DVD details for
The Sixth Sense (1999) More at IMDbPro »

Michel Hafner (5 April 2000):
This DVD edition of 1999's surprise blockbuster _Sixth Sense, The (1999)_ is not quite state of the art throughout, but very watchable nonetheless.
The film element used is clean and image steadiness is good except for one jump in chapter 2 at 3:34. Contrast and color rendition are first rate with deep blacks, good shadow detail and highly saturated colors where needed (such as the symbolically used intense reds). Sharpness is uneven but mostly good or very good, solid average for a new anamorphic transfer. The noise and grain level is low and never distracting. I have not seen distracting video artifacts as well.
The weakest aspect of this DVD is the compression which could and definitely should be better. The average bit rate is around 5 MBit/s and that is not enough for some scenes. Most have no distracting problems, but some do: I-frame pulsing, macro blocking and also floating texture parts. A good example is in chapter 11 where Bruce Willis sits next to a sofa with a yellow pillow on the left. The textures of the pillow and the sofa are full of macroblocking artifacts and pulsate rhytmically (I-frame pulsing). Why? Because the supplements use too many bits? Because the MPEG encoder used does not like that type of scene? Only the expert knows. What I know is that it's a pity and should not happen with a DVD of a major film as this one. Can we have high bit rate DTS version, please?
The supplements have good image quality (except the deleted scenes which are low resolution) and the various trailers are better looking than the average trailer as well. The menu design is appropriately spooky.
Overall this is a very nice DVD. The compression problems are a minus point and should be fixed in any new versions, but are likely to be no major problem unless you watch the DVD on a big and very bright screen.