Blu-ray

[Will von Tagen]

So I saw my first Blu-ray movie (aside from the in store previews) and I have to say that I cannot stand it. It just looks terrible. The movie was Jurassic Park, one of my favorites. My question for blu-ray fans is this; why do you enjoy watching high grade movies that now look like they were shot with practically consumer grade video cameras? The motion looks weird, almost choppy, the cuts are so noticeable that i get distracted by it, and due to the fact that the image is so crisp that it looks like "behind the scenes-esc" footage, the acting even looks less believable. If I had mad a big hollywood production (and especially if I had shot on film), seeing my work on blu-ray would be a serious slap in the face.

 

Who cares if you can see every wrinkle on someone's face, or the threads on their jacket. Why do you want it to look "true to life"? The whole point of movies is to escape reality. Any CGI Render looks like a cheap video game graphic.

 

Basically, the image generated by blu-ray makes film look like a lousy PBS or Discovery Channel production.

 

All in all, I would like to get other people's opinions. Why do you like blu-ray (if you do), and am I the only one who feels this way? I feel digital has a lot to offer, but the way we are starting to run-a-muck with it is destroying the art of film making.

 

What are your thoughts?

[georg lamshöft]

We had this topic discussed before, basically it seems to be a problem of post-production/scanning technology, not Blu-Ray or HD itself.

 

Many/most films are still transfered with "quick&dirty" 2k telecine (no pin-registration, sensor-noise, grain-alaising, limited DR...) and to make things worse, some of these scans are further damaged by strong digital filters (noise reduction...). Your Blu-Ray was most likely made from a 15 years old transfer!

 

An Arriscan can scan at 1fps (6k native resolution, double-exposure for full 16bit DR), so a 2h movie takes about 48h (x500$/h = 50000$ scanning costs alone?) to scan, finding and preparing the orignal negatives takes some time and converting it into a proper Blu-Ray will take some time either. But I think we're not expecting too much when demanding investing a few 100.000$ into a great Blu-Ray-Transfer of those classics like "Jurassic Park"! Do we? Wasn't the nice transfer (and expensive restoration) of "Blade Runner" a real economic (and artistic!) success, much more than a horrible Blu-Ray (from an old transfer) would have been? You have to spend money to make money...

 

I personally think Blu-Ray is great! 52MBit/s at 1920x1080pixels resolution with today's codecs CAN deliver really great IQ, when the transfer was done properly...

 

Make a google-picture-search on "very large"-images, by using names of popular movies - you will find pretty nice sites making blu-ray-reviews with orignal-sized-screenshots, get a better Blu-Ray, you won't be disappointed!

[Michel Hafner]

What are your thoughts?

First, where is that Jurassic Park Blu Ray for sale??? Has not been released so far, has it?

Second, Blu Ray has no specific look different from 8 bit HD at 4:2:0. If you hate Blu Ray you hate HD of that

kind in general no matter what is put on it. It's not film, it's video. But it can look quite film-like if that's intended...

Maybe you don't hate Blu Ray but that specific transfer, whatever it was?

[Toby L Edwards]

I saw Transformer playing on Blue Ray a few days ago. Same story. It ruined the Movie. I could not believe how choppy the Camera moves looked. The colors looks so over saturated, it looked like it was shot on a Movie Set, Fake!! The Lead actress looks like crap up close. I'm afraid the future is going to be quite ugly! I own the DVD and it looks great. I will not be going to Blue Ray anytime soon!

 

Toby

[James Martin]

I have seen good and bad Blu-Ray transfers... I honestly don't know what people have against the format, I would have thought the sort of people that come on this forum of all people would appreciate the benefit?

 

For sure, there are sub-par transfers but these were even worse back in the days of DVD... I have a semi-decent home theatre setup with a colour calibrated screen and for me there is no comparison between a good blu-ray and a good DVD. If films look bad on Blu-Ray, it is usually the fault of the transfer (which is probably the one used for the DVD, only DVD is not good enough to see the imperfections).

 

I don't usually get involved in these sorts of debates, but I feel the necessity to speak my mind here.

 

Also, RE: Transformers, I saw the film in the cinema and one of the leading ladies also looked Orange there, so this is the intention of the filmmakers. It is a very saturated movie but that is an artistic choice IMHO. Blu-Ray simply allows for more preseveration of these colours, AFAIK.

[Toby L Edwards]

I have seen good and bad Blu-Ray transfers... I honestly don't know what people have against the format, I would have thought the sort of people that come on this forum of all people would appreciate the benefit?

