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Topic: Anyone consuming HD or Blu-ray?

Joe Redifer
You need a beating today

Posts: 12859
From: Denver, Colorado
Registered: May 99

posted 05-28-2008 05:50 PM

quote: Mark Gulbrandsen
The Hummer got 19.2 mpg over the weekend on a trip to Pilot Peak... up one side and down the other

That's because you put the thing in neutral and just coasted most of the way back down and used the momentum to coast the rest of the way home.

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Scott Jentsch
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1061
From: New Berlin, WI, USA
Registered: Apr 2003

posted 05-28-2008 06:49 PM

quote: Steve Guttag
I recently put a Blu-Ray player with Blade Runner on the "big screen" about 40' wide...I was pretty shocked at how bad it looked. Yeah, it was rock steady but the colors were off and the contrast ratio was lacking and overall.

It sounds like the projector you were using is in need of calibration, and/or it's just a bad projector that's not using the correct color space for HD.

Blade Runner received excellent ratings for both video and audio quality (e.g. http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/bladerunner.html)

quote: Mark Gulbrandsen
My wife wanted me to pick up a copy of "August Rush". It was $27.95 there last Saturday morning.

Mark,

If you would like a copy of August Rush on Blu-ray, contact me and you can have mine. PM me your mailing address and it's yours!

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Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster

Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

posted 05-28-2008 08:35 PM

Thanks Scott! Will PM you... My Wife will be very appreciative of this.

Re: The 19.2 mpg on the Hummer. Just keep the speed at or under 70mph and load the back end properly. Same with the Land Rover. Both guzzle gas above that speed but at that speed or less they both get about the same gas milage. The interesting thing about the Hummer is that it turns 750 less revs at 70mph than the Land Rover does. While off roading is normally done at low speeds it still uses up gas in 4wd... especially low 4wd. Crawling boulders still takes higher revs and burns the same amount of gas you'd burn at say 65 mph. Now the Hummer H-2's are very definately gas pigs... 8 to 10 mpg at best. Many many of them are available for less than we paid for the 07 H-3 at local used car dealers.

Mark

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Mike Blakesley
Film God

Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99

posted 05-28-2008 09:35 PM

I've sold enough Sony products over my retail career that I know they sell a lot of crapola. But, my first XM Radio was a Sony and it's still going strong on a daily basis.

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Steve Guttag
We forgot the crackers Gromit!!!

Posts: 12814
From: Annapolis, MD
Registered: Dec 1999

posted 05-28-2008 10:54 PM

quote: Scott Jentsch
It sounds like the projector you were using is in need of calibration, and/or it's just a bad projector that's not using the correct color space for HD.

Scott...you didn't read the post very well. The color space was indeed set and verified (chromaticity meter) plus Broadcast quality (HDCAM) was run on the same system and the color/image were quite good.

I doubt any of the reviewing companies looked at the image blown that big.

Furthermore, I checked it on three different systems.

Where as I was forced to use the component out, that would be the first point of the degredation as I could only have 1080i which introduced motion artifacts and it also required the player to do a D/A conversion of the picture. That signal was then converted to HDSDI for transmission to the projector. I would have MUCH preferred to go from HDMI to HDSDI and keep it all digital and run at 24p...which the projectors are more than capable of.

Steve

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Monte L Fullmer
Film God

Posts: 8367
From: Nampa, Idaho, USA
Registered: Nov 2004

posted 05-28-2008 11:55 PM

quote: Mark Gulbrandsen
Now the Hummer H-2's are very definately gas pigs... 8 to 10 mpg at best

..(yea, you should see the stockage of them at our local Hummer dealer in the used car lot.... [Big Grin]

)

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Mark Gulbrandsen
Resident Trollmaster

Posts: 16657
From: Music City
Registered: Jun 99

posted 05-29-2008 07:45 AM

quote: Mike Blakesley
I've sold enough Sony products over my retail career that I know they sell a lot of crapola. But, my first XM Radio was a Sony and it's still going strong on a daily basis.

What does this have to do with the gas milage I'm getting. [Wink]

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Scott Jentsch
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1061
From: New Berlin, WI, USA
Registered: Apr 2003

posted 05-29-2008 11:04 AM

quote: Steve Guttag
Scott...you didn't read the post very well. The color space was indeed set and verified (chromaticity meter) plus Broadcast quality (HDCAM) was run on the same system and the color/image were quite good.

I doubt any of the reviewing companies looked at the image blown that big.

Furthermore, I checked it on three different systems.

Actually, I did read your message well, and no, there was no mention of the fact that you did anything beyond "tweaking the light." While I believe that it's possible that your other source looked good, having a system calibrated for one source and then using another doesn't mean that the system was calibrated for the purpose.

It also sounds like you have lots of devices in between the source and the projector. That means that there are lots of places for color space to get screwed up, starting at the player and ending with the projector.

Colors and contrast are something that will be more evident (or the same) on a smaller display than with a larger display. Larger displays will make artifacts such as banding, edge enhancement, and noise more noticeable, but not contrast or color issues, IMHO. (Isn't contrast more a function of the room and the equipment than it is with the source? As long as the transfer looks good on a calibrated standard-sized well-performing display, it should look just as good on a calibrated super-sized well-performing display)

Widescreen Review tends to be very picky about both sound and picture, and while they did mention some problems with artifacts when they reviewed the HD DVD of Blade Runner, they said that the other aspects were pretty good:

quote:
The black levels, as well as the shadow delineation, are key for this film, which has many dark scenes. Colors are bold and vibrant, really popping from the screen, and contrast is very nicely rendered. The picture has an impressively dimensional look to it.

web page

Since WB usually used the same transfer for the HD DVD and Blu-ray releases, comments about the HD DVD should hold true for the Blu-ray disc, but it's always possible that it doesn't for some strange reason.

