Pulp Fiction SE - what a stupid place for a layer change!!!

[Squirrel God]

Having watched Pulp Fiction SE R1 last night, I have to say I'm really annoyed that they put the layer change right in the middle of Christopher Walken's talk about storing the watch up his ass! It ruined the flow of his monologue and reduced the impact considerably

I sometimes think that the people who decide the layer changes are blind and/or deaf and/or just plain stupid.

My only consolation is that the noticeable layer change will become a thing of the past in DVD players at some point in the future (as they are in HCPCs).

 

[andyk]

I watched it last night as well and was also well annoyed.

The change was about 30 seconds before the end of the section. Why!. There are quite a few black silent bits in Pulp Fiction (between the various stories). Surely one of those could have been used.

 

[pete18]

the region2 version is out soon
I went on dvd compare and they say that both region 1 and 2 are the same.

Has Pulp Fiction region 1 got french writing on it if your order from play, how bad is it



from pete

 

[andyk]

There is French writing on the cover. The french title is underneath the english one (in smaller writing). The chapter listing and narrative in the leaflet are duplicated in french on separate pages. The packaging generally is very flimsy.

I find though that all of these factors don't affect the quality of the picture, sound, plot, acting, cinematography or direction that go to make the film what it is.

Don't worry about it.

 

[dred]

going back to layer changes...

this has probably been asked before but why don't DVD players incorporate some sort of memory buffer, similar to that found on portable CD players. i.e. the data that is read from the disc is temporarily stored so that any gaps in the data transfer are eradicated.

have I missed something?

 

[andyk]

My understanding is that some players do indeed have a buffer to stop this sort of thing. Not mine though :-(

 

[GermanMan]

I'm dismayed to read that the simple layer change is STILL causing problems on players this many years after DVD hit the market. The DVD adventure seems to be one screw up after another from the original concept of the standard to how its implemented.

I still, to this day, have not heard a believable reason why the widescreen and std version cannot be on the same side, that is, WHY the 4:3 std version is not just a true pan-scan clipping box that selects a portion of the widescreen data for display - the control signal defining where the clipping-box is could easily be hidden in some low bandwidth sub-channel type of thing.

Anyway, back to the actual topic: Layer change lag. When players cannot buffer the change from layers on the same side of a disc, and given the fact that the industry never went with implementing dual-head players that could play double sided discs without flipping them, WHAT sort of mess will we get with multi-disc movies?

I'm thinking specifically of the comming extended version of Lord of the Rings: Fellowship - which has additional 30 minutes of footage. The movie, from all that I am reading, will then be split accross 2 discs. ARGH! I can only 'assume' the disc change will at least be at a scene change and not in the middle of some action, but given how SLOW some of the changers can be in changing discs, I can imagine a 30 second delay in the flow of the film while the disc changes.

I suppose, given that, by some accounts, 95% of films fit on a single dual-layer disc side, there is no commercial reasoning to build a standard dual-headed, single-tray player. Given that the produced discs are apparently going to split films that don't fit on one dual-layer side onto 2 discs, rather than the 2nd side of a 2 sided disc - will there be ANY move to build and sell at least SOME dual-well dvd players that are synchronised to seamlessly jump from disk 1 to disk 2?

I'm allready ****ed at the idea of having to get up out of the chair to put in disk to of the LOTR special edition.

 

[higenbs1]

Originally posted by andyk
My understanding is that some players do indeed have a buffer to stop this sort of thing. Not mine though :-(

My Denon 2800 Mk2 has. And it work perfectly.

 

[Squirrel God]

Dred and AndyK,

As Higenbs1 has stated, Denon make players with 2-4Mb buffers to reduce or eliminate the effects of layer change. As I said in my first post, layer changes are not an issue with DVD-ROMs due to the already inbuilt buffer. I'm sure that in the future, buffers will become standard. In the meantime, it would be nice if the layer changes were done in convenient places! It's not hard to do but sadly we get too many layer changes in bad places.

