Witness is a 1985 Amishsploitation-thriller staring Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis and directed by Peter Weir. Three writers share credit: William Kelley, Pamela Wallace and Earl W. Wallace. Winning Oscars for its screenplay and editing as well as opening the Cannes film-festival, and being the eighth highest grossing film in the US in 1985, the film was a commercial and critical success. It is not yet available on Blu-Ray in the US, though international editions (which are basically the same disc) are available. I thought I’d compare the Blu-Ray with the iTunes 1080p edition to see which is worth your time.
Witness – iTunes HD 1080p Review
The iTunes HD 1080p download clocks in at 4.45 GB, with an average bitrate of 5.1 Mbps, with peaks of around 11.2 Mbps. It includes both a AAC stereo with a bitrate of 149kbps and 384kbps Dolby Digital 5.1 track.
Witness is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.78:1. Image quality is fair, with some grain and what look like some noise reduction artifacts, as well as a few compression artifacts.
It appears to be a different transfer from the Blu-ray, possibly one intended for HDTV. Colors are slightly more muted in the iTunes version, and in the final shootout, the windows are blown out in the iTunes transfer and not in the Blu-ray. I’ll discuss this later.
Once again the iTunes bitrate of 5 Mbps just can’t carry the feature without some artifacting during pans and heavy motion. I would dearly love Apple to push up the bitrate notch a megabit and a half up, but I’m not holding my breath.
Witness – Japanese/Italian/German/French Blu-ray
The Blu-ray version is clearly intended for deployment globally, as it has subtitles for just about every possible language as well as German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese and Portuguese audio tracks. The main English audio track is a Dolby TrueHD audio track with an embedded 640kbps AC-3 track.
The image is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.78:1. Average video bitrate is approximately 33Mbps (i.e. 3 times the iTunes peak bitrate), with spikes up 40Mbps. Image quality is generally good with a few exceptions. Various shots in the final shootout appear to have been transferred incorrectly, resulting in the view from windows being exposed correctly while the central action is weirdly digitally artifacty, as if the brightness has been boosted resulting in digital shadow clipping. This is a little disappointing as many other scenes have a thick grainy look. It’s possible saturation has been boosted a bit, but I don’t see anything too objectionable with respect to color alterations.
Witness – PAL DVD
The PAL DVD of the original (non-collectors edition) happened to be in my collection, so I spun that up. Again the picture is presented at 1.78:1, and this time is very slightly sepia tinted and slightly de-saturated compared with the Blu-ray. The colors in the old DVD feel truer, and more theatrical print like, however there are some negatives. The primary one being the grain induced artifacts.
The single-layer DVD format simply can’t cope with the amount of grain in this picture. Switching between the Blu-ray and the DVD, fine detail is lost in the DVD, and artifacts are intermittantly apparent. There is no weird digital noise reduction at work however.
Conclusions
It’s the Blu-ray by a mile. Sure there are some issues, but the extra resolution is hard to beat. The old collectors edition DVD is good, but there are too many MPEG artifacts when blown up on a big HDTV to recommend it. iTunes edition is too artifacty to recommend.
The few scenes in the final shoot-out show where a few corners have been cut. Looking at the screenshot comparison on the right, you can see that the negative was probably exposed so that the overall scene would be dark.
This resulted in a negative density for that scene very different for that scene than for the rest of the film. This would require careful timing for the scene, and probably the view from the window was timed at just at the edge of the clipping on a release print.
However when the recent Blu-ray negative scan was done, the scan was probably done with a single pass for the whole negative, with no adjustment for exposure. Since the earlier releases were probably scanned from an inter-positive, the timing was already baked in, but for the negative scan it would need to be recreated by re-scanning the portion of the negative at a different exposure to correctly capture the raw scan.
This would be expensive, so either wasn’t done, or the issue wasn’t discovered until the negative was back in the vault. So the colorist has had to stretch the resulting image to get an adequate brightness, which results in the extremely odd solarization effect in the above screenshot comparison.
It’s not a deal breaker but it’s a shame. Given 2015 is the 30th anniversary of the films release, I’m guessing this transfer is the edition we’ll see released in the US for that.
I’ve seen mention elsewhere of DVNR possibly being applied here – I agree it’s possible, the dark shootout scene was where I saw what might be traces of it, but I couldn’t say for sure.
If I’ve sold you on getting the Blu-ray I would suggest working out which location has the cheapest copy (check Amazon.de/Amazon.fr/Amazon.jp) and get it shipped to you. Enjoy.
Witness Blu-Ray Screenshots
Witness – Blu-ray screenshot – Window shopping
Witness – Barn raising scene – a screenshot from the Blu-ray.
Witness – Blu-ray – A quiet moment.
FTC Disclosure: I am an iTunes affiliate advertiser, this means that if you click on one of the links above, I get a very small amount of money.