Hbo (owned by wb - the studio behind tenet) released it at the same time as theatrical release bc it was in the middle of covid and most theaters were closed anyway. Nolan didn’t like it tho
>“I’m known for my love of theatrical and put my whole life into that, but, the truth is, the way the film goes out at home is equally important.”
Thats respectable. But if he cares so much about that then him and the studios should demand more from streaming services, if they're not reaching his bar for video and audio quality.
I read a great user review on a film ranking site for guy Ritchie’s film the covenant that said something approximating “he liberated himself from his own genre” and I sometimes feel that Nolan’s work could use some of that.
I have issue both outright with the material of Oppenheimer, and his handling of it, but on release I waited an extra 3 weeks to get a reasonably positioned seat in one of the imax 70mm showings.
And it made me realize something.
Even if people like Nolan or pta or Tarantino swear by film, and even if they’re right!, what matters is if the theater owners care about film, because the presentation was terrible.
There were flies on the lens obstructing the image with little furry dust balls crawling all over the picture.
There was roughly 5 minutes worth of a red line down the picture, just to the left of center, in various 20 second chunks throughout the film.
Also just culture shocked by imax 70mm because it frames the film in essentially 4:3.
Growing up in the states in the 90s has me associating 4:3 with sitcom tv.
So is the 4:3 framing the “intended” framing?
Are home media viewers encouraged to drop the majority of their screen real estate when watching this?
Does the home release have a 16:9 cut? Did Nolan reframe it? (These questions likely have answers for anyone who really wants to know but this article was light on actionable details other than “it is cause he said it is”)
At a similar special showing I thought hateful 8 used theatrical 70mm to great effect.
I liked the first fifth of Oppenheimer. Mostly the imaginative practical effect asides of seeing into the mind of someone laboring over matter at this scale.
It lost me right around the time Nolan cruelly mangled this absolutely chilling moment into a “get it up” punchline.
I watched Interstellar in a movie theater with remarkably low image quality. The picture was as if they had chosen the wrong gamma setting. I was very dissatisfied with Nolan's work at the time, because I didn't know that it was a presentation issue. Ironically, I realized that it was so only when I've seen it again on my home TV, which was not a high quality one, but still produced better image quality than what the theater had offered me.
4:3 is the correct aspect ratio for IMAX but it sounds like everything else about the presentation at the theater was wrong so who knows if there were any other issues at your particular theater. The movie was released in a number of different formats so there's already a cropped version that will go onto the disc https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
Unfortunately they emptied out the proverbial bench to get enough staff worldwide to play Oppenheimer in film formats wherever possible and that led to some pretty spotty results.
Can't a Blu-ray's playback be disabled by revoking the AACS cert (or whatever key) the blue-ray uses for DRM in the blu-ray players? Especially since they're all always connected now.
Yeah, the wording around it is a little confusing, but the tl;dr on it is you use their firmware flashing tool to overwrite the existing firmware on your Blu-ray/dvd/UHD drive if it's compatible. Then there are no more restrictions on what your drive can read whatsoever. Region locks, DRM, etc all go away.
Unless you're using the Blu-Ray player for something else, there's not really a need to connect them to the network. Maybe to ease firmware updates if you want those.
Yes, some discs have something that does something with the network, but I can't imagine it's worthwhile (but maybe if I knew what it was, it could be?)
One of my blu-ray players had a bunch of streaming clients, but they pretty much all expired.
It might be nice if you could use a blu-ray player to play discs copied to your network, but I think DRM makes that a no, and anyway, 4k blu-ray can exceed 100mbps at peaks, and I don't think 1g ethernet has made it to 4k blu-ray players yet. But it has for some models of Apple TV, and some android TV products, including the well regarded Nvidia Shield.
It can happen even without connecting to the network. The discs that new movies are on can have updates that will disable your player's ability to watch any DRM'd Blu-rays, even old ones that previously worked in it.
If a drive that fully implements the AACS spec opens a disk with a newer version of the MKB block, the drive will update its flash and refuse to downgrade to an older MKB block. If the software you are using to talk with the drive had its host certificate revoked in the newly update MKB, the drive will refuse to work with that software forever. A active network connection isn't required.
