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I have heard more than a few bad reviews on both the DVD and blu ray set of The Invisible Man but over time I still ended up getting both. And they both have their pluses and minuses. He is the overview.
Although sometimes it looks close, I don't believe that they began with a true HD transfer. The pilot is certainly not HD, the episodes, maybe, maybe not. It is hard to tell sometimes because Invisible man did many of it's invisible effects using video chroma key. They took the video and transferred it back to film. So you will see the show go from a more film like quality to what looks like video resolution (because it was). Of course, that sort of thing integrated much better on old TV's. The best HD transfer will not make these chroma key video to film sequences look any better.
The DVD has the episodes on 4 DVD's. The DVD's have the best presentation of the pilot. It and the episodes are the original 4:3 ratio. The pilot is nice but the rest of the episodes suffer from motion artifacts. The somewhat staccato movement you can sometimes see in streaming material. It is most visible in pans. Other than the motion artifacts, the shows look good enough (but the motion artifacts bug me)
The blu ray carries the entire run on one disc (it runs a bit under eleven hours on "play all"). This kind of argues in favor of this all being up converted standard video because a blu ray can hold a great deal of standard video (a double layer blue ray has the capacity of about 5 and a half Double layer DVD's). However, the encode is an HD codec and can be output at 24p.
The pilot on the blu ray is stretched at the sides in the same way TV's can do and that makes it a total fail for me, I hate that stuff. The regular episodes, however are cropped to 16:9 and I don't like that either... but I still find it watchable. The video quality is fairly good (sometimes it gets to what i think is an HD level but in the end I stil think it is an upconvert or at best a 720p transfer) and there are no motion artifacts like the DVD has.
So, the trade offs between DVD and blu ray are
DVD:good pilot presentation and motion artifact infested episodes in the original 4:3
Blu Ray: Pilot stretched out and unacceptable, regular episodes cropped for 16:9 but look good.
A lot of negative comments on the releases came from people not realizing that the effects were video chroma key but both are still quite flawed releases.
Although sometimes it looks close, I don't believe that they began with a true HD transfer. The pilot is certainly not HD, the episodes, maybe, maybe not. It is hard to tell sometimes because Invisible man did many of it's invisible effects using video chroma key. They took the video and transferred it back to film. So you will see the show go from a more film like quality to what looks like video resolution (because it was). Of course, that sort of thing integrated much better on old TV's. The best HD transfer will not make these chroma key video to film sequences look any better.
The DVD has the episodes on 4 DVD's. The DVD's have the best presentation of the pilot. It and the episodes are the original 4:3 ratio. The pilot is nice but the rest of the episodes suffer from motion artifacts. The somewhat staccato movement you can sometimes see in streaming material. It is most visible in pans. Other than the motion artifacts, the shows look good enough (but the motion artifacts bug me)
The blu ray carries the entire run on one disc (it runs a bit under eleven hours on "play all"). This kind of argues in favor of this all being up converted standard video because a blu ray can hold a great deal of standard video (a double layer blue ray has the capacity of about 5 and a half Double layer DVD's). However, the encode is an HD codec and can be output at 24p.
The pilot on the blu ray is stretched at the sides in the same way TV's can do and that makes it a total fail for me, I hate that stuff. The regular episodes, however are cropped to 16:9 and I don't like that either... but I still find it watchable. The video quality is fairly good (sometimes it gets to what i think is an HD level but in the end I stil think it is an upconvert or at best a 720p transfer) and there are no motion artifacts like the DVD has.
So, the trade offs between DVD and blu ray are
DVD:good pilot presentation and motion artifact infested episodes in the original 4:3
Blu Ray: Pilot stretched out and unacceptable, regular episodes cropped for 16:9 but look good.
A lot of negative comments on the releases came from people not realizing that the effects were video chroma key but both are still quite flawed releases.
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