Too smooth

The picture quality on Robert Luketic’s card counting film 21 looked too smooth when I saw it in cinema on Tuesday. Avid’s customer showcase page confirmed what I suspected: it was not shot on film, it was shot with HD digital cameras.

The digital movie cameras of today can provide amazing looking shots if the director and director of photography know what they’re doing, but in this case the end result looked like a dvd projected with a digital projector, even though the theater I saw it in used film projectors. I really missed the grain and texture of film. Very disappointing.

Quantum of Solace teaser follows previous formula

The teaser trailer for the upcoming James Bond film Quantum of Solace was released on Monday and guess what – it’s basically a remake of the Casino Royale (the previous Bond film) teaser trailer.

Here’s the new Quantum of Solace teaser (and you can also find it on the official 007 site):

Compare the above with teaser for Casino Royale from two years ago (also available on Apple’s trailer site):

There’s definitely similarities. First there’s a relatively slow build up with M scolding Bond (with the idea of one of the smaller villains talking down to Bond taken from the final trailer for Casino Royale) followed by a potpourri of action scenes, with images of scantily clad Daniel Craig and Bond girls thrown in for good measure.

I know it worked very well last time (Casino Royale was a major success), so you can’t blame for them using the same format for cutting the clips together. Still, a few surprises in the teaser would have been nice for fans.

Here’s a good example of a more original approach when talking about Bond teasers. It’s from 2002’s Die Another Day, the last Pierce Brosnan Bond film:

I just love the way those sand dunes turn into Bond girls and the bullet morphs into Bond’s car, plus as a bonus you can here her blow the smoke in the end. Nice touch.

James Bond will return in Blu

It’s official: to promote the theatrical release of the 22nd (by official counting) James Bond film Quantum of Solace, MGM and Fox are bringing the early adventures of the secret agent on Blu-ray worldwide on October 20th.

In this batch, six Bond films are getting the high definition treatment: Dr No (1962), From Russia with Love (1963), Thunderball (1965), Live and Let Die (1973), For Your Eyes Only (1981) and Die Another Day (2002). That’s three from Sean Connery era, two from Roger Moore and one from Pierce Brosnan.

You’ve got to admire their press release, which makes it sound like this high definition re-mastering and restoration process they did was just for this Blu-ray release:

Recently restored and re-mastered for the highest quality picture and sound quality via the state-of-the-art Lowry process digital frame-by-frame restoration and featuring special features galore, Bond is primed for Blu-ray Disc with a selection of 007 adventures spanning the storied career of cinema’s most recognisable spy.

I’m betting though that the restoration they’re referring to is the one they made when they released the Ultimate Edition dvds in 2006. Here’s what Macworld.co.uk wrote about the restoration process back then:

The project team also worked to a higher resolution than DVDs support, offering a route forward to release the digitised classics on other formats in future. The film was scanned at a resolution of 4,000 x 3,000 pixels, in contrast with the 720 x 576 pixel resolution of DVDs. This meant that each frame of each movie weighed in at 45MB.

That would mean that essentially all they’ve done now compared to the Ultimate Edition dvds is that they’ve upped the pixel count on the image from dvd quality (576i) to high definition quality (1080p). That’s certainly something, of course, if you’ve got a Blu-ray player and a large screen, but those who already own the Ultimate Edition dvds and don’t have big television sets are propably not missing anything too essential when the new high definition discs arrive.

Unless they decide to release the discs with new extra features.