Live at Budokan Blu-Ray CONFRIMED.

[1neeto]

Ah, I see.  Well, at least leave me a DVD format because I don't have the $$ for Blu-ray.

Dude blu ray players are dirt cheap nowadays. I've seen them as cheap as 79 bucks at wal mart! You really are
Missing out if you're still watching movies on blurry ass DVD's.

[DarkLord_Lalinc]

lol? DVDs look just fine.

[1neeto]

lol? DVDs look just fine.

I personally can't watch anything on standard definition anymore.

[cramx3]

Im pretty excited that this is official now. Ive got Flight 666 and The Big 4 on blu ray and both made me wish DT had a blu ray concert.

[Snow_Dog]

Im not someone who needs everything on blu ray, but I'll make an exception here and there and for this concert I would definately pick up the blu ray edition. damn near perfect concert, love how it was shot, plus high def Hollow Years solo / Instrumedley? Yes please  . Only gripe I have with it, is JLB is kinda cringe inducing on it in spots.

[TL]

lol? DVDs look just fine.

I personally can't watch anything on standard definition anymore.

You should try sitting more than a foot from the screen.

[SystematicThought]

I personally can't watch anything on standard definition anymore.

What? Even DVDs look really great nowadays. Not Blu-Ray quality but still pretty damn good. Now TV on the other hand, there is a noticeable difference

[cookienut]

The best concert bluray I own is Porcupie Tree. Nothing comes close to hearing uncompressed audio through adecent HT system. Hopefully, the Budoken bluray delivers the goods.

[VanBrandevoort]

lol? DVDs look just fine.

I personally can't watch anything on standard definition anymore.

Actually, there have been times when I failed to see the difference between a (PAL) DVD and Blu-ray. The upscaling in TV's is pretty good nowadays.

Nevertheless, I will but this Budokan Blu-ray sooner or later

[me7]

lol? DVDs look just fine.

I personally can't watch anything on standard definition anymore.

Actually, there have been times when I failed to see the difference between a (PAL) DVD and Blu-ray. The upscaling in TV's is pretty good nowadays.

Nevertheless, I will but this Budokan Blu-ray sooner or later

Dream Theater's three-hours concert DVDs suffer heavily from compression. A proper AVC encoded BluRay should look a lot better.

Apart from that the PAL Budoka DVD is messed up, I wasn't able to find any deinterlacing settings that produce a clean and stutter-free picture. This is the real reason why I'm looking forward to this release.

[petrucci07]

I flippin' LOVE Blu-rays. I don't enjoy watching films in SD as much as in HD, the detail is (for most BDs) so much better.

[TL]

I like BluRay, and it does obviously look better (and sound better in many cases), but I have no problem watching something on up-converted DVD (not to mention, many more recent DVDs are 720p to begin with*). For me, it often comes down to if it's a film that greatly benefits from being in high definition, or if the price is right.

*While a 720p DVD played on a DVD player will only play at 480p, it will play at 720p on a BluRay player, often still up-converted to 1080p. You do need a TV capable of displaying 720/1080 of course. Obviously not every DVD is encoded at 720p, but many are these days.

All that said, I am buying Budokan on BluRay.

[Marion Crane]

1080p and 120hz for me.  I had to sit through a standard def movie the other night with my girlfriend.  And it was FULLSCREEN!  I wanted to punch a baby.

[SlickSy]

*BUMP*

The Budokan blu-ray arrived in the mail today. I'm impressed with it. The re-designed menus are a nice touch. I was unsure about buying it, but after purchase I'm glad I did. The bumped up sound quaility alone makes it a worthy purchase. You get three auidio options to choose from: the original audio from the DVD, a DTS HD Master mix and a 5.1 surround mix. The sound on the HD master is MUCH clearer than the standard LCPM mix and it doesn't sound compressed like it does on the CDs/DVD. You also hear alot more keyboard sounds which aren't audiible on the DVD. Overall, I love it. Drawback is it makes my Budokan CDs and DVD redundant now though

