| In one of my recent trips along the HD Movie aisle at Fry's Electronics store I noticed a Blu-Ray edition of Casablanca. It was tagged the "Ultimate Collector's Edition" and was full of frivolity, including a "passport holder", "luggage tag" (really...) and photo books, cards, etc. And more etc. Okay. However, the reason d'etre for this collection was the Blu-Ray transfer of the movie itself. So checkbox #1: you've got to have the movie. And why not? Casablanca is one of my favorite movies--and for whom is it not? It is Number 11 on IMDB's Top 250, and near the AFI's Top 100 list. Interestingly, Casablanca is the most represented film in the AFI's ballot for "Top 100 Best Movie Quotes". It is mentioned seven times! Here's one, a classic, #2 on the list. Okay, I don't have to sell you on the movie. Checkbox #2 is, however, "Do you have it already?" Well, yes, of course I do. I have two. One on VHS. And another on DVD. So now its time to pony up for the Blu-Ray, right? |  |
Amazon thinks so, they have a sales pitch video for it. Seven hours of extras, yeah, yeah. But the 2" web preview doesn't really let me know if it is really going to look and sound that much better. Don't get me wrong. If I didn't already have the DVD, I'd be on it like Captain Renault on Ugarte. But I do already have the DVD, and I also have a very good Toshiba A30 HD-DVD player with an excellent 1080p up-converter. Of course it would be good, but the question for me was, "would it be that much better?"
I'm at the point where I'm going to buy almost all new movies in Blu-Ray, I'll get closeouts I don't already have in HD-DVD because they're cheap, and I'll still shop the closeout bins for DVDs for relatively recent movies--because the transfers upconvert very well. For special movies, some "kaboom" flix or a special effects blockbuster or anything Pixar, I'll probably duplicate a DVD I already have in Blu-Ray. I mean (and I think I've asked this before), can you really have too many copies of 2001: A Space Oddesey? The answer is no.
But for movies I already have, on DVD, the bar is a bit higher. That's my point. I love Casablanca and it will probably be a go-to movie on many rainy nights in the future. But isn't the DVD pretty good? I've always thought it was.
The experience which lures me to wanting more was one of a few years ago (December 19, 2004 to be exact) when the City of San Jose reopened the California Theater, on South First Street. I'll save all the info I have on the California, nee, Fox movie house, for another post. On that one particular night my mom, my sister and I went to see Casablanca there. Courtesy of the David Packard Foundation. There was a newsreel (FDR, Churchill and Stalin in Casablanca!), a Bugs Bunny cartoon which featured "As Time Goes By" and some live organ music. All that culminating in a wonderful print delivered on a brand-new screen with state of the art projection and sound. It was sublime.
Could I get closer to that at home? I'm just talking degrees here, of course I don't have the kind of home theater setup that would rival the California. Or even the local cineplex shoebox. So discretion prevailed that day at Fry's and I put the box (and all of its "etc"s) back on the shelf. To be quite Candid about it, if it were just the disk, and the asking was $25 rather than $70, I probably wouldn't have thought twice. But I've got to be somewhat discreet with my video upgrade expenditures. There may be 50 candidate films in my collection I could replace in DVD with Blu-Ray. That's well more than a thousand dollar outlay for something I already posses.
But then the fates came to me. A co-worker had the Casablanca Blu-Ray and loaned it to me. Heaven! Better than that, because as the Stone Soup Blu-Ray Player and the HD-DVD upscaler are on separate HDMI inputs, I would be able to do a true back-back compare of the two disks.
And here, dear reader are my results. I don't have the time nor chops to present this comparison in a format akin to Tom's Hardware or other sites which do this for a living. I can also say that if you want someone else's textual analysis of the new release, there are plenty of reviews on the web. What you're going to get here is my amateur visual comparisons. Because that's what its all about, baby. Which one is better when you slot the disk and turn down the lights. No exotic measurements or tuning to the "nth" degree of output. This is a seat-of-the-couch evaluation. What's the best picture for your buck.
You can skip the next couple of paragraphs if you like; it is all about the technical bits.
The TV is a Samsung 46" LCD with 1080p, flourescent backlight and 15k:1 contrast ratio. A couple years old, but still very nice. Its got the shiny, not matte screen, great for films. The settings are out of the box, "Standard" (not "Movie") and with contrast and brightness settings in the middle. Color settings don't matter a whole lot here, but there was no color casting to the B&W print that I could see in either the DVD nor BLU-Ray. Feeding the DVD-side is the aforementioned Toshiba A30. In the Blu-Ray's corner is the SSBRP, which is an LG player driving an NVIDIA PureVideo® HD engine off an Asus M3N-HT Deluxe/HDMI Hybrid SLI motherboard. The player software is CyberLink's Power DVD 7. I took screen shots by hand with my Canon S5-IS at the widest zoom, fixed 1/60sec exposure with ambinent room (i.e., LCD backlight) lighting.
