DVD details for for
Cleopatra (1963)

Michel Hafner (15 September 2001):
One of the most expensive movies of all times and also one of the most notorious is now available from Fox on this 3 DVD set, 2 discs for the film, one for the supplements: Cleopatra (1963). It's a DVD in the 5 star collection so superior sound and image quality can be expected. Does this edition deliver?
The film master used is in very good shape for a film this old. There are minor problems but nothing distracting. Image steadiness is good.
Contrast and especially color rendition are excellent. The colors are mouthwatering on many occasions. The costumes and set designs are gorgeous to look at.
Images are sharp most of the time but some loss of sharpness compared to what's possible is obvious nonetheless (see below).
The noise and grain level is mostly low and no problem.
Finally Fox did the right thing and put the 4 hour film on 4 layers on two discs so a very high average bit rate keeps compression issues at a minimum.
So far so good. Now for the not so good.
First, during the intermission the still frames are half resolution and show ugly staircase effects all over the picture.
Second, and much more relevant, pretty much all of the transfer has been subjected to digital noise reduction. Sometimes rather sloppily with plenty of noise reduction artifacts as a result. Usually the problem shows up as flickering textures and flickering straight lines in stairs or arches. Occasionally parts of the image move around relative to the background when they should move together or not at all. Some scenes are full of this problem (such as chapter 19 with Cleopatra's entrance into Rome), others are much less affected (and look superb). In addition there is some ringing around contours due to edge enhancement and some aliasing at times. As a result this DVD scores low concerning video artifacts. A pity since the rest is close to reference quality. If only Fox had not filtered at all. With a bit rate this high the compression would still be good, images would be sharper and more film like and the overall impression better. This superb transfer deserves better than this!
Finally the third disc with the supplements is in a cardboard sleeve which is not exactly disc friendly. My copy was scratched from the beginning and also soiled with sticky matter that refused to be removed entirely and made the picture freeze at several instances. Rather stupid. What were they thinking? The supplements themselves are of good quality, content and technically.
This DVD edition of Cleopatra (1963) offers good image quality, sometimes excellent, but suffers from sloppy noise reduction which is easy to see on high quality progressive displays of some size, less so on smaller interlaced displays and when you sit more than 3-4 screen heights away. A version without noise reduction artifacts would be most welcome, but is unlikely. The HD transfer, if not filtered, will be a lot better, if it's aired sometime or gets a release on a HD format in some years.