We Need a Blu-Ray Release!
It's about time, people! Bernardo Betrolucci's filmography deserves the honour of Blu-Ray. DVD resolution doesn't do this wonderful movie justice.
shareThere is a BluRay for "The Dreamers" but not this. I wonder why that is..
"IMdB; where 14 year olds can act like jaded 40 year old critics...'
You wonder why?
Has it occurred to you that until a few years ago most of the film material used in cinematography didn't carry a resolution higher than what a DVD offered - many older films didn't even reach that. It wouldn't be terribly ethical to offer you a blu-ray at the usually higher price and deliver a quality that isn't any better than what you could expect from a DVD, possibly even less.
Admittedly, new image processing algorithms can sometimes squeeze a bit more sharpness out of the older material, and in some cases that may be an improvement. By and large, though, I feel that this sort of meddling with the ""original work of art" is about as helpful as the colorizing of classical old black and white movies. Meaning NOT!
Motion picture film, especially 35mm and 70mm filformat, IS the original, high-definition medium. That's how they are able to blow the picture of a movie up to the size of a movie screen that's 50, 70 feet wide or even bigger, and the focused picture on the screen stays nice, sharp and clear.
That being said, there is no doubt in my mind that a good, 35mm theatrical print of Stealing Beauty would yield a dynamite transfer to hi-def media like Blu-Ray.
Betrolucci has managed to capture is so much beautiful scenery of the Italian countryside that this movie definitely deserves top treatment in every way for home video and I'm afraid DVD resolution doesn't do it justice.
"Until a few years ago most of the film material used in cinematography didn't carry a resolution higher than what a DVD offered."
You are wrong.
If we apply some elementary calculus, it is easy to understand that your claim cannot be true.
DVD resolution is 720 (w) x 576 (h).
If your claim were true, you would have noticed 'back then' in every cinema with screens between 40 to 60 feet wide, that the image was pixelated with pixels getting as big as 1 inch or larger. Now that is BIG PIXELS!
However, you nor I nor anyone ever noticed such HUGE pixels on the cinema screens. Not in the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties or nineties - before the entrance of the DVD and the digital format. That is because back then, film makers did not use digital techniques, but 'analogue' film. Analogue film can have great sharpness and detail, even when a 35 or 60 mm film is magnified to 60 feet screens. That's the greatness of celluloid for you.
Heck, even *after* the entrance of the DVD format, cinema's did not show such huge pixels on their huge screens. That is because movie formats in cinema's typically offer a MUCH greater resolution than DVD. Whether the source is celluloid or 'digital'.
Blu-ray movies of older films are not sharp because, as you say, 'image processing algorithms squeeze sharpness out of older material', but because the Blu-ray and 4000p formats do more justice to the information in the hi-res celluloid master - information that is already there and does not need 'squeezing out'.
'Image processing techniques' may be used to interpolate pixels that have never been there, but that is not the case in the original celluloid masters (apart from damaged celluloid in which information got lost).