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The would-be ultimate edition Blu-ray vs. DVD smackdown

Thu, Oct 9, 2008 (midnight)

The TV was 52 inches. A big, bad-ass Sony flat-screen. This past weekend, the editorial staff of Las Vegas Weekly got together to compare DVDs to their upstart replacement, the super-high-resolution discs known as Blu-ray. We screened DVDs of Ratatouille, Batman Begins, Kill Bill: Vol. 2 and Casino Royale.

More on DVDs: Cardboard plots! Wooden acting! The occasional gem! (10/9/08); It's the talking heads, stupid! (10/9/08)
Beyond the Weekly: Blu-ray

Then we put in their Blu-ray equivalents. This, we figured, would be like trying out broadband after years of dial-up. Or like those scenes in The Road Warrior where drivers add nitrous oxide to their fuel to give their cars a punch of power. We expected a force-pushing-you-into-your-seat rush.

Well, that was the plan …

Look, there’s no denying the detail in the Blu-ray pictures is impressive. Not the same leap as going from VHS to DVD, but striking. On a good DVD on a good screen, a film image tends to be clear and crisp, vibrant, detailed. On Blu-ray some of these images were breathtaking. An action scene like the Batmobile chase in Batman Begins, which had felt solid but indistinct on DVD, now crackled off the screen.

And while the Blu-ray scenes we screened had the explosive “it-is-live!”-ness of an actual, real-time event, we all felt right away that there was a cost to be paid. For one, static shots, where the camera doesn’t move, showed off the fabulous resolution of Blu-ray to best effect. But when the camera started moving, there were problems. The picture would be ever so slightly jerky, a kind of pixelated lag. The camera no longer felt fluid but instead artificial, like the pan-and-scan technique of moving a rectangular movie image around on a square-sized TV set so that (eventually) you could see all of an entire shot.

But this may have been a problem with the player, or a first-generation hang-up that future Blu-ray players will correct. The real issue was the very strength of the player, its super-real resolution. The consensus among our group was that Blu-ray might be, well, too real. We had passed out of the realm of fiction and into the realm of fiction-as-real, live, demonstrable existence. It was so real that the scenes we watched passed the top of the mountain of pure clarity and headed back down the other side, toward overpixelated inauthenticity. Shots were so “real” that they looked like live action, like a giant sporting event, and no longer looked like movies.

Like good consumers of the culture, we quickly began to parcel out our distinctions. My favorite line? Watching a bonfire in a short scene from Kill Bill: Vol. 2, one of my colleagues noted, “That fire looks like DVD to me.”

One doesn’t want to be a Luddite here. Surely there were complaints when movies introduced sound, and black and white yielded to color. Those have, on balance, turned out well. The digitalization of film, which continues with this latest technology, may also prove to be a godsend—and at more than delivering cool special effects. But perhaps it’s the point that movies—and perhaps art—shouldn’t be trying to create a world that hews ever closer to some definition of “real life.” We know real life when we see it. We know movies when we see them. Let’s leave it at that.

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