Sound output from the Toshiba is HDMI to the TV set, wheras on the Blu-Ray the sound is optical S/PDIF out to the Sony home theater reciever and its theater-in-the-box speakers. I should say right now that the audio was very obviously better, but the differences between the outputs make the comparisons difficult. From other reviews I understand that the sound hasn't been remastered, and that it was still in Mono, but it was clear and bright on both the DVD and the Blu-Ray. Not enough difference there for an upgrade repurchase.
So what were the visuals like? From the opening credits, the improvement in the transfer was apparent.
The text on the background map was much more legible and the drop shadow behind the title was clear and made the text pop with depth as was certainly originally intended.
After the narrative introduction with the model globe showing the route to Casablanca--there is this establishing shot of where our story takes place. Although it is actually a matte painting with an composite of the sky, the minaret, and a little figure walking the parapet. The figure is actually quite blurry and the Blu-Ray magnifies this, but this is decades before ILM mattes. I didn't give the minaret much space on the Blu-Ray side in the above mash-up, but you can click through on the links below and see the obvious differences.
Note especially the dynamic range in the sky as well as crispness in the minaret roof shadows. Truth be told, I didn't know the cityscape was a matte painting until I saw the Blu-Ray for the first time and could pause the picture. You can't do that at the movie theater! I should have known though as all the airport scenes (except the arrival of Major Strasser) are all mattes and models.
As nearly the entire movie takes place inside Rick's Cafe American, we skip ahead to the first musical number, where Sam leads the bar in a rousing rendition of "Knock On Wood". Here, in the busy background, you can see the depth of the lighting, the slight push to the contrast, but most of all the crispness of line and brightness. The DVD looks positively muddy by comparison. This wasn't just the camera or the brightness of the TV (though the latter could be adjusted to achieve some better parity, I suppose). The Blu-Ray just pops. This indeed does remind me of my night with Casablanca on the big screen at the California Theater.
With a crisper print details abound. I thought it was just wonderful that the extra at Sam's right arm was playing in the scene. You could see her facial expression as Sam runs his hand through his hair. Never saw that before!
For this shot of Rick, where he denies the Deutsche Bank representative access to the gaming tables, I didn't get the Canon in exactly the same spot between switching inputs. So the images are slightly different sizes. Rather than introduce artifacts by scaling in Photoshop, I decided to put them side-by-side here. Which is a better presentation of all the differences anyway. Look at the tile on the wall, and the pattern from the lightshade and shadows (the film is full of such rich lighting details). Notice the individual chess pieces and the shadows on their left sides in the Blu-Ray.
And most of all, notice Bogie's wonderful mug. The scar on his lip was clearly visible as were the pupils of his eyes. You might give the nod to the DVD's dynamic range when it comes to Bogie's forehead, however. Those famous brow wrinkles are just a little deeper, his face just a little wearier. I should mention that these are not frame-by-frame time-code matches in these pictures, so Bogie's brow might actually be a bit more relaxed. I just used the pause buttons and my eye to freeze the pictures, flipping back and forth on the HDMI inputs until I got a reasonable match.
If there is anything that the DVD's flatter contrast provides, it is that there might be a hint of a white-on-white stripe in Rick's dinner jacket (a Gasbarri of Rome, made for the movie for Bogie). But then again, that might be a moiré pattern introduced by the DVD transfer, the upscaling to 1080p for the DVD to the TV set or from the CMOS chip in the Canon camera I used for the caputre. I didn't notice it anywhere else.
Even if that is the case, everything else in the scene--the sets, the decor, the costumes and most of all the facial expressions, all pop with new clarity.
At Ilsa's introduction, where she asks Captain Renault about Sam at the piano, there is this exquisite close-up of Ingrid Bergman. Even with the soft-focus and halo lighting treatment by Arthur Edeson's crew, the Blu-Ray punches out detail. Though the contrast line just at her neck & hairline is lost, that might in fact demonstrate this transfer was taken right up to the edge of what is possible for the contrast ratio of video--or at least of my LCD screen. Who knows, the contrast gradient might be better on an LED-lit or Plasma screen? The grain introduced by the earlier transfer, subsequent scalings and computer intervention by the Toshiba is reduced in the Blu-Ray The lighting is made more uniform, and the removal of the sepia-like cast means the Blu-Ray image is very near like a publicity still.
I should mention that the reddish "bursts" on the upper and right edges aren't in the print, that's my halogen spot room lighting reflecting off the TV screen. In the larger files you can see curtain reflections as well. Mea culpa. This is my first time shooting off the TV screen.
Though I watched a little bit more of the movie (I had to stay in for that quote, "You played it for her, Sam you can play it for me!") I was ready to shut it down after the first half hour, return my borrowed copy and get one of my own, leather passport case and all. Truly and absolutely worth it.
I'm convinced: a great transfer makes a great movie....wonderful.
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