Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Letters from Iwo Jima

This is topic Letters from Iwo Jima - Blu-Ray in forum The Afterlife at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

To visit this topic, use this URL:
https://ft-forum.com/ft/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=12;t=000621

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-05-2008, 10:40 PM:

Rented Letters from Iwo Jima on Blu-Ray. I thought it was a better, more interesting movie than its companion film, Flags of our Fathers. Definitely worth the rental, especially if you're paying a buck or so more rent a high-def version.

IMHO, one of the factors that makes the movie more interesting is the Japanese perspective. From the American point of view, we're getting the perspective of what was our enemy. This angle helped other films in the same manner, such as Das Boot and All Quiet on the Western Front.

The image quality on the Blu-Ray disc is usually pretty sharp at the points of focus in the 35mm anamorphic material. Eastwood drained much of the color out of the image on purpose, presumably to do more to depict the hot, barren feel of Iwo.

My home theater setup isn't equipped to decode the full Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio on the disc, but I thought the 640kb/s DD track sounded very good. Dialog and music was clean. Significant passages of the movie are pretty quiet and confined to the front channels. But the battle sequences are loud and mixed pretty aggressively. Lots of activity in the surrounds during those scenes.

My only real complaint is the music score was far too repetitive and minimal. Eastwood seems to prefer his music scores played this way. I don't think it works as well as it should here.

I also think more care should be taken with how subtitles are handled on 1080p HD material in Blu-Ray discs. With a 2.39:1 movie, there's still ample space and lots of available pixels in the black area below the image where legible type can fit. It doesn't have to run up into the picture.

Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 02-05-2008, 11:08 PM:

I think the issue with putting subtitles in the black area below the image is that some (relatively very few) high-end home theater setups with front projection have scope lenses and/or real screen masking to eliminate the black bars entirely. And don't some TVs and projectors that auto-detect the black bars go into some kind of zoom mode to fill the screen with image and eliminate the black bars. Admittedly those are weak reasons for most of us but still reasons.

Weren't there a handful of letterboxed laserdiscs that put the subtitles in the black bar area? I know I've seen at least one but I can't remember what movie it was now. I might be thinking of Return of the Jedi. ?

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-06-2008, 12:31 AM:

If folks with projection systems are cropping away the black bars, they're still going to be cutting off their subtitles. The text is positioned across parts of the black letterbox area and extending up into the picture.

I assume these subtitles are generated by the player, correct? It might be nice if the viewer could specify font size and position. I'm not going to go as far as changing fonts, although something besides freaking Arial might be nice. News Gothic or Clearview One might be nice for that purpose, but that could get into more costly licensing issues.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 02-06-2008, 01:45 AM:

Everything should be Copperplate Gothic Bold. Not sure why...

And yes, the Star Wars LaserDiscs did indeed put their subtitles on the black bar. Every once in a while if there was just too much text for a given line, it would creep into the picture.

Posted by Adam Wilbert (Member # 1184) on 02-11-2008, 02:28 PM:

but aren't the subtitles over the image area in the theatrical release? [Razz]

Posted by Scott Jentsch (Member # 1681) on 02-12-2008, 02:16 PM:

Since I don't have a constant image height (CIH) setup yet, I don't mind that the subtitles are in the letterbox blacked out area. However, it's more true to the theatrical experience to put them on top of the image, and for those that are doing CIH, it's a necessity.

With both DVD and its high def counterparts, I do believe that the subtitles are generated by the player. I've seen the issue discussed a little and it seems that HD DVD and Blu-ray discs have to specify where the subtitles are to be placed. So, if the disc specifies for them to be placed on the image, that's where they will be. Likewise for the letterbox area.

It's up to the studios to build in that flexibility, as far as I know. They're going to have to hear from the enthusiasts if such an option is important. The good news is that the formats are still new and such changes can happen without too much past history to overcome.