Blow Up-Antonioni-1966-x264_OPTIMIZED

After my first viewing of Blow Up, I was almost breathless, yet a word had to come out : "perfection".

The cut gave me the feeling to be perfect to the 1/24th of a second, never a frame too much, never one too short. Music by Herbie Hancock and solid acting don't hurt, but the other impressive achievement of Blow-Up, was the outstanding move to color (started with Red Desert tough). Not only had Antonioni been working for a long time in B&W, fact is films or directors who truly master color are extremely rare. Most of the time fine and beautiful use of color is achieved through the use of a limited set of tone. Here is some wonderful use of color, rich in tones, yet devoided of pretention, just beautiful, not invasive (as opposed as to some painting in a movie a la Kubrick, which can be wonderful but adds Kubrick into a movie that's not supposed to have him as a character).

No synopsis, no spoiler.



VIDEO :

Picture quality should be better than the DVD to most eyes (short sample included, snapshots in the snaphots tab).

Important ! almost every video you can find on the net, including some high bitrate HD releases should be played with ffdshow installed whenever possible. Reason is that by default ffdshow activates the deband filter which is the most universal useful post-processing video filter (deband). Without that you watch something much less nice, and regurlaly awful (especially dark scenes). A simple install of K-Lite Codec Pack will install everything you need in case you've listened to the bad advice often given on the net and you're still using VLC or worse.

Duration : 1h 52mn

Format : AVC

Format profile : High@L4.1

Width : 720 pixels

Height : 576 pixels

Display aspect ratio : 1.851

Frame rate : 23.976 fps



AUDIO :

Codec ID : A_AAC

Channel(s) : 1 channel

Channel positions : Front: C

Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz

Language : English



Audio #2

ID : 3

Codec ID : A_AAC

Channel(s) : 1 channel

Channel positions : Front: C

Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz

Title : Commentary



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