DVD details for
Seven Years in Tibet (1997) More at IMDbPro »

Michel Hafner (25 July 1999):
This is a good quality DVD from Columbia/Tristar. It would be an excellent quality DVD if it were not for the... But let's stick to the usual order of our categories.
The transfer which this DVD is mastered from is of very high quality. The film master used is clean, and image steadiness is very good. The noise and grain level is low with the exception of a few sky shots which are somewhat grainy.
The 16:9 enhanced imagery is sharp and provides excellent detail on many occasions. Color reproduction is outstanding. Many shots are gorgeous to look at, with deeply saturated reds and yellows and a multitude of shades in between. The handling of contrast is not much worse with solid blacks and shadow detail not lacking. There is occasionally a slight problem though with clipping highlights. One example is in chapter 2 at 3:40-3:53 where the highlight on Brad Pitt's cheek clips.
Video artifacts are minimal with the exception of a couple of somewhat over-enhanced edges with white halos.
Up to this point we are talking about a top DVD from Columbia/Tristar, we are talking about excellence. Remains the last category to look at, the compression quality. And here, a pity, this DVD stumbles, and a few times falls flat on the face.
The film is 136 minutes long. There is one layer for the widescreen version and one for the pan & scan version. Both versions must be encoded with a meager 3.5 MBit/s on average. The compressionists at Sony have proven numerous times in the past that they are able to squeeze the last ounce of quality out of ridiculously low bit rates. But to compress this transfer, with all its high frequency content from rocks and other textures with fine detail, with 3.5 MBit/s average, and still not produce objectionable compression aretifacts in the process, requires a miracle. I'm sorry to have to report that the miracle has not happened this time, and there are indeed some distracting compression problems.
There is I-frame pulsing which is mostly invisible, occasionally a wee bit visible, and a few times hard to overlook. A slight case, and a test for the resolution power of your set up, is in chapter 7 at 0:26 and following, showing Brad Pitt's face in close up. There is slight pulsing and general compression noise visible in his facial textures. It's indeed slight, and if you can't see any problems from a distance of two times screen height, I'm not surprised. If you see the artifacts, congratulations, you have a system with good resolving power.
Two much more obvious examples are in chapter 3 at 4:28-4:33 where the background is twitching around with the rhythm of the I-frame pulsing, and in chapter 8 at 4:05 and following, where a series of shots with plenty of rocks lets the encoder break down, and the images break up in independently moving parts. There are several more instances of that kind. I don't know, how much the situation could have been improved by fiddling around longer with the most obvious problem cases. But judging by the wildly varying bit rate (going down as low as 2 MBit/s and as high as 9 MBit/s) quite some optimisation has already been done for this DVD.
It's a pity that such as gorgeous transfer falls victim to an inadequate bit rate in the compression stage. Only to include a pan & can version that destroys the composition of the images and is a mutilated version of the film, after all.
Since this DVD has come out (April 1998) dual layer technology has become cheaper, and Columbia/Tristar has started to release some longer films in widescreen only, using both layers and a higher bit rate (see _Mask of Zorro, The (1998)_ for example). I welcome that policy with all my heart. It removes the last quality bottleneck in cases such as this, and provides the means for giving us DVDs with really excellent image quality in all respects.
If Columbia/Tristar remasters "Seven Years in Tibet" for a dual layer/high bit rate release, I'll be the first in line, to buy it again. And so should you, since this film has a lot to offer, including 'John William' 's masterful score, good performances by Brad Pitt and David Thewlis, high production values all around, and an important subject matter, too.