What this means is that with the right amount of care and attention older films are quite capable of looking spectacular on Blu-ray because they already contain more resolution than the format can handle. Of course not all distributors are willing to spend the required time and money to ensure that older titles look their best, but more often than not even the most pedestrian of catalogue titles will offer an improvement over the DVD edition. Let’s take a look at some examples (click the images for larger versions): First, let’s examine an unassuming film from the early nineties that has received only ‘no-frills’ releases to date.
1993’s Rising Sun (starring Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes) isn’t a particularly glossy movie, and with its grainy image and fairly muted colour palette the DVD release looks a little shoddy by today’s standards. Now let’s examine the same frame from the Blu-ray release, which is a lowly catalogue title encoded in MPEG-2 and presented on a single-layered BD25. At first the differences appear to be somewhat superficial, but if you take a closer look you’ll see that the grain resolution is far superior and the colours are more natural. You might also notice how the framing has been slightly altered.
You might think that it's an odd choice for this article, but I wanted to demonstrate how even less than ideal sources can benefit from the high-definition treatment with even minimal restorative work. It's also worth bearing in mind that the Blu-ray version will look significantly better on larger screens, where even tiny flaws are more noticeable.
Okay, so we’ve looked at one example of how Blu-ray can offer subtle improvements on even the least glamorous of titles, but what about an old classic? For this example let’s go all the way back to 1972 with Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. The original DVD was one of my treasured possessions when it was originally released, but it’s really starting to show its age now. For the Blu-ray release the film underwent a complete restoration supervised by Coppola himself. The image was cleaned, the colour timing was corrected, and the whole thing was scanned at high-resolution before being transferred to Blu-ray with a high bitrate AVC encode. As you can see, virtually every facet of the image demonstrates a marked improvement over the DVD version.
The most obvious enhancement is the level of detail, which reveals hitherto unforeseen texture in clothing and scenery. You can also see that the characters' faces are no longer blurry messes, colour is more natural, and the brightness and contrast have been brought in line with Coppola's original intentions. It still doesn't look like a glossy feature from 2010, but it's not meant to.
The purpose of Blu-ray is to offer an audio-visual presentation as close to the filmmakers' intentions as possible, and this is a great example of a director taking the opportunity to create the definitive version of their work. Now let’s examine a slightly more recent film, Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner. This film has received more DVD releases than most, but this screen capture is taken from the director’s cut version released in 2005. It’s a clear step up from the original DVD (which was horrible), and although it has some problems with dirt if you’d never seen another version you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s about as good as the film could ever look. However, with the right amount of time and effort it’s possible to coax even more out of the film, especially on Blu-ray.