[petrucci07]

*BUMP*

The Budokan blu-ray arrived in the mail today. I'm impressed with it. The re-designed menus are a nice touch. I was unsure about buying it, but after purchase I'm glad I did. The bumped up sound quaility alone makes it a worthy purchase. You get three auidio options to choose from: the original audio from the DVD, a DTS HD Master mix and a 5.1 surround mix. The sound on the HD master is MUCH clearer than the standard LCPM mix and it doesn't sound compressed like it does on the CDs/DVD. You also hear alot more keyboard sounds which aren't audiible on the DVD. Overall, I love it. Drawback is it makes my Budokan CDs and DVD redundant now though

Surely the CDs can still be used for the car, etc. And you can always keep the DVD for posterity 

[me7]

I have it as well and I'm less than impressed. It appears that the concert was shot at film speed (23,976 full frames per second) and then telecined (60 half frames per second) for DVD release. Since the telecine pattern changes throughout the concert, it's a safe bet to assume that the video was telecined BEFORE editing, meaning that no final, edited version at original speed exists.
This leaves two options for the Bluray release:
a) re-edit the whole thing again to produce a proper Bluray
b) reuse the crappy DVD version and release a bad Bluray

The studio opted for alternative b.

My initial attempts at detelecining failed, I always ended up with jerky movement when duplicated fields were not correctly detected by the detelecine algorithms I tried so far. I will give it a more thorough look when I have more time, but the fact that I even have to spend time at home to repair flaws that should have been eliminated by the studio is sad, a fallback to the dark age of PAL and NTSC.

[FlyingBIZKIT]

I just ordered this, can't wait!

[Orbert]

I have it as well and I'm less than impressed. It appears that the concert was shot at film speed (23,976 full frames per second) and then telecined (60 half frames per second) for DVD release. Since the telecine pattern changes throughout the concert, it's a safe bet to assume that the video was telecined BEFORE editing, meaning that no final, edited version at original speed exists.
This leaves two options for the Bluray release:
a) re-edit the whole thing again to produce a proper Bluray
b) reuse the crappy DVD version and release a bad Bluray

The studio opted for alternative b.

My initial attempts at detelecining failed, I always ended up with jerky movement when duplicated fields were not correctly detected by the detelecine algorithms I tried so far. I will give it a more thorough look when I have more time, but the fact that I even have to spend time at home to repair flaws that should have been eliminated by the studio is sad, a fallback to the dark age of PAL and NTSC.

This saddens me.  Thank you for the detailed technical review.

[JimmyJava]

A review of the Blu-Ray release. Not so pretty...

https://www.blu-raydefinition.com/reviews/dream-theater-live-at-budokan-blu-ray-review.html

[petrucci07]

A review of the Blu-Ray release. Not so pretty...

https://www.blu-raydefinition.com/reviews/dream-theater-live-at-budokan-blu-ray-review.html

They gave the video quality 4/5 and the audio quality 4.5/5. They only gave the extras 2/5 because they were in SD, sounds like a pretty good review to me.

[FlyingBIZKIT]

That sounds like a good review. The guy is obviously not a DT fan, but he did say the picture and audio was good.

[Pettor]

Yey for BR

Both Score and LaB is hard to watch on my HDtv so this will be great! The review above is fine, he obviously didn't like Dream Theater but thought the audio and video was good ... which is what the BR should improve!

[Lowdz]

That sounds like a good review. The guy is obviously not a DT fan, but he did say the picture and audio was good.

And he said Hollow Years sounds like Europe's Carrie  so I trust his judgement

[petrucci07]

That sounds like a good review. The guy is obviously not a DT fan, but he did say the picture and audio was good.

