I Have "Brother Bear" DVD In My Hands!

[Miles Baxxter]

Just registered, so a quick 'hello' to everyone! =)

Anyway, I just received my copy of the Brother Bear DVD from dvdsoon.com, a really super Canadian DVD webshop, last Saturday, and watched the disc 1 version of the movie yesterday (Sunday) - and, much to my dismay, I experienced occasional skipping.

By skipping, I mean that the movie suddenly skips ahead by a few minutes or seconds, which I found to be really annoying. This only seemed to happen when a new chapter was starting, and only at certain chapters. So when one chapter was ending, and it switched to the next chapters, instead of switching to the beginning of the chapter, it skips. If I press the back button though, going directly to the beginning of the chapter, the skipping does not occur. I think it happened four or five times during the movie, and it's not a random skipping - when I try playing the part where it skipped a second time, it will skip again.

As I bought this copy from DVD Soon, I presume it's a Canadian copy. Does anyone know if this is a widespread problem with the Canadian version? Or did I just get unlucky?

[karlsen]

I guess it wount help you to know if it is a large problem or just a small one just for you.

What you have to do is to contact the store where you bought it and ask what to do. They should send you a new copy of it.

[Miles Baxxter]

I guess it wount help you to know if it is a large problem or just a small one just for you.

What you have to do is to contact the store where you bought it and ask what to do. They should send you a new copy of it.

Well, if it's a problem with all the discs, then asking for a replacement copy won't do me much good! Plus, I'm naturally curious.

I presume this hasn't been a problem with U.S. versions of the Brother Bear DVD?

[karlsen]

I asume that it has not been a huge problem because we would have heard about it here if it was.

Many have now recived their copy, and nobody have mentioned anything like that before.

But another question for you: Did you buy it with free shipping or did you pay to get it first class?

I did pay for first class so I would be certain to get it fast, but I have still not got it (two days after you did).

When was your shipped?

[PublicEnemy#1]

Have been thinking about getting this but maybe I'll rent it first.

[Jordan]

As I bought this copy from DVD Soon, I presume it's a Canadian copy. Does anyone know if this is a widespread problem with the Canadian version? Or did I just get unlucky?

I ordered my copy here too (received in 3 days before the national release ) and I didn't see any problem on the DVDs, excpet a big ugly sticker inlaid in the cover saying "Version Française Incluse" !!
It was so annoying me that I covered it with a false sticker of mine

It's not a particularity of the canadoian copies 'cos they're exacly the same. Your DVD must just have a problem, or be damaged.

[Miles Baxxter]

I ordered it with the free shipping method, and I was very surprised that it arrived so quickly. And, maybe the sooner you ordered it the higher you would be "priorotized," thus express shipping only counts to some extent. I ordered my copy three or four days before the official release, unless I remember incorrectly.

DVD Soon also included some free Brother Bear stickers with the DVD, which I thought was a very nice gesture of them. If only they'd included a DVD that played properly...

I also thought it coult potentially be a problem with my DVD player, but I'm not sure how likely that might be. It plays most other DVDs pretty flawlessly.

[Grunches]

I guess it wount help you to know if it is a large problem or just a small one just for you.

What you have to do is to contact the store where you bought it and ask what to do. They should send you a new copy of it.

Well, if it's a problem with all the discs, then asking for a replacement copy won't do me much good! Plus, I'm naturally curious.

I presume this hasn't been a problem with U.S. versions of the Brother Bear DVD?

My DVD skip some too and mine is the US version

[2099net]

Disc 1 - is that the one with the Moose commentary (which also has the moose appearing every now and then)? Sound like it may be skipping on the "branching" part. In which case I suspect it is a player issue and will do the same for all discs.

As for the disc, there's a thread on the HTF which states the 2.35:1 transfer take up 2.8 GB on the disc. That's less than a third of the available space! I can't believe the other features on the disc take up anywhere close to the rest of the disc. So they could have put trailers on. And an extensive virtual galleries. And a filmmaker commentary. And much, much more (as Disney likes to say).

I'm wondering if this means Disney have prepeared and mastered a transfer which can be reused in another, more feature packed release in the future... they've made sure that there's room for additional supplements... and there is that "troubling" lack of a slipcover for this release. Perhaps.

