I almost never post, just lurk around  

Anyhow, I agree that the SC commentary was uncomfortable. It went beyond playful and sounded like some sort of nerd turf war. I was shocked Sony went with that cut. Odd decision.

The lack of commercials, the blurring (not a big deal) in commercials, and the poor colors threw me off. I figured the corrections would brighten things, maybe fix a few errors (like when Frenzy and Rumble are both the same color), and generally clean things up... ended up preferring the fullscreen version. In fact, I have a VHS version (didn't have TFTM on DVD until today) with colors I found superior to both.

All in all it I find it more positive than not -- the fan commentary with all the guys was great... much friendlier and informative. Wish we could've had SC with a commentary/subtitle option too... especially with that really awkward discourse  

Overall I'm proud of the work these TF fans put in, was exciting to see Sony/Hasbro work with the community.

 

I was surpised that the commentary and the trivia pop-ups made no mention of Arcee using Hot Rod's larger gun while the decepticons are retreating. It's the only time the weapon has ever appeared in any transformers animation.

and yes, I submitted it when they were taking trivia submissions.

 

What? And... what?

Care to edit this so that it actually makes some sense in English?

 

... the sweets.  

 

This dvd rocks. I havnt had it on dvd yet either. Just the old VHS.

The SC commentary was a bit odd, but I didnt mind it, nice change of pace actually.

The colors are fine to me, HotRod only stood out in the dance scene next to the Junkions.

That ultimate hidden egg is actually quite interesting.

And the cut scenes are pretty sweet.

Go buy it now if you havnt.

 

Glad I went to Walmart!   now if only I trim the lenticular cover to fit..but I really don't want to cut it...I guess I'm happy I got it after all, along with the exclusive iron-on. sweet touch!

Wow. I've watched the movie, watched the movie with fan commentary (of course)...I got to watch that again! Good job, Tony, Rik, Joe, and Paul! I doen't think a single thing was left out by you Paul. I had the pleasure of going to your panel and meeting you at Cybercon '05 when I volunteered as staff. And I thought I gathered some knowledge then...you really outdid yourself on this DVD. I just want to say thanks for filling in a LOT of facts, rumers, myths, storyboards and un-animated material as well as cut or changed material like when you talk about the sweeps' ripping Magnus...I could go on and on. It was a real treat as a fan to get the inside look at TF:TM like that and I want to thank all of those involved for such a great experience!

And I've only just begun! I have tomorrow off to dedicate to ALL of the extras I haven't yet seen. I tried and got the few easter eggs, but not any that haven't been posted. I keep checking the other thread but feel silly as I've spent hours trying, ah well, someone will post more I hope sooner or later.
-Gary

edit: found the Magnus egg!  

 

NO NEED TO BE A JACK ASS...I'm sure you have never made typos in your ENTIRE meaningless existence.

Some of us have not had a computer since we were in the womb, and I know I do not type well, especially when I am Watching a movie at the same time.. sorry I did not re read, but I was in the middle of the movie and this is the 1st I've come back to look!  

 

play nice boys



Anyway, thanks to that guy who posted screen caps of both versions. After viewing them I must say this:

"Pink' HotRod, looks like he always did to me. But the Fullscreen version actually looks much darker than before...

 

Will you please tell us how to get to it instead of bragging about seeing it?

 

I just got mine. I'm just glad they are releasing the G1 series on DVD again... I hope this time there are special features.

 

Okay, I hate to be a killjoy, but I'm not extatic about this release. Definitely some big pros but a couple of significant cons too.

Packaging=awesome

Extras=awesome

Movie itself (video quality)=hmmm ...

I won't comment on the excellent extras and packaging because they've been discussed already. I'll talk about what bothers me about the film itself:

-Color (this is the big one) - the colors are WAY off, especially on the full screen version. Check out Megatron's Decepticon insignia:

Shockwave looks a sort of purple-ish red. In general the color balance is all over the spectrum. There are varying degrees of red or yellow casts over the entire film. Some scenes are a bit better and others are worse.
On the widescreen DVD, some effort has been made to improve the color, but it goes a bit wrong (the already noted example of Hot Rod's pink color for example). The purple glows are also atrocious in a lot of scenes. They tend towards red or even white. The glows on Quintessa when Hot Rod and Kup first arrive are good examples.
Plus there seems a little ghosting at the edges of animated characters. Not good.
Whether some of this is more "accurate" to the original film is difficult to prove, but it's certainly not as pretty as the Rhino pallette. I find the Rhino colors to be more accurate and much richer.

-Contrast overall is better; it may be a bit too high. You can see a LOT of detail that was lost in the Rhino DVD. I notice a lot of detail in the starfields I'd never seen before.
But it's not without it's shortcomings. A bad shot:


-There are definite advantages and disadvantages to the digital cleanup Rhino applied, but I prefer the cleaned up film to this one. There's a relatively lot of noise on the Sony release. I'd assume this is due to compression (I don't really know; I'm not a technical guy). And there're a lot of dust and burn marks on the fullscreen version. But there are a couple of explosions that Rhino seriously F-ed up, like the destruction of the shuttle (the shockwave effect).

All in all, I'm glad I have both of them, but the Rhino version is still a better transfer of the film itself in my opinion.

Other screen comparisons:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v510/wannabegeorge/Starscream.gif
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v510/wannabegeorge/Optimus.gif
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v510/wannabegeorge/Hot-Rod.gif
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v510/wannabegeorge/Blaster.gif

 

Man after watching this DVD (and then Rhino's transfer) I have to agree with you - I like Rhino transfer better. If I want to watch the movie again, I'm gonna pull out my Rhino version.

