Blu Ray Screencaps – Cloverfield

Blu Ray Screencaps of Cloverfield.

I went into this film knowing it was about a monster attack on New York City and knowing that it was shot in a handheld style and thus i expected moments of shakycam and the film certainly has plenty of that. I felt the shakycam aided the look of this film and suited the film's style. What i didn't expect was some superb effects work, i actually thought this was some low key little movie and didn't expect impressive CGI but it does feature some very good effects work.

I came away feeling really entertained, it's interesting that there is no music score during the whole movie but it does have a music score about a minute into the end credits and i absolutely loved this music score, very memorable and i'm playing it as i type this.

The image quality is hard to judge, for example if you look at frame 3 below you will see there is ringing or edge enhancement around the character on both sides of his body and i noticed this in some other daylight scenes, night photography can often hide this if the characters are wearing dark outfits and the background is darker. I'm not sure if this was intentional since everything is supposed to be shot on handycam and maybe they were simulating the sharpness control of a handycam or perhaps the encoders sharpened the film on it's HD debut.

On closer inspection there appears to be a very slight thin line around the image which is on the sides and top and bottom of the frame although hardly visible during normal viewing but this could be a sign the image has been passed through some sort of filter, the resulting filter has possibly removed a little detail and so the person doing the encode decides to apply a little sharpening hence the visible edge enhancement during some shots in the daytime. This line is certainly not visible during some other recent screencaps that i have done.

Another possibility with this release is that a downconversion from a 4K master resulted in a slight ringing effect on the image. I do not think the image looks bad considering the intentions of the film makers and since i do not know if the downconversion caused the minor issues i saw on the disc or whether it was filtered i have decided to place the film on my minor issues list.

I have checked other screencaps and note i see a line top and bottom of the frame on The Gauntlet. The Gauntlet definately had DNR applied to reduce grain levels in the image but it appears they also put the film through some sort of filtering process since it is filtering which causes these lines to appear and not DNR. The interesting thing is that not all scenes from The Gauntlet have this line as the prison scene when Clint meets Sondra for the first time is free of the line and is one of the better looking scenes in the film. You can blow up the Cloverfield images on your computer to see the lines.

You can see on Death Race frame 2  lines to each side of the image and thats the scene i suspected of having ringing. Other frames show no such lines. There is also a line around the sides and top and bottom of Basic Instinct, that film looks awful on blu ray. Yet many discs do not have these lines around the image. This raises my suspicions that seeing such lines around the image means the film has gone through a filtering process.

The sound mix for this film is superb, it has a very active sound mix with lots of rear speaker surround sound and low bass that makes the air move. Just fantasic and i loved this sound mix. The inspiration for the end music score is the Japanese Godzilla movies, films like Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla spring to mind and this is an obvious homage to those films. I look forward to the sequel which is currently in the planning stages and is slated for a release sometime in 2012. I hope they use the music score created for the end titles of this film, regarding that sequel there has been much discussion and rumour that it may even be a prequel.

View blu ray screencaps of Cloverfield below. Click twice for the full HD image.