TWINE

SE vs UE vs BD

Of course I can’t afford the super rare Japanese LD soooo…

VQ: It may be the same base element being used. The SE is more colorful but has a number of artifacts, EE, and less detail overall. The UE cleans all this up but loses color and overall has a blander appearance. There is still EE and some noise here and there, so I think they just reprocessed the SE master with a higher bitrate. The BD actually goes a long way to fix this and has the SE color back but more properly rendered, thus making it third time right IMO. It is STILL the UE though, so don’t expect perfection. It is by no means as good as a 1999 Panavision release should be on Blu-ray.
To me the SE is probably derived from the LD workflow, as it has all the hallmarks of being mastered for that format then ported to DVD.

AQ: The 5.1 appears the same on all three. Again like TND the track appears slightly louder on the UE in both Dolby and DTS variants. The BD allows for finer presentation from the lossless codec. Without a rear center speaker I can’t really tell if much of the EX encoding comes into play, but once a track is mixed for it, it should also decode out on newer releases that don’t indicate the sound is EX encoded. I thought I noticed some effects come through the rear area, like a EX mix would and like how I remember the theatrical release being. This and TPM really interested me for having sounds come directly from behind so I vividly remember those experiences. But it wasn’t that many on TWINE IIRC unlike TPM.

Thus, for the first time it appears we can say BD on all fronts. That said I do like the color saturation on the SE, and after my GE/TND discovery of the LD being better than the SEs…really want that darned Japanese LD…and for the 2.0 PCM…why in the world is it $500?