Of course, for the ultimate in service, one can always visit that particular bay in sweden. Eye-patch, peg-leg, and parrot included free of charge!
You get to download the movie. You get to keep the movie. You get to play the movie whenever you want.
This was the service problem that streaming was supposed to solve of course. Unfortunately people have gotten a bit too greedy, which leaves us with the current situation.
Nooo you have to purchase 30 dollar country locked unskippable ads physical media that can only be played with special equipment and has expensive software keeping you from playing it in a convenient way.
I will. There’s no streaming service that guarantees any level of bitrate or picture quality, and if they can save a few cents by compressing the hell out of my movie, they will. If I get a well-mastered 4K disc, it’ll always be a quality experience on a decent player.
Still, I think your attention to picture quality is a niche case (like how "audiophiles" treat music). Above a certain quality that all streaming services pretty much match, I don't really care about compression. Honestly, I can't remember a time I noticed netflix's compression.
You slot the plastic in once and then save a video file to you hard drive. Keep the plastic disc as a reliable back-up in case you lose the file or need more disk space.
Wait until the film you want to watch no longer exists.
Instead you'll stream a version that meets the restrictions of the day. Perhaps the soundtrack has been changed due to licensing issues, or entire scenes have been deleted for being politically incorrect (according to whichever politics are in power when you watch the film)
Wait a few weeks and the digital version of the spinning media will magically appear thanks to the magic of an eye-patch, peg-leg, and parrot included service in a bay.
While I agree, there is nothing less satifying than backing up to a nvme external drive.
I still have some spinning disks large hdd as a secondary backup and it's so much more satisfying. I could listen to them work all day! Probably rooted in my brain from childhood.
I’ve been getting into blu ray again thanks to streaming costs. Amazing deals out there. You can also sometimes get 4k blu ray movies with a digital download code included for less than the digital version alone costs.
And yet they are available, proving the studios will never learn.
Capitalists always say the market will work it out, but all I see are entrenched companies who think customers are beholden to them, not the other way around.
Piracy wouldn't be needed if it weren't for the studios shooting themselves in the foot.
Nope. You are often buying people's old collections that they are getting rid of or downsizing due to space and available streaming options. There's lots of bargains on Blu rays and DVDs these days.
I'm finding I'm snapping up loads of <$10 Blu rays from brick and mortar stores now too. I'm enjoying the more deliberate choice of a movie rather than endlessly browsing streaming sites.
I'm sure Nolan has sufficient clout that he could negotiate a perpetual contract that the streaming service may not remove Oppenheimer from their catalog.
I own quite a few blu-rays, mostly movies where compression artifacts on streaming versions are very noticeable. I'd get them for more movies, but I don't have infinite shelf space, nor do I want to transform my living room walls into disc storage like some of my movie buff friends did in the DVD era. Filing cabinets could work, I suppose. But the point is, streaming a purchased or pirated copy is just simpler and better, and for 90% of movies the compression doesn't impact the experience. With all due respect to Nolan's work on the home release, I'm pretty sure Oppenheimer will be in the 90%. For the remaining 10% I'd love if iTunes and the other digital movie storefronts offered a "hifi" quality download with bitrate on par with blu-ray. I know Sony has something like that for their TVs, but I mean something really available cross platform through Movies Anywhere or similar. The difficulty studios have making money on digital movies really seems self-inflicted in some ways, plenty of people out there would be converted from buying blu-rays if the price and quality of downloads improved just a bit.
I love Christopher Nolans movies, but there is something seriously wrong with the audio mix on Oppenheimer that makes the dialogue inaudible. I cannot see how that was a deliberate artistic choice.
My problem is that I know I'll probably only ever want to watch a given movie 'x' times. The cost to rent a movie is around $4, and the cost to buy a new movie is around $30. For me, it's almost always the case that 30/x > 4.
This reminds me of the current state of blogs vs platforms. The issue with streaming platforms in various formats is that they rake in more money over their lifetime than the creators, simply by acquiring copyrights and hosting it.
