Taal-Eros/B4U

This review submitted by Rishi .

Picture

After anxiously waiting quite a long time for this official release of Taal (a bootleg copy existed before), I was extremely disappointed by the picture quality of the movie. It is sub-standard for DVDs. There is pixelation breakup, places on the image of low color depth (i.e. color banding appears), and the picture is not sharp in the least bit. During pixelation breakup, annoying colors show up out of nowhere (the bands of purple are especially annoying) - this is very apparent on walls of interior rooms, and, in general, in low contrast scenes. For example, in the "Taal Se Taal Mila" video we see bands of purple pixels in the sky and scattered purple pixels on the screen as Mansi lies on the grass.

The entire movie has an un-sharp, blurry look to it that does not do service to the wonderful cinematography of the movie. Smaller objects on the screen (e.g. wide-angle shot with dancing people appearing small) are indistinct due to the low-resolution quality of the transfer. To make matters worse, sweeping shots of the green mountains and lush valleys of Himachal Pradesh are ruined by jerky and blurred motion. Some of this may be due to original filming (slow shutter speeds), but most of it appears to be a result of poor DVD encoding/compression. Mountain scenery seems to jump, people's motions often jump and are blurred, and freeze frames are usually blurred and indistinct. It is very annoying to have this substandard picture clarity when one is trying to enjoy and take in the scenery and motions. Also, all the way at the top of the image (in the black portion above the widescreen movie frame) there are some distracting white lines--this in no way interferes with the video of the movie, it is well above the picture frame. But it is annoying to have these at the top of the screen.

At some points in the movie the image annoyingly bobs up and down at a constant frequency for no apparent reason. The contrast levels could have been done better and more consistently to make the picture more outstanding--some parts of the movie seem washed out, others too dark and indistinct. The entire presentation is most unsatisfying, as we have come to expect much better from DVD (take, for instance, the image quality of Dil Se and Jeans-absolutely superb and sharp). The aspect ratio of the original movie was filmed in ~2.35:1; this DVD has a cropped image of 1.85:1. This looks terrible, and the aspect ratio should have been kept at 2.35:1.

Sound

Although the sound is nice and clean for much of the movie, there are big problems with the soundtrack. Let me start off with the good: The songs are generally crisp (Raga dance, Kariye Na, Taal Se Taal Mila), and especially in the Taal Se Taal Mila video, the split surrounds are used very nicely (listen for the sound of enveloping rain amidst the song "Taal Se Taal Mila"). However, there are many portions of the soundtrack where clipping is apparent. That is, the sound levels must have been too high at some point of the soundtrack editing for this DVD, for one can hear cracking and clipping when the sound gets too loud (especially apparent in the song "Ramta Jogi" -- every time a heavy beat lands, the sound is distorted). This is a huge disappointment, for DVDs (and any other digital media) should be able to pack a lot of "oomph" without any distortion. Such is not the case for this DVD. In addition, the LFE (bass) channel is much too weak throughout the entire DVD. The bass in Rahman's score should be emphasized through the LFE channel; it is not on this DVD.

Menu/Extras

The DVD shines here. The menu is superb; it is animated very well, and, regrettably, the picture quality on the menu is much better than the picture quality of the actual movie. The scenes from the movie animated into the menu, scaled larger, still look much better than the movie itself... Chapter selections are also animated, extras are animated... it all looks great.

There are a number of extras on this DVD. You can play all the songs together, there is an extra music video that is not in the actual movie itself (again, not too impressive picture quality), there is "The Making of Taal", interviews with director, music director, actors, actresses, etc. Director's notes, a special segment on what audiences around the world thought of Taal, mostly good stuff. BUT the inclusion of all these extras (lots of extra video) took up lots of space on the DVD (after all, a DVD only holds 8 gigs, dual-layered, which this DVD is). Therefore, there was less room left for the actual movie; in fact, out of the 7.84 gig DVD, only ~3.6 gigabytes are used for the actual movie! I looked through the individual video files and found that less than half of the DVD was devoted to the actual movie (The silliest thing is that all of the music videos in the movie-which comprise a large part of the entire film-are present in separate video files all over again recorded in 2.0 surround. This is absolutely pointless; those video files are just taking up extra space on the DVD for no reason). This is absolutely absurd, and it means that a very low bitrate was used for encoding this movie. Even when low bitrates are used, DVDs can have decent picture (for example, Around the World in 80 Days compresses nearly 5 hours of video to 8 gigabytes on the DVD). There are, then, two major problems here : too little space devoted to the movie, and poor DVD authoring/compression.

Overall

The sound on this DVD is decent, but needs work. The menus are outstanding; the extras are fun but entirely unnecessary given the importance of the MOVIE when one buys a DVD to watch the MOVIE. The picture, where DVDs normally shine the most at, is terrible and unacceptable. Such picture quality detracts from the wonderful scenery, cinematography and acting of the talented actress and actors, etc. of the movie. Given that this is a new release, and that many other Indian movies (some much older - e.g. Mohra, Dil Se, Jeans, etc.) have outstanding video quality, it is appalling that the Taal DVD has such unsatisfying picture quality. After all, this was a very popular and awaited release, and its success depends on an exemplary presentation of its many beautiful components. A poor video transfer does not serve for such an exemplary presentation. Therefore I must say that those of us at home cannot enjoy the movie Taal in the way it was meant to be presented. The authoring method was obviously poor, and the inclusion of so many extras left too little room for the actual movie on the DVD (causing a very low bitrate). Since, I believe, most of us would prefer superb picture quality with no extras rather than poor picture quality with lots of extras, this DVD really fails any test of quality. As we all know, most Hindi films tend to be long (this one is 173 minutes) and so they should require at least a full 8 gigabytes for the movie itself. If one wants to release so many extras, they should be released in the form of a second DVD (take for instance "Armageddon" - released on two DVDs, the movie on one, and extras on the other). To have such poor picture quality does great disservice to a wonderful movie. I really think that this DVD should be re-called, and then re-released. Indian DVDs have been known to be re-released, and, since DVDs can't get any worse than this one, I strongly believe that EROS or someone should re-release this DVD-particularly, an anamorphic transfer in the correct ~2.35:1 aspect ratio, taking up the FULL 8 gigs available on the DVD. I know that a great job can be done, for EROS has released a number of absolutely superb DVD transfers. I know they can do it again.

Picture Quality Rating: 1 out of 10

Worse than "Mast", this DVD has the worst picture quality of any DVD I have ever watched. The resolution appears to be of VHS quality, while digital artifacts in many places makes the entire transfer WORSE than VHS.

Sound Quality Rating: 6 out of 10

If they fix up the gliches in the recording, oomph up the LFE, and perhaps use the split surrounds a bit more effectively, this could be an outstanding soundtrack.

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