 

For sure, there are sub-par transfers but these were even worse back in the days of DVD... I have a semi-decent home theatre setup with a colour calibrated screen and for me there is no comparison between a good blu-ray and a good DVD. If films look bad on Blu-Ray, it is usually the fault of the transfer (which is probably the one used for the DVD, only DVD is not good enough to see the imperfections).

 

I don't usually get involved in these sorts of debates, but I feel the necessity to speak my mind here.

 

Also, RE: Transformers, I saw the film in the cinema and one of the leading ladies also looked Orange there, so this is the intention of the filmmakers. It is a very saturated movie but that is an artistic choice IMHO. Blu-Ray simply allows for more preseveration of these colours, AFAIK.

 

Have you seen Transformers on Blu ray? I don't think so!

 

Toby

[Walter Graff]

Here's worse. I have taken two identical Panasonic plasmas, fed one a blu ray version of the movie and the other a RGB progressive scaled 1080 SD version of the same film and depending on the movie, either saw little to no difference between both monitors or saw no difference. In one case the bluray looked worse, too sharp, almost video-like. I tried this with four films I rented one night three weeks ago.

[Mike Lary]

I honestly don't know what people have against the format, I would have thought the sort of people that come on this forum of all people would appreciate the benefit?

 

I don't see the benefit of making a motion picture sharper, more saturated, and higher contrast than it was when I watched it in the theater, and that's what I've seen from the Blu-ray discs I've watched thus far. Sure the resolution of Blu-ray is closer to what I saw in the theater than a DVD would be, but resolution and quality are not interchangeable terms.

 

If the format is capable of 'film-like quality' but fails to deliver to the consumer, its value is greatly diminished, as is the credibility of the claims made by its proponents. A friend of mine claims that HD projection is equal to or better than film projection, but when anyone argues with him based on their experiences he claims that their experiences are not valid because they haven't seen a 'properly calibrated HD projection at optimal quality'. That argument means nothing to consumers who expect marketing claims to be met.

 

As far as CG scenes looking fake in Blu-ray, I agree. People seem to like it though, so I guess fake is the new real.

[Toby L Edwards]

Here's worse. I have taken two identical Panasonic plasmas, fed one a blu ray version of the movie and the other a RGB progressive scaled 1080 SD and depending on the movie, either saw little to no difference or saw not much. In one case teh bluray looked worse, too sharp, almost video-like. I tried this with four films I rented one night three weeks ago.

 

 

Exactly. The Blu-ray of Transformers I saw looked like over sharpened highly saturated Video. I almost puked on my Shoes it was so bad.

 

Toby

[georg lamshöft]

Make sure you deactivated any "image-enhancements" from your TV/player!

 

Well, there are oversharpened, ugly-filtered, over-saturated blu-rays available, but there are some blu-rays that are incredible.

 

DVD is crap measured by technical standards, period! 720 lines of resolution with inferior compression, creating terrible looking, unsharp images full of artifacts!

 

Here is a nice site with full-rez screenshots, which may give you an idea when choosing another blu-ray:

http://www.highdefdiscnews.com/?page_id=104

Edited January 28, 2009 by georg lamshöft

[Toby L Edwards]

Make sure you deactivated any "image-enhancements" from your TV/player!

 

Well, there are oversharpened, ugly-filtered, over-saturated blu-rays available, but there are some blu-rays that are incredible.

 

DVD is crap measured by technical standards, period! 720 lines of resolution with inferior compression, creating terrible looking, unsharp images full of artifacts!

 

Here is a nice site with full-rez screenshots, which may give you an idea when choosing another blu-ray:

http://www.highdefdiscnews.com/?page_id=104

 

Those Screen shots look nice, but how does it look when it moves? Can anyone recommend a Movie on Blu-ray that the transfer looks really good?

Thanks

 

Toby

[georg lamshöft]

The motion-artifacts caused by the codec are usually really minimal, the bitrates are quite high.

 

When you prefer the more "natural" look instead of "pop-art contrast/colours" I would think of "There will be blood" (Anamorphic) or "Eastern Promises" (Super 35), many say the 4k-transfers/masters of "Blade Runner" and the "Godfather"-trilogy are great (but heavy post-production/filtering, though), but haven't seem the personally, my Blu-Ray-collection isn't that big right now, others might have more/better suggestions.

[Sam Wells]

Can anyone recommend a Movie on Blu-ray that the transfer looks really good?

Thanks

 

Toby

 

Chungking Express (Criterion)

 

-Sam

[Guest Kyle Waszkelewicz]

Here's worse. I have taken two identical Panasonic plasmas, fed one a blu ray version of the movie and the other a RGB progressive scaled 1080 SD version of the same film and depending on the movie, either saw little to no difference between both monitors or saw no difference. In one case the bluray looked worse, too sharp, almost video-like. I tried this with four films I rented one night three weeks ago.

