Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: "Heat" on Blu-ray

This is topic "Heat" on Blu-ray in forum The Afterlife at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 04-20-2010, 10:34 PM:

This had been in my Netflix queue for a long time and finally bubbled up to the top. What a great movie! ***** How the hell did I miss this?

Unfortunately the BD mastering is quite pitiful, far from reference quality. The video quality is mediocre at best, reminds me of a DVD that's being upscaled. The audio, despite being in Dolby True-HD, is not great either, and there are numerous sequences where dialog is muffled. The mastering gets a "Fail".

I would buy this on Blu-ray if the mastering were better. Maybe they'll try again at a future date. The movie deserves better. [Frown]

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 05-03-2010, 07:33 PM:

I own Heat on both DVD and Blu-ray. While I agree the video imagery on the Blu-ray isn't reference quality, it still is quite a bit better than the DVD.

IMHO, one of the problems is Warner Home Video and the philosophy it has long had in place of needlessly squeezing compression levels too far. The studio is arguably one of the bigger offenders in terms of turning the smoothie knob too much. WHV drew a great deal of criticism in being the last studio to use lossless audio on most or all of its releases.

In fairness, some of the limitations with the image quality of Heat may be in the original cinematography. Much of the movie is dark and many shots have a shallow depth of field.

Still, I think WHV could have done better. Other titles from the same era, such as Braveheart and Forrest Gump, have excellent video quality due in part to better quality video masters and significantly higher video bit rates.