A lot of the "epic" and "vista" movies are promised a similar treatment.

I think the advent of really good restoration technology, coupled with a "latest and greatest" consumer medium available have sparked a long awaited and much needed interest in the catalog titles that have for years sat degrading on the shelf....

 

Agree...anyone who has seen Lawrence of Arabia, for example, on Blu Ray disk should be amazed at how it appears - it never looked better.

 

True.

It has taken some time to get BD established with the studios themselves - now they all seem to be getting on the bandwagon.

The other good news that the recent trends to lower pricing on the BD disks themselves will surely accelerate things.

 

Disagree....volumes will offset that....they already saw that in this past holiday season....

 

Volumes only apply to movies that have a large audience. Remastering is touchy, delicate work and therefore expensive... Few older movies would make back the cost of release much less the cost of remastering and release.

Remember, the article is talking about nearly 100 years of movies, with only portions of the last 20 years being worth the cost of remastering. Very, very few people would be interested in movies from the 1930's and 1940's, except for the most well known movies.

I've never seen Gone with the Wind for instance. I'm just not interested in many of the older movies.

Cheers,
Tom

 

I agree with Tom. The "classics" will always get a treatment to get them to look the best. But, think of the countless Westerns, B-Movie scifi & horror flicks from the 40's, 50's & 60's that will probably not see the light of day for some time to come if ever

The only way I see those getting a HD treatment would be to outsource to some 3rd world country where labor costs are nil, or someone comes up with some hardware & software combo that can automate a good chunk of the process.

 

The frightening thing here is that many of these films may well be lost forever.

I am not so much concerned with getting these movies onto a DVD, Blu_Ray, etc., as I am with getting them digitally stored from master prints. The fragility of film stock is the frightening part.

Digitizing the films and storing them would always keep them available to be viewed, remastered, even placed on new film stock if needed.

People that care are going to have to step up.

It is frightening to watch the current generation turn up its nose at any film simply because it is in black & white.

It isn't going to be cheap.

 

As hard as it is to believe, huge numbers of those older films have already been lost forever, except perhaps for some older, worn, damaged prints floating around. There have been countless studio fires and floods, as well as buy-outs and takeovers that have resulted in tons of footage being thrown out. And even films that were intended to be preserved aren't always preserved as well as intended.

Then there's the problem of digital storage. The amount of data for a film is staggering. Archival footage isn't just the final studio master, but all kinds of additional footage, such as outtakes, alternate scenes, interviews, etc. And we have only recently been able to digitize film at resolutions that approach the quality of the actual film. Even today, few movies use 8k masters, though 4k is fine for many movies. But even 4 hours of footage stored at 4k is HUGE!

And as the studios have found, technology moves very, very quickly. Data storage devices, mostly tape backup machines, that were cutting edge just 10 years ago are obsolete and unsupported today, and it will only be worse in the future. And many studios were making 1k masters during the latter part of the DVD era, intending to use those masters for Blu-Ray. In most cases, that simply wasn't good enough, and they've had to go back and remaster many of those movies at great additional expense. The Fifth Element, anyone?

 

BattleZone, do you have a list of movies that have been lost like you say?

I believe there is also a list of movies that were released on VHS and Laser Disk that were not released on DVD and movies on DVD that aren't on BluRay.

The Beatles "Let It Be" is an example of the former. Song of the South was released on foreign VHS and Laser but not DVD.

Say what you want about piracy, but that's the only thing that will save old movies where legit rights holders won't do anything about it, if they can't make money on it.

ETA: And don't get me started about TV shows. We are now able to see shows that premiered in other countries and didn't show up here till months/years afterward, if ever.

ETA2: Article on What movies died with VHS. www.cinematical.com/2009/03/01/what-movies-died-with-vhs/

 

I like to think that SOMEday we'll have a model that will allow low-volume, obscure movies to be done like "books on demand" and that you'll be able to order them online and they'll be burned for you at that point.

 

But now that the holidays are over that trend seems to have reversed. The cheapest price last week for "9", for example, was about $25. It seems the cheapest price for next week's "Cloudy with a chance of meatballs" is also about $25.

In previous months, you could always find BD discs on release week for less than $20.

Even Amazon had/has these titles for $25 pre-order. In the past, pre-order BD's were always $15 - $20