70 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadDid you mean "continuity"?
https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/8/22162918/christopher-nola...
Thats respectable. But if he cares so much about that then him and the studios should demand more from streaming services, if they're not reaching his bar for video and audio quality.
I have issue both outright with the material of Oppenheimer, and his handling of it, but on release I waited an extra 3 weeks to get a reasonably positioned seat in one of the imax 70mm showings.
And it made me realize something.
Even if people like Nolan or pta or Tarantino swear by film, and even if they’re right!, what matters is if the theater owners care about film, because the presentation was terrible.
There were flies on the lens obstructing the image with little furry dust balls crawling all over the picture.
There was roughly 5 minutes worth of a red line down the picture, just to the left of center, in various 20 second chunks throughout the film.
Also just culture shocked by imax 70mm because it frames the film in essentially 4:3.
Growing up in the states in the 90s has me associating 4:3 with sitcom tv.
So is the 4:3 framing the “intended” framing?
Are home media viewers encouraged to drop the majority of their screen real estate when watching this?
Does the home release have a 16:9 cut? Did Nolan reframe it? (These questions likely have answers for anyone who really wants to know but this article was light on actionable details other than “it is cause he said it is”)
At a similar special showing I thought hateful 8 used theatrical 70mm to great effect.
I liked the first fifth of Oppenheimer. Mostly the imaginative practical effect asides of seeing into the mind of someone laboring over matter at this scale.
It lost me right around the time Nolan cruelly mangled this absolutely chilling moment into a “get it up” punchline.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=lb13ynu3Iac
Unfortunately they emptied out the proverbial bench to get enough staff worldwide to play Oppenheimer in film formats wherever possible and that led to some pretty spotty results.
For anyone else wondering, this seems like a good explanation:
https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18856
Yes, some discs have something that does something with the network, but I can't imagine it's worthwhile (but maybe if I knew what it was, it could be?)
One of my blu-ray players had a bunch of streaming clients, but they pretty much all expired.
It might be nice if you could use a blu-ray player to play discs copied to your network, but I think DRM makes that a no, and anyway, 4k blu-ray can exceed 100mbps at peaks, and I don't think 1g ethernet has made it to 4k blu-ray players yet. But it has for some models of Apple TV, and some android TV products, including the well regarded Nvidia Shield.
You get to download the movie. You get to keep the movie. You get to play the movie whenever you want.
This was the service problem that streaming was supposed to solve of course. Unfortunately people have gotten a bit too greedy, which leaves us with the current situation.
Audio quality is even worse. To be able to underestand spoke english you need the volume at 60% (everything else working at 20-30%).
Instead you'll stream a version that meets the restrictions of the day. Perhaps the soundtrack has been changed due to licensing issues, or entire scenes have been deleted for being politically incorrect (according to whichever politics are in power when you watch the film)
Silence of the lambs and Lexx come to mind.
I still have some spinning disks large hdd as a secondary backup and it's so much more satisfying. I could listen to them work all day! Probably rooted in my brain from childhood.
Capitalists always say the market will work it out, but all I see are entrenched companies who think customers are beholden to them, not the other way around.
Piracy wouldn't be needed if it weren't for the studios shooting themselves in the foot.
$3 on eBay, delivered within a few days.
The stuff I want to watch is rarely available on the very few streaming services I subscribe to.
As for piracy - ugh I really could not be bothered - what a waste of time finding and downloading and playing.
I'm pretty sure that any streaming service now will offer much better quality than DVD by default.
Unless you use a projector or something to watch your movies, in which case the details are sufficiently lost to not observe any real difference?
For those prices I'd wonder if you're getting the counterfeit versions?
I'm finding I'm snapping up loads of <$10 Blu rays from brick and mortar stores now too. I'm enjoying the more deliberate choice of a movie rather than endlessly browsing streaming sites.
[1] https://github.com/automatic-ripping-machine/automatic-rippi...
[2] https://jellyfin.org/
MaxFALL: 147 nit
Very low light levels on this HDR Blu-ray.