[Joe Carioca]

I posted this message on another thread, but I think it suits here better.
My Brother Bear DVD arrived last week's Friday, and the picture looks HORRIBLE! The color banding is awfully distracting and the movie is heavily afected by that (and it is throughout the whole thing!).
Here is an example of what I mean:



For me, the most distracting scenes are that of Sitka's funeral (the banding "dances" across the sky and the character's faces are filled with mosquito noise) and when Koda and Kenai are under the glassure (just look at the bear's fur.

Shame on you, Disney. Utterly disapointed.

[abl32]

Hiya everyone...noob here!
My copy of Brother Bear looks horrible too!
At first I thought it was my DVD player or my TV (brand new 50" widescreen HDTV), but upon trying it in 2 other DVD players it does the same thing!
I emailed Disney the other day and got a reply today asking me to call in for further assistance. I called 'em up and told them what was going on, then they transfered me to tech support and I told them the same story.
The guy on the phone then said they would ship me a new copy of Brother Bear with a prepaid envelope to send the bad copy back....I guess they've been hearing about this

[Joe Carioca]

Hiya everyone...noob here!
My copy of Brother Bear looks horrible too!
At first I thought it was my DVD player or my TV (brand new 50" widescreen HDTV), but upon trying it in 2 other DVD players it does the same thing!
I emailed Disney the other day and got a reply today asking me to call in for further assistance. I called 'em up and told them what was going on, then they transfered me to tech support and I told them the same story.
The guy on the phone then said they would ship me a new copy of Brother Bear with a prepaid envelope to send the bad copy back....I guess they've been hearing about this

Hi abl32! Welcome to the boards!
When you get your new Brother Bear DVD, could you tell us here at the board if the picture is somewhat fixed (which I highly doubt)?

You people who live in the States could call Disney about this. Ask for quality releases again - better picture quality and better extras (aka less-kiddy). We don't invest on expensive home theaters and DVDs to get this.

[abl32]

Hi abl32! Welcome to the boards!
When you get your new Brother Bear DVD, could you tell us here at the board if the picture is somewhat fixed (which I highly doubt)?

You people who live in the States could call Disney about this. Ask for quality releases again - better picture quality and better extras (aka less-kiddy). We don't invest on expensive home theaters and DVDs to get this.

Thanks! Great forum you guys have here!
Will do! They said it should be 10-14 days to get it....hopefully it'll be sooner!
Here's some of my color bands...Very annoying!

[Prince Adam]

I just saw the movie last night and loved it! It's better than Treasure Planet, and right up there with Lilo and Stitch and Pocahontas (it's not one of the greats, but still "Masterpiece Edition"-worthy).

And the movie was so sad! I cried several times...

My only annoyances were that Rutt and Tuke were pointless, and Tantana (or whatever her name is) is annoying.

Another problem is that when I rented it, the video store had no 2nd disc! I noticed this when I got in the car, so I went back in and asked them for it. They said that they only got the 1 disc! They didn't say why, they just said they only got 1. That's really strange, and annoying because I only got to see the kiddie features. Although the art review wasn't bad.

All in all, I really enjoyed the movie, and will pick it up as soon as I have some $$$.

[PatrickvD]

Has anyone listened to the Moose comentary yet? You really should. It's plain hilarious, a spoiler so it is written in white, especially when they started arguing wether a moose was transformed into a lion in The Lion King - priceless Anyhow, it is the best extra feature on a Disney dvd in along time. Better than a usual comentary (those put me to sleep lol) Too bad about the picture quality though....

[Satoshi]

Guess I never posted thoughts on this, did I? My sister bought it on release date and I watched it then, and then I bought it myself yesterday. I thought it was really good, like Prince Adam said, it's up there at that level that's just below the fab 4 and such. The only real problem I had with it was that it felt that I had watched it many times before, because of the similarities to Ice Age. So yeah it didn't feel too original but still when I look past that it really is a great movie. I wish Phil Collins had sung all of the songs he wrote though, he only sang like one or two of them, which was slightly disappointing.