The lenticular cover was disappointing in that it doesn't fit into the DVD case. The Transformers Q & A was also pretty lame.

I did like the toy commercials, commentary, deleted footage, Easter Eggs & Scramble City episode though.

The ultimate DVD would have Rhino's colors/transfer and Sony/BMG's extras.

 

I think there may be a reason we didn't get every commercial released back in the eighties on this one set of disks. Like, you know, all the season sets being re-released by Sony?

Aside from that, the only easter egg I've found was the original Diaclone toy commercials. Now those were freakin' awesome. I almost wish we would have had such cool stop-motion and hand-off-camera toy animation in the states.

The Scramble City thing sounded like a couple of guys that could have really used a break from each other for a few hours before tackling another commentary. I don't know, they just didn't have good chemistry, unless you consider near explosions to be good chemistry. Also, while I'm not completely on the ball tonight (tough week already) there were enough factual errors in the commentary to send up the red flags for me every few minutes, so I'd imagine the really informed folks will be going insane over this one.

The other special features are kind of nice. I just sort of gave the whole works a once over tonight.

The side-by-side of "Original" and "New" made it apparent that somebody skipped a step in the clean up process in my mind. In fact, the "New" footage just looks washed out, and actually makes the animation look older than the original footage. If it were a picture edit I'd say they needed to go back to stock and pull an overlay of the original colors to bring some balance back to it. Let me illustrate with something non-movie related, so as to not step on any toes.

Now, say we start with something like this, call this original footage:



We can easily follow stock enhancement treatements to bring the brightness up and end up with something that looks like this:



This seems to be where they headed with the "color correction" on the DVD. At least on the wide-screen version anyway.

Meanwhile, the small addition of one more "layer" based on the original colors used as an overlay to balance the colors and bring back the clarity gives us this:



I wish they would have headed in this direction. The clarity they were probably going for is present, the shadows and light regions are more defined, yet colors still pop well and nothing looks washed out or "old."

I only harp on this because I've taken so much time over the past couple of years to learn about proper color correction. And while I sometimes tend to go for over-saturation in picture enhancements, the reason I do that is to match the cartoon look we've all grown to love.

The cartoon on this DVD doesn't look oversaturated.

But, it's not the end of the world. It's easily fixed by turning that brightness down for watching this DVD. The only negative strike there is that every other DVD I own looks good with the same brightness setting, well above the brightness setting I'll have to use here. But, *SHRUG* I'll live.

Outside of the film itself, I'm fascinated by the extra features, and can't wait to hear about more easter eggs. I think the single one I've found is probably the only one I'll find until clear and concise instructions come out on the rest of them, but that's OK. I'll be patient on that.

All in all, I like what we've gotten here. Beautiful work on the extras is really the reason I bought this DVD set. I have the movie on DVD already. And while the color correction attempt is appreciated, I'll probably end up watching the non corrected one except when I want to hear a commentary track. For the price it was, I'm OK with that. Who would have expected a two DVD set to cost less than twenty bucks these days?

Good job on the extras, Sony. And I'll get around to watching the commentary tracks on the main feature in a couple of days. (I can't believe the number of people that have had time to watch this multiple times already all the way through. Even my best friend, who's usually busier than me, had watched all the commentaries by the time supper time rolled around for me. I hadn't even gotten the wrapper off yet.)

(MODS: If any of you feel my pictures above are a waste of space, feel free to edit my post and remove this line. I just wanted to illustrate what I was talking about, but would completely understand if it's seen as off-topic and space wasting to do so here. Apologies if it is.)

 

Damnit. I've tried and tried to figure out that hidden easter egg thing, it's impossible...or something.

 

Is everyone here blind?

Is everyone here blind? The Transformers the movie reconstructed version shows much more footage! Just fast foward to the part were Starscream shoots the Constructicon's horn instruments at his corination. Ramjet is in full view in the right corner of your screen..... face and all. In this so called new great widescreen version you can only see half of Ramjet in the screen! What a joke! Do I have to wait until next year to get a true animorphic version of the movie?

 

I seriously hope you are kidding, as its not only well documented, but has be repeatedly brought up here in the news forums specifically, that the widescreen version IN THE THEATRES was nothing but a cropped version of the 4:3 cut, because the movie was made in 4:3. There will never ever ever be a true anamorphic widescreen version of this movie because it never existed.

 

When will people understand? THE MOVIE WAS ORIGINALLY ANIMATED IN FULLSCREEN. These cropped the image for the movies/widescreen version. That means if you have a HDTV there should be bars on the left and right sides if you don't want the image stretched to fill the screen.

 

I know what the original movie looked like, I watched it in the theatres when it originally came out! Watch the UK version of TF the movie reconstructed and then compare it to this... you will see what im' talking about.

 

Geeze kid, try to relax a little bit. And cut down on the sugar while you're at it.

I don't remember calling you any names in my post - just trying to make sense of something that made NO sense when you typed it - so you can kindly take your 12 year old tantrum induced response and shove it. Please and thank you.

 

OK look..... Im' not trying to start a flame war! You know I got respect for your opinion Redline...... But I was upset with this new 20th anivers. DVD. The UK TF the movie reconstucted version showed additional animophic footage than this version didn't ... thats all! It's plain as day!
Compare the following footage.....
1. Wheeljacks cut in half body!
2.Unicron's transformation.
3. Starscream's corination.

you will see that they could have fit more footage into our view!