And he said Hollow Years sounds like Europe's Carrie  so I trust his judgement

He writes reviews for a Bluray website, he probably knows what he's talking about when it comes to audio/video quality

[Nofire]

The only thing that bugs me about LaB, is JLBs performance. Quite often a little low and he's not really articulating that well. Other than that, it's awesome. I just wish he would have sung like he did on Score 

I'll definately get this on BR when I get myself a BR player

[PetFish]

This reviewer is an asshole, plain and simple.

"Hey, Brandon DuHamel, you're a prick.  How about you just stick to what your job is and tell us about the quality of the Blu-Ray.  What's the point of taking shots at the band?  The quality of a disc and its features and audio have nothing to do with whether or not you like the subject material.  You're a royal douche."

It's fine to not like something but to say the shit he does is inexcusable from a 'professional' writer.  Really embarrassing and pathetic.

[Orbert]

I keep getting an error trying to open that page.  Is anyone else having trouble?  I'd like to read the review.

[FallTempest]

I keep getting an error trying to open that page.  Is anyone else having trouble?  I'd like to read the review.

Samee 

[hefdaddy42]

I keep getting an error trying to open that page.  Is anyone else having trouble?  I'd like to read the review.

The error is better than the review.

[Dillster22]

The reviewer keeps saying "4 hour concert", but doesn't the concert go for just under 3 hours? Minus the intermissions.

[Orbert]

I keep getting an error trying to open that page.  Is anyone else having trouble?  I'd like to read the review.

The error is better than the review.

From what I'm reading, that would seem to be the case.  But if he gave it good technical marks, that's all I'm really interested in.  me7 sounds pretty knowledgeable about that kind of thing, but for now we've got one "aye" and one "nay".

[FlyingBIZKIT]

Mine is coming today. Can't wait!

[Setlist Scotty]

I keep getting an error trying to open that page.  Is anyone else having trouble?  I'd like to read the review.

The error is better than the review.

From what I'm reading, that would seem to be the case.  But if he gave it good technical marks, that's all I'm really interested in.  me7 sounds pretty knowledgeable about that kind of thing, but for now we've got one "aye" and one "nay".

My guess is that it's probably a comparison between average-reviewer doing the review and someone who's intimately involved in the industry and knows what to look for. I say this coming from a printing/retouching background. Most people won't pick up the small details that give away that an image has been retouched, but because it is something that I work with regularly, I know what to look for.

[me7]

I keep getting an error trying to open that page.  Is anyone else having trouble?  I'd like to read the review.

The error is better than the review.

From what I'm reading, that would seem to be the case.  But if he gave it good technical marks, that's all I'm really interested in.  me7 sounds pretty knowledgeable about that kind of thing, but for now we've got one "aye" and one "nay".

My opinion isn't really "nay". Apart from the issue that the picture was telecined, the Bluray looks very "alright". Not as stellar as Hollywood blockbusters but just what you would expect from footage shot with a digital camera in a dark concert hall. It is a huge upgrade from the DVD just for the lack of obvious compression artifacts alone (DTs three-hour concerts with light flashes were too much for the DVD standard to handle).

That said, I HATE interlacing and telecining. It was necessary for NTSC to turn a 24 fps film into 30 fps but, in my opinion, shouldn't be supported on Bluray at all. If you watch the Bluray on a Bluray-player in untouched form, you may not even notice the issue at all. The real problem arises if you want to encode the concert to a smaller file for HTPC or mobile device usage (like I do), because you need to sacrifice something (waste storage space or accept jerky movement) unless I manage to configure a detelecining filter to process the footage correctly, I'm still busy with other things.

The linked review didn't care to look for some of the better shots. The screenshot of Myung was taken from a frame while the camera was not focused correctly, if the reviewer had cared to jump a few frames ahead it would look much better.
The interlacing isn't a real showstopper, it just shows that Eagle Rock Entertainment didn't put much care into this re-release.

[Orbert]

Ah, that's good to hear.  What you said earlier had me concerned.

Basically there are only two things I really care about: (1) How does it look? and (2) How does it sound?

If it looks and sounds good, or generally is "a huge upgrade from the DVD" as you say, then that's what counts, right?