Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck shine in Roman Holiday a 1953 feature that as of 2013 strangely isn’t available on Blu-ray yet, despite being an IMDB top 250 film, and winning Oscars for Best Actress, Writing and costume design. Since it is available on Itunes 1080p HD, I thought I’d give it a look from a quality perspective.
Appropriate grain for a 1950s black and white film. But not for long.
The film is shot in black and white in ‘Academy’ ratio (4:3), and makes excellent use of real locations in Rome, as well as the then newly renovated Cinecitta studios.
The Itunes transfer is taken from the 2002 restoration, as it includes a story credit for Dalton Trumbo, who black-listed as one of the ‘Hollywood Ten’ at the time of the original release and couldn’t be associated with the project.
Unfortunately that’s where the good news ends. The transfer available on Itunes appears to be the same as a HD broadcast I saw a few years back. The first few minutes of news reel footage look great, properly grainy and scratchy, however once the feature proper starts the trouble begins.
Waxy motion adaptive DVNR in action
Some kind of motion adaptive DVNR has been applied to the film, resulting in a waxy mess that looks awful. Backgrounds jiggle subtly as the noise reduction algorithm fails to distinguish grain or gentle swaying of a chandelier from noise, and skin texture looks like wax.
To make things worse the DVNR appears to have upset the H.264 coding used by Itunes, resulting in frequent motion artifacts.
The DVDs available of this Roman Holiday are actually pretty bad, and the most recent is possibly sourced from the same transfer.
Screenshot Comparison Itunes HD vs DVD
Itunes HD on the left, Paramount DVD on the right. The DVD looks better in motion, due to the lack of heavy DVNR.
Conclusion
Poor: 2 out of 5. I can’t recommend buying it, but if you want to watch it, and don’t already own a DVD version, then it’s not a terrible rental. The film itself, is wonderful.
Fingers crossed that Paramount do the Blu-ray justice.
Itunes 1080p Screenshots
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