Bullets 'n' Babes

This is a quick and dirty comparison between:

The Puzzle World Blu-Ray disc which I bought here:
http://www.yesasia.com/global/the-storm ... /info.html
which is supposed to be region-free (I'll be able to confirm this pretty soon).

The director's cut on the Special Edition UK DVD.

Notes:
-Some snapshots might be off by a frame or two. Sorry about that.
-The DVD (which is letterboxed) was upscaled to 1920x1440 using Bicubic resize and then cropped to 1920x1080 in VirtualDubMod.
-The Blu-Ray transfer is decoded by CoreAVC. Snapshots come from Media Player Classic.

UK DVD:
http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/8535/stormuk1.jpg
US BD:
http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/4840/stormbd1.jpg

UK DVD:
http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/411/stormukchiba.jpg
US BD:
http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/7467/stormuschiba.jpg

UK DVD:
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/9035/stormuk3.jpg
US BD:
http://img251.imageshack.us/img251/8046/stormus3.jpg

UK DVD:
http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/1554/stormuk4.jpg
US BD:
http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/5735/stormus4.jpg

UK DVD:
http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/268/stormuk5.jpg
US BD:
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/5643/stormus5.jpg

Overall the Blu-Ray is pretty decent.
Way too much DNR, though. Makes the actors look like wax figures.

Easy win for the Blu-Ray...the improvement is quite significant especialy in caps 3 & 4.

Is Puzzle World part of it's French title?

The UK DVD being non-anamorphic, means it loses immediately.

tom2681 wrote:Way too much DNR, though. Makes the actors look like wax figures.

Yeah, it's not really pleasant.

Elsewhere, it looks great.

Crap blu-ray release, I'm surprised no one's being more critical of it! The DNR proplem is pretty major as it makes the entire image look smudged, colours are definitely over-saturated (greens in grab 4 are particularly overblown), and is that blocking or intense dot-crawl or some form of aliasing i'm seeing in the opening titles?

Shows you how long it has been since I watched the UK dvd, I always remembered it being anamorphic, then A Man Called Hero was not and the Duel was but as none are worth buying hey

The Blu ray looks like 100% Noise Reduced trash, I would never go near that

it's been years since i saw this but it was a bit pants from what i remember

@Brad:
Puzzle World is the name of the company distributing the film on BD.
Asianblurayguide.com lists 3 separate releases but Puzzle World isn't mentioned anywhere.
So it's a bit confusing.

@Shingster:
It does look like macro-blocking around the edges, doesn't it?
Weird, because with this much DNR, this film should be easy to compress.
The aliasing is probably a result of the heavy cleaning/sharpening filters they've used.

And before I forget:
I heard somewhere that the PCM audio track was out of sync by several minutes (!) on this disc.
If you need uncompressed sound, forget it.

tom2681 wrote: I heard somewhere that the PCM audio track was out of sync by several minutes (!) on this disc.

LOL

Shit film anyway.

Exactly why I love it.

Tom2681 - Loves the Films You Hate

Thanks Tom.

Haven't you tested the PCM?

That's what I'd use as my LG Player can transcode to 1.5Mbps DTS, which sounds better than the DD5.1. I was very surprised to see this feature isn't the norm. and something of a hidden gem on my LG Combo Player.

I feel the need to watch this shitty film again, and hey the Sqeequal has just come out as well after all these years, it looks as shit, they still think crap CGI impresses people in Asia (which it does). But it loks far better than SR1.

A man called hero was pants. I've never bothered with the the other two.

bradavon wrote:A better tomorrow was pants. I've never bothered with the the other two.

Wuchu talkin' bout Willis??

Random

WTF! Even I managed to confuse myself there. I'm going to blame the coke I took last night . Fixed!

You crazy mofo!

bradavon wrote:A man called hero was pants. I've never bothered with the the other two.

and that was by far the best of the 3 shows you how good they were then.

I thought The Duel was the best - had a sense of humour.

The other two were OK. Not really my genre though.

Quick Update:

I've now seen the film in full.
There are good news and bad news.

Good news:
-The disc is indeed compatible with region B players.

Bad news:
-The picture quality is a lot worse in full motion than in those screencaps. The whole film looks like a moving oil painting.
Fairly horrible TBH. Any good DVD will beat this BD easily.
-The PCM cantonese track is indeed completely out of sync by several minutes. Utterly useless.
-The english subtitles are pretty bad (all in engrish) and synced to the mandarin soundtrack.
In most films this wouldn't be an issue, but in the case of Stormriders there is some additional dialogue in the mandarin track and you sometimes get a subtitle even though nobody's talking.

I'm actually thinking about going back to the old letterboxed UK DVD.
(Yes, it's that bad).

tom2681 wrote: -The PCM cantonese track is indeed completely out of sync by several minutes. Utterly useless.

So is there any in sync soundtrack? it amazes me they get them fractions of a second out of whack, never mind seconds and more.

Yeah, there's a perfectly healthy DTS-HD track for cantonese and a basic Dolby 5.1 track for mandarin.
But the people who need uncompressed sound are f*cked.

Are you sure it's not DTS-HD MA?

* For what it's worth DDDHouse says: Cantonese (DTS-HD MA 5.1 / LPCM 5.1): http://www.dddhouse.com/v3/product_deta ... uctID=9714
* And the HK BD has: Cantonese (DTS-HD MA 5.1 / Dolby Digital EX): http://www.dddhouse.com/v3/product_deta ... uctID=9698

If the USA BD is definitely only DTS-HD HR, then I'd guess the HK BD is the way to go OR the HK DVD if not (non-anamorphic but DTS over the UK DVD).

p.s - I take it you've tried the French anamorphic DVD with Cantonese DD2.0?