In a world of Blu-ray HD 1080p, the movie industry is big business, it puts a lot of it’s reward into hunting down the so called Pirates, those evil Dick Dasterdly’s who, if we believe the word of Hollywood, are killing the industry with poor quality hijacked movies. We are encouraged to walk on by those DVD selections on the side of the street and humbling take note of the piracy warnings only found on official purchases!?

So last night the wife and me went for a bite to eat and then on to the Vue Cinema in Sheffield’s Meadowhall Centre, to watch the lastest and first of the X-Men franchise. A blockbuster, mainstay of Hollywood and the movie industry, like obedient trustworthy types we paid for our tickets from the official counter, switched off our phones.

The trailers rolled and amongst the game previews we were shown a series of upcoming superhero super-definition showstopper movies. All was going well, then the usual bbfc classification glowed into life, but it was immediately clear there were problems, the bbfc frame shook and wobbled, appearing out of focus down one half.  The intro titles of the film rolled, the same shaking of the type and blurring on the left side of the screen. At first we hoped this was a temporary gltich. But no, the first 10 minutes of the film includes subtitled german. The left side or the subtitles were heavily out of focus and glowing with yellow halo’s while the right side of the screen was far better.

After about 5-10 mins it was clear it wasn’t going to resolve itself and that the actual image was badly affected too, there was also a very heavy amount of grain in the film. The out focus affect was really quite painful to watch, so I went in search of a member of staff. The only staff member I could find said she would speak to the projectionist and apologised. 5 minutes later you could see something was being attempted as there were a series of changes in the focus. It mildly improved but the grain and focus seemed to change throughout the film.

There were also strange changes to the aspect ratio, several times in the film you would notice the image stretch or compress.

By the time the film was over, I had quite a headache.

So much for avoiding the poor quality pirate versions, it appears the movie industry is ensuring that pirate copies are poor quality by dishing it out at source.

Vue you have lost one customer, or maybe a few more.

~ by Thinker on 9 - June - 2011.