-----------------

Originally posted by GermanMan
that is, WHY the 4:3 std version is not just a true pan-scan clipping box that selects a portion of the widescreen data for display - the control signal defining where the clipping-box is could easily be hidden in some low bandwidth sub-channel type of thing.

In fact, this is how P&S should be done according to the DVD-Video standard! So I couldn't agree more. It's a waste of disk space. I can only conclude that the film companies don't do it because of lazyness and cost. It's far easier and cheaper to just dump out the 4:3 P&S version to DVD that they have to prepare for the VHS market, than to spend time and money coding the P&S parameters.

Originally posted by GermanMan
I'm allready ****ed at the idea of having to get up out of the chair to put in disk to of the LOTR special edition.

I'm not bothered about getting up out of my chair as I'll definitely do that once or twice anyway during a 3.5 hour movie! I'm just a bit annoyed at the fact that the choice of when the break takes place is taken out of my hands.

My solution would be to remove the DTS and commentary tracks and supply 2 versions of the extended LOTR edition (one with DTS and the commentary tracks for those who want them, and one with just the DD5.1 soundtrack for people like me). It would probably then fit on a single disk. Again, there are cost implications of doing that though.

It's not the end of the world but it's still an inconvenience I'd rather not have.

 

[GermanMan]

I agree - indeed, putting the film with the primary audio tracks on one disk (which should handle up to nearly 4 hours on a 1 side - dual layer) and then the same video again with the commentary track and or some other language tracks on the 2nd disk would be the way to go. You have to press 2 discs ANYWAY.

This brings up the point - how was it (or will it be done) on LOTR? Is it already set that there WILL be a disc change in the movie or is there a chance they will do it as you suggest (and I realized 10 minutes after my initial post above) - and supply 2 disks with the same full movie video just different audio tracks on them?

We may not know till we get to see the disks later this year.

 

[Squirrel God]

Originally posted by GermanMan
I agree - indeed, putting the film with the primary audio tracks on one disk (which should handle up to nearly 4 hours on a 1 side - dual layer) and then the same video again with the commentary track and or some other language tracks on the 2nd disk would be the way to go. You have to press 2 discs ANYWAY.

No you misunderstood. That wouldn't work. If you put the video with all the commentary tracks and the language tracks the movie wouldn't fit on one disk! What I meant was having two different releases.

One has just the movie with a DD5.1 soundtrack all on a single DVD-9 disk (plus the 2 extras disks, so 3 disks in total). Even with just the movie and DD5.1 soundtrack though, I reckon video quality would have to be compromised somewhat to get it all to fit.

The other is the 4 disk version that is being released anyway.

Originally posted by GermanMan
This brings up the point - how was it (or will it be done) on LOTR? Is it already set that there WILL be a disc change in the movie or is there a chance they will do it as you suggest (and I realized 10 minutes after my initial post above) - and supply 2 disks with the same full movie video just different audio tracks on them?

They are releasing it with the movie on 2 disks.

 

[GermanMan]

They certainly could do that as well, though I imagine they would want to have the commentary and other language tracks in the box. However, I'll stick with my original proposal of two -9 disks, each with the movie on it in its entirity with only a limited set of audio tracks on each one.

As it is, if it comes out split over 2 disks, then I'm not buying it. I'll download it from some p2p network, paste it together and make a single good quality mpeg out of it to put on a recordable dvd disk as a giant vcd until such time as they fix that nonsense.

2 disk movies are as stupid as flippers and there really is NO reason for them.
According to the specs I'm reading on the -9 disks, you can fit around 4 hours of video on them - so why 3.5 hours cannot fit (with audio) is beyond me. Slightly more compression I will gladly trade for the stupidity of splitting over 2 disks.

Given the 2 disk format - does ANYONE have a usable solution to make the disk change tollerable? What about changers - I assume there is nowhere near the mechanical mechanism nor the buffer memory to make a quick transition to a second disk possible.

 

[Philip Newton]

Watced PF SE R2 last night didn't even notice the layer change watched watch up arse scene twice and noticed nothing! am using tosh 220 as well which is not all that good with layer changes anyone else notice this and if so where is the layer change on R2 version