Bullets 'n' Babes

Lourdes wrote:Did you do what I said to see this?

Just did and you are somewhat right. It is lacking detail for a true HD remastering. =/ Oh well... Still better than anything that is currently out there so far.

Shingster wrote:...sharp enough that you could give the transfer a pass and say "not an upscale", but likewise I wouldn't really argue with someone who's confident that it is an upscale.

It's definitely not an upscale that's for sure.

Shingster wrote:We really need someone like a Criterion or Masters of Cinema to do a proper job on one of these 80s/early 90s action films so we can get a better idea of how they are supposed to look in HD. As it stands, we have no real template and it's very easy in these cases to see how soft these transfers are and immediately assume they're an upscale. I strongly suspect that there's not a tremendous amount of detail to be found in the negatives of films like Police Story and Hard Boiled though.

I kinda doubt that even Criterion could bring out any extra details out of these HK flicks, but they even managed to outdo Toho when it came to Godzilla remaster. I guess we can only dream as Criterion remaster for such movies most likely won't ever happen. =/

Do the original negatives even exist for these films?

It's not upscaled, it just doesn't quite have an HD level of detail. It's not uncommon to find even modern and major releases to have no more than 720p detail on BD (Dark Knight Rises, except IMAX scenes). So with older films with poor print condition and without a huge restoration budget you frequently get even less.

Honestly though, are there any HK films with standout transfers on DVD/BD? When I think of HK cinema it's always blown out contrast or murkiness.

At least I wasn't completely wrong...

If we're talking HK cinema from the 90s, I can only think of the Wong Kar Wei films that look pretty good in HD, but then not only have they been authored by bigger distributors they're also significantly more "artsy" productions than your average John Woo/Jackie Chan flick, so I'd imagine those films look better on the negatives & subsequent prints anyway.

The only reason these films look better on Bluray is coz you're taking an uncompressed SD master, upscaling it *then* compressing it with modern encoding software (and at much higher bitrate than DVD)

The result is a noticeably less muddy picture and truer colours

Is that worth my £££ though? Hell no

R2FRDVD vs JPBD http://www.check2pic.ru/compare/28949

Resurrecting this thread to say was reading the thread regarding the japanese BD over at Blu-ray.com,clear consensus was it was easily the best transfer though overly bright.So a while back Matt Stevens (remember him ) made a custom,he lowered the brightness and gamma,added subtitles based on the Tartan translation (i think) and added the laserdisc pcm audio.Grabbed it last night,had a flick through and opening impressions are he's done a hell of a job! Will watch this week,been a long time since i saw this.

What did you think of it Sam - was it as good as hoped?

it's very good and pisses over the DD release.