Lots of Home-Viewing News
Filed under: Universal, 20th Century Fox, Home Entertainment
There's a lot of excitement going on with home entertainment this week, as studios are continuing their progress towards new media:- CinemaNow has added Twentieth Century Fox to its roster of studios selling movies and TV shows through the download website. As of Tuesday, customers could buy films including Cheaper by the Dozen 2 and The Ringer as well as episodes of 24 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Other television programs shown on Fox, FX, FUEL TV and SPEED will also be available starting next month. Fox joins recent CinemaNow partners Warner Bros. and Disney. I still haven't heard one good case in favor of the service, though.
- Next Tuesday, you will be able to buy your first Blu-ray Discs, as Sony is unveiling its first slate of titles (players arrive in stores five days later). The seven movies you can own in the new format are 50 First Dates, The Fifth Element, Hitch, House of Flying Daggers, XXX, The Terminator and Underworld Evolution. Then, on June 27, they will release Ultraviolet, The Last Waltz and A Knight's Tale. And next month we'll get Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addition, Kung Fu Hustle, Legends of the Fall, Stealth, Species, SWAT and Resident Evil Apocalypse. The most significant of these titles is likely to be Ultraviolet, which was filmed entirely in high definition.
- As if worried about the new competition of Blue-ray, Universal is slashing its prices on all of its HD-DVD titles, down from $34.95 to $29.95, beginning August 8th. The only titles that will go on sale at the old price are the upcoming HD-DVD/DVD hybrid discs of Animal House and Unleashed. HD-DVD first went on sale two months ago.
- Blockbuster Video filed a counterclaim against Netflix on Tuesday in response to the latter's April lawsuit against the once-mighty video rental chain. While Netflix is suing Blockbuster to knock them out of the online rental business, based on patents Netflix holds for the service, Blockbuster is stating that those patents are "unenforceable" because they were obtained deceptively.
- This last bit only applies to Southern Africa, but it is still pretty interesting. Moonyeenn Lee, the casting director for Tsotsi, told Mmegi Online that after excessive piracy of the Oscar-winning film in and around her country, the official DVD, to be released in South Africa later this month, will feature three different endings, and future films she represents will now be going straight to video, bypassing cinemas altogether.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-14-2006 @ 1:51PM
The Jeremy said...
You'd think Sony's first two Blu-Ray titles would be *Spider-Man* and *Spider-Man 2* (and *The DaVinci Code* in a couple of months). In that way, they could soak the fanbase with two or three releases before the general public fully embraced Blu-Ray and its market penetration eclipsed traditional DVD.
Sony truly is its own worst enemy.
How about a remastered Blu-Ray release of *Escape from New York*?
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6-14-2006 @ 3:44PM
Watson said...
"The most significant of these titles is likely to be Ultraviolet, which was filmed entirely in high definition."
I'm assuming that you meant that ultraviolet was filmed with digital cameras, because all of those movies have been filmed in high definition. In fact, every movie that's filmed on 35mm cameras is filmed in high definition. The actual resolution of film is generaly considered to be 4K, or 4000 pixels across. 1080p, on the other hand (which is the maximum resolution provided by the next generation players) has a horizontal resolution of 1920 pixels. Therefore, every movie, if scanned from the original prints, is capable of providing a beautiful, high-definition image. You can compare the various resolutions by visiting this page: http://www.red.com/product/format-sizes/
If you did mean that Ultraviolet was filmed with digital cameras, then that is significant, as it does seem to provide the best picture quality when released on a digital format, like DVD, HD-DVD, or Blu-ray.
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6-14-2006 @ 4:00PM
Christopher Campbell said...
Ultraviolet was shot with Sony's HDW-F900 cameras, so as far as I understand it, I meant it was shot entirely in high definition video.
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6-15-2006 @ 1:57PM
The Jeremy said...
I sure hope that in the future that it turns out that HD shot movies are easier to "upscale" to the higher resolutions because 1080p is not the holy grail of image quality. Its just that it is a "perfect" presentation each time it is shown versus film which degrades each time. No more "cigarette burns" to contend with in the imaging. However, as stated, you'd have to see a HD presentation using Sony's system that does 4k to equal pristine 35mm. And to think that we used to have 70mm presentations.
Hopefully the studios will also remaster their classic films on the same scale that the (holy) *Star Wars* trilogy and the classic James Bond films received which run color correction and image cleaning prior to the HD (re)mastering. Granted, it takes money to do this treatment, and the same for striking new "virgin" film prints.
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