[goofystitch]

Maybe it is just my eyes, but I don't see any problems with "color bands." Can somebody help me out? All of the pictures being posted look the same as on my DVD, and also look the same as the film looked when it was in theaters. I am really confused.

[PatrickvD]

Maybe it is just my eyes, but I don't see any problems with "color bands." Can somebody help me out? All of the pictures being posted look the same as on my DVD, and also look the same as the film looked when it was in theaters. I am really confused.

look closely at Kenai, you will see that his fur sort of has stripes going from lighter to darker... this was surely not how it was seen in theaters. If your pickey and demand quality (especially considering this is a new movie) you will be annoyed. If you dont even notice, then dont bother and enjoy the dvd

[2099net]

Colour banding is a symptom of the player or the display screen as well as the encoding. While it is possible this is a flaw on the DVD, it is possible it's just equipment related.

Hardware Colour banding is caused by player when they convert the digital image into an analogue image. All Players have something called a DAC (digital to analogue converter). Most have a 10 or even 12 bit DAC, but some have only an 8-bit DAC. The less bits, the less unique colours there are the player can convert into an analogue format, so it chooses the closest. Some displays actually convert the analogue signal into Digital before displaying it. This is done with a ADC. Again, should there be low precision in the process, banding can be introduced. This means some set-ups have the potential for the colours to be reduced twice, once from the player and once prior to display. Banding can also be cause by some TV sets having the sharpness of the picture turned up as the display attempts to find and define boundries in the picture.

digital-to-analog converter (DAC): is an integrated circuit (IC) or chip that coverts digital signals to analog signals. The signal that is being converted may be video or audio, depending on the DAC chip. Video uses a video DAC chip, while audio uses an audio DAC chip. Audio DACs are used in DVD players and audio/video receivers to convert the digital audio information into an analog audio output signal that is ready for amplification to drive the loudspeakers. Video DACs are used in DVD players to convert the digital video information to an analog video signal.

SD-2700 features a 10-bit Video DAC four times more effective than conventional models. By transforming 8-bit data to 10-bit, critical signal loss can be prevented while ensuring superb reproduction and fidelity of highly-detailed images.

Color Range and Smoothness - Frequently, MPEG-2 decoders will be forced to make approximations when reconstructing the colors in an image. This can be seen as distinct bands of color with hard edges for boundaries. Obviously, these boundaries were not present in the original video.

This player produces surprisingly detailed imagery. Throw Dark City or The Two Towers Extended Edition into the player and it will deliver excellent, deep blacks without losing image contrast. In fact, the player can pass below black (0 IRE PLUGE) that can be evidenced using a video calibration DVD. In many movies, the extra clarity produced by the oversampling video DACs and quality deinterlacing results in fine, minute details that many lower end DVD players usually smudge. However, the 2200 also inherits an effect of the chroma bug fix applied to the Mitsubishi MPEG decoder that can be similarly found with the 2900. The issue is improper detection of the alternating flag that can cause color banding or flickering to occur. The classic test for investigating this is to examine chapter 5 of Monsters, Inc. by Pixar. In the beginning of this scene, the red fire hydrant and hood of Mike’s car flicker demonstrating the presence of this bug. While this artifact is present, one really needs to be actively looking for flickering or banding to notice it. In short, the alternating flag bug is the only problem associated with the video quality, as otherwise the 2200 delivers breathtaking image quality that you might not believe was possible with your DVD player.

and while addressing computer displays and hardware acceleration, not DVDs, the following is useful too (remember a PC DVD card my be running in 24-bit true color mode, but it doesn't mean the overlay channel is running in 24-bit color.

http://hankfiles.pcvsconsole.com/answer.php?file=430

Animated films tend to show this banding more than live action films because it's easy to create a smoothly graduated background or fill colour in Animation, but hard to do so in real life. Also, film grain helps to disguise banding, something that is missing from direct digital transfers (like Brother Bear).

Anyone who has photoshop can experiment and reproduce this banding effect by switching their display to 16m colours, turning off Dither on the gradient tool and creating a simple gradient background. Then switch to 24 bit "truecolor" and do the same again.

[Mermaid Kelly]

I noticed some color bands too! It wasn't too bad though. Only a slight distraction..mostly on Kenai.