DVD details for
Braveheart (1995) More at IMDbPro »

Michel Hafner (12 September 2000):
This DVD edition of Braveheart (1995) by Paramount has been in the making for quite some time. Was it worth the wait? Does the DVD deliver? As far as I'm concerned it mostly does notwithstanding some minor problems.
The film master used is pretty clean. I felt never distracted by speckles or other film artifacts. And image steadiness is very good.
Color and contrast rendition are very good as well. If reports in other reviews can be believed the colors on this DVD are less saturated than on the laserdisc which has been criticised. I can find no fault in this respect. The film looks pretty much how I remember it from the big screen.
Image sharpness is uneven, but most of the time images are about as sharp as can be expected from a decent new anamorphic transfer. The stunning detail found on the best DVDs is not available though (see below).
The noise and grain level is low except for a couple of shots where grain is pretty obvious (mostly sky shots). Some of this has been achieved with digital noise reduction which brings us to the subject of video artifacts. And here we have found the weakest point of the DVD. DVNR artifacts are visible in many scenes. Thank God they are more or less slight and never as distracting as in Paramount's Witness (1985) or _Ten Commandments, The (1956)_ . As an example watch the armour of the commander slitting Murron's throat. The DVNR makes it flicker when it should not flicker at all. It's a pity since without DVNR artifacts most shots on this DVD would look very film like and some would approach reference quality. The DVNR also seems to reduce sharpness a bit. Edge enhancement is no issue, though.
What about compression quality? Braveheart is a long film (close to 3 hours) with many outdoor shots with lots of detail, but also with intricate textures of clothing. Compression is good considering that the bit budget is tight. The bit rate is highly variable and goes from ~2.5 Mbit/s to over 9 Mbit/s. Slight artifacts are visible at times. But because of the DVNR problems it becomes difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. I don't think it was a good idea NOT to put the 28 minutes featurette and the two trailers on a second disc, preferably with some more supplements (such as the cut out 22 minutes according to Mel Gibson's commentary), so all of the first disc's storage capacity could be used for the film and the film only. As it is there are no bad compression problems, but superior image quality becomes elusive when the average bit rate is limited to ~5 Mbit/s. Sure, you can go to 9 Mbit/s when there is much action, but to compensate for this you also have to go to 3 Mbit/s at times, and less, and that shows.
So, the overall impression of this DVD is somewhat mixed. Image quality is good, ocasionally very good, and sometimes even excellent. Images look often film like and very attractive, even under revealing circumstances such as projecting the DVD with high quality equipment on a large screen. At times though video artifacts interfere and reduce the presentation quality to some degree. But the film is allowed to cast its magic spell effectively with this DVD, which I enjoyed a lot. If you like this five times Oscar winner you will hardly be disappointed with this edition as far as image quality is concerned.