Michel Hafner (8 August 1999):
Witness (1985) by Peter Weir is a movie I have very fond memories of. It was one of the first movies which made me aware that the medium is not only good for entertainment, but that it can also be art. That a good director frames shots in specific ways to tell a story within the story. That, if he shows an object, it's sometimes not only an object, but something else, too. That music and images can subtly relate to each other.
When the 16:9 enhanced DVD of "Witness" was announced I was naturally very happy and looking forward to it. Now I'm having it in my hands. The back of the case also promises a new 5.1 Dolby Digital sound mix. And I have read somewhere on the web that the average bit rate on this dual layer disc is very high (it's about 8.0 MBit/s, actually). Yummie! We are in for a treat, aren't we? Dead wrong! We are in for a major disappointment. I hate to be cranky. I would really have loved to give this DVD a rave review. But Paramount screwed it up. Very annoying.
The film elements used are reasonably clean and image steadiness is ok, but not great. The colors are quite nice, the contrast and shadow detail are no problem area either. Sharpness is mostly good, too, but clearly not near the sharpness of a top DVD. So far no reason to lament. But from here it goes steeply downhill. This is the third Paramount DVD in a row (after Gallipoli (1981) and Days of Heaven (1978)) which is ruined by a stupid choice of a film master, namely a master that is too grainy to give good results, followed by careless digital processing to get rid of the grain again. A sure recipe for an artifact riddled DVD which may look pleasant on displays with reduced resolving power, but looks pretty ugly on displays with full DVD resolution. Strong words, I know. But sadly they are true. I wish they were not and "Witness" would look as good as the average Columbia/Tristar or New Line DVD.
Well, as we already said, the noise and grain level of the film master is too high and is distracting in many scenes. Because of that digital noise suppression has been applied and the typical artifacts are present in every sinlge scene. Really, I have not found one scene that was not affected! Textures in fast motion are smeared into a pulp. More or less stationary textures look unnatural and distorted. There is image break up at several places (image parts moving against each other). In addition we also have scratch removal running amok in several scenes. How on earth can this pass quality control? Maybe I'm naive and Paramount has no quality control. Or maybe quality control is rather cynically following this rule: Don't move unless the problem is visible even on tiny TV screens from a distance of 3 meters.
Jokes aside, here is a representative listing of some problems in chapter 3. Check them out and you will see what I mean. It's also quite helpful to step through these examples frame by frame to see in detail how the grain, noise suppression, scratch removal and compression interact to create quite ugly results:
· 0:00-0:04: The central clock is flickering, it's attacked by digital scratch removal, the whole image is jittery because of compression problems.
· 0:27-0:37: The lamp on the right is attacked by scratch removal.
· 1:54-1:58: This is a stationary shot. The Noise reduction moves the statue around although it should stay put. Result is a jittery image. Relatively subtle effect.
· 2:16-2:46: The lamps are again attacked by scratch removal and the back wall with the toilet entrance is moved around by the MPEG encoder.
· 4:25-4:36: Danny Glover's jacket has stripes. They are messed up as soon as the jacket is moving, thanks to digital noise suppression.
· Anywhere: Textures in fast motion are smeared, when standing more or less still they look noisy, distorted and unnatural. Around contours of moving objects noisy ghost images are created and blur the contours.
These problems are not only in chapter 3 but most of them are in all chapters. I should also mention that there are occasionally some over enhanced edges. "Witness" is one of the important American movies of the '80s and also one of the big box office draws. It's an exquisitely crafted film with major stars, directed by one of the finest working directors of our time. It deserves much, much better than what Paramount offers with this DVD. It deserves that the original negative is taken out of the vault and scanned in by a state of the art teleciné . The current DVD is anything but state of the art. It should be remastered as soon as possible.