The original premise that Blu-ray on a movie theater screen will not look as good as film still holds, I think, but I would think that the issues would be more related to resolution and aforementioned compression artifacts.

But what do I know? If you say that your system was perfectly calibrated for playing Blu-ray and you noticed the problems that you did, I have no way to dispute that. It's just surprising, that's all.

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Joe Redifer
You need a beating today

Posts: 12859
From: Denver, Colorado
Registered: May 99

posted 05-31-2008 04:50 AM

Toshiba isn't done yet, they're hard at work on YET ANOTHER Blew-ray killer!

Source

quote:

Toshiba is working on an extension to the DVD format which will offer video quality comparable to that produced by Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs, according to Japanese media reports.
(Advertisement)

The company plans to begin selling a DVD player based on the new technology within six months, Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun reported yesterday citing unnamed sources at Toshiba.

The new enhanced DVD players will be sold at lower prices than Blu-ray players, according to the sources.

Toshiba ceded to the rival Blu-ray format in February 2008 after spending years developing its own HD-DVD next-generation video disc standard.

HD-DVD was backed by a consortium of companies including Microsoft and Intel, while Sony is the lead developer of Blu-ray.

The new DVD player will be backwards-compatible with standard DVD discs, according to the sources.

One Japanese report appeared to suggest that the new technology would be able produce much higher-resolution images from existing DVDs, but did not address the apparent impossibility of this claim.

The modified DVD format relies on a newly-developed large scale integrated circuit chip to rapidly convert the stored video, but no technical details were released.

Manufacturers have attempted to extend the lifespan of existing storage technologies by adding additional data which can be used by new players but ignored by older players.

For example, hybrid Super Audio CDs (SACDs) can be played in traditional CD players but produce higher quality audio when played in special players. However, SACDs have failed to meet sales targets.

Go Toshiba! There is NO WAY you can possibly fail this time! While you're at it, get some therapy so you won't be such a sore loser. I really do like my Toshiba SDTV, though... even though it is made by Sansui.

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Larry Myers
Master Film Handler

Posts: 371
From: Herndon, VA, USA
Registered: Jan 2001

posted 05-31-2008 10:33 AM

Actually there is a way of doing this. This technique has been used in astronomy for years. That is, the use of overlapping images. You could get better image quality by taking 3 or 4 motion picture images in a row and combining them to reduce grain and increase sharpness. A fast image processing chip would do the trick. So in 1/24 of a second the chip needs to grab the next 4 images, process them, recombine them based on the first image grabed and then send it down stream to have it played or projected.

Your eye more or less does the same thing when you watch a movie. You can see this by stopping your standard DVD player to just look at one image, notice it will look "out of focus" and grainy. Push the play button and it clears up when the movie is back in motion.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 05-31-2008 03:10 PM

quote: Larry Myers
Actually there is a way of doing this. This technique has been used in astronomy for years. That is, the use of overlapping images. You could get better image quality by taking 3 or 4 motion picture images in a row and combining them to reduce grain and increase sharpness.

Interframe compression techniques in MPEG4 AVC and VC1 already do this sort of thing. Even MPEG-2 has the capability. However, that technique is pretty worthless when there is a bunch of movement taking place within the film frame. It works best on imagery that is mostly static.

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Larry Myers
Master Film Handler

Posts: 371
From: Herndon, VA, USA
Registered: Jan 2001

posted 05-31-2008 03:18 PM

Indeed it is not a perfect system. It's kind of like DTS where if the digital goes out for a second or two, the standard analog signal from the film takes over. The world of image processing just like sound processing is not perfect.

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Joe Redifer
You need a beating today

Posts: 12859
From: Denver, Colorado
Registered: May 99

posted 05-31-2008 05:19 PM

I don't consider interframe compression a capability, I consider it a handicap. Each frame should be its own image. It's a huge handicap for shitty things like HDV in camcorders, HDV cameras should be avoided at all costs.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 05-31-2008 05:22 PM

I don't think the analogy of the theatrical DTS system works very well. DTS will drop out to the backup analog track if it has too many problems reading the time code on the film print. So it's just an example of a system failing to work and relying on a different system to do the job. Interframe compression is an issue in video authoring, not playback.

A disc author won't be able to fit a 2 hour movie on a dual layer DVD or dual layer BD if he just compresses the video at the maximum bandwidth of either format. Choices have to be made about the bit budget. Compression ratios can be increased and disc capacity conserved in scenes with little movement and less detail. More bits have to be provided for the fast action, in some cases enough where every frame is described in an almost discrete, separate manner. It's more of a balancing act than anything else.

If you have HD satellite or HD digital cable service you can plainly see interframe compression at work. I don't know the bandwidth limits of over the air HD versus that of digital cable and satellite. The 720p signal I get from our local ABC station looks better than the 720p signals from ESPN HD. The Weather Channel has an HD channel running (although they're not showing much in the way of HD programming yet; that will change Monday). When you see their "Local on the 8s" thing in HD the graphics have a lot of mosquito noise and other quantizing effects when the menus are animating around the screen. But when the graphics get still all the noise disappears and the image looks almost perfect.

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Larry Myers
Master Film Handler

Posts: 371
From: Herndon, VA, USA
Registered: Jan 2001

posted 05-31-2008 10:44 PM

That's the nice thing about being an individual, we don't have to think alike and we sure don't.

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