 

I've tried a similar thing, and there wasn't a case where it was even a contest- the upscaled dvd never looked anywhere near as good as the blu ray. There are a lot of factors playing into individual experiences- tv, player, transfer, etc. For me at least, with the home theater setups I've seen, blurays have been consistently miles ahead of their dvd counterparts- that is to say that regardless of the variables there was always a noticeable difference and the dvds always looked worse.

 

Those Screen shots look nice, but how does it look when it moves? Can anyone recommend a Movie on Blu-ray that the transfer looks really good?

Thanks

 

Toby

 

The most jaw-dropping bluray I've seen was Ratatouille, but if we're only talking about film transfers that look like good film transfers then off the top of my head I'd recommend The Prestige.

[Walter Graff]

I've tried a similar thing, and there wasn't a case where it was even a contest- the upscaled dvd never looked anywhere near as good as the blu ray. There are a lot of factors playing into individual experiences- tv, player, transfer, etc. For me at least, with the home theater setups I've seen, blurays have been consistently miles ahead of their dvd counterparts- that is to say that regardless of the variables there was always a noticeable difference and the dvds always looked worse.

 

 

You are correct Kyle, it all depends on so many conditions form how the TVs are set-up, what the scaler in your DVD is like, the scaler in your TV, the condition's you are viewing under, etc. In fact it is often impossible ot compare two movies as their is no gold standard for how those movies are made so it's really impossible ot make a valid comparison. Too many folks think HD is some sort of visual standard and also think numbers are a indicator of that standard. That is far from true. Remember the reason for the creation of HDTV viewing was so that bigger sets could be made that could be placed within the same viewing room as what you had, giving you a more movie-like, larger picture view without the retrace lines being seen. Some people expect some sort of nirvana but the reality is it's not much better of a picture than what you had. No one but the TV set manufacturers make that claim. Mark Shubin says it best:

 

http://www.bluesky-web.com/high-and-why.html

[georg lamshöft]

Sorry, but HDTV is a true milestone in TV-quality! All the older formats (PAL/SECAM/NTSC) are 40 years old electronic standards only usable for small screens.

That's the point: HDTV is made for cinema-like (diameter 1-2x viewing distance) watching, not seeing a small screen from a fairly large distance (diameter 4-5x viewing distance?).

 

Please don't tell me you see no difference on your tiny PC-monitor:

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews4...%20blu-ray2.jpg

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDReviews21...%20PDVD_008.jpg

 

Why does the NTSC-Image look like crap? Well, Mpeg2-compressed resolution of about 0.3Megapixels...

[Michel Hafner]

Those Screen shots look nice, but how does it look when it moves? Can anyone recommend a Movie on Blu-ray that the transfer looks really good?

I don't even know what that's supposed to mean, looking good. One man's good is another man's crap. The relevant question is if the Blu Ray is a well compressed version close in quality to the studio HD master tape and if that tape is an accurate version of the movie with a look as intended by the film makers for the HD medium. If "Transformers" Blu Ray makes someone puke it's not a Blu Ray problem. The disc is well compressed and the colors, contrast and sharpness are what Bay wanted them to be. The disk has neither excessive sharpening applied nor can I see anything else wrong with it in the technical department. Wanna bet digital projections in 2K of the film looked quite close? The look of this film is what it is.

Before judging disks it's a must to make sure that one's display chain is accurate and following technical standards for correct color, gamma and grayscale and all digital filtering gimmicks are turned off (no sharpening, no noise reduction, no frame interpolation...) or you are not seeing what was put on the disk in the first place. And what was put there has all kinds of visual styles and signatures, superb eye candy for some, yucky garbage to others. Never trust a display you have not calibrated yourself or at least checked with reference material.

Good looking Blu rays? There are lots and lots.

Blade Runner

Predator

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Shoot Em Up

The Tudors

The Other Boleyn Girl

Cool Hand Luke

Black Narcissus

Baraka (mostly)

Atonement

Ratatouille

WALL-E

Der Fuchs und das Mädchen

The Prestige

Apocalypto

Matrix 1-3

...

[Toby L Edwards]

I don't even know what that's supposed to mean, looking good. One man's good is another man's crap. The relevant question is if the Blu Ray is a well compressed version close in quality to the studio HD master tape and if that tape is an accurate version of the movie with a look as intended by the film makers for the HD medium. If "Transformers" Blu Ray makes someone puke it's not a Blu Ray problem. The disc is well compressed and the colors, contrast and sharpness are what Bay wanted them to be. The disk has neither excessive sharpening applied nor can I see anything else wrong with it in the technical department. Wanna bet digital projections in 2K of the film looked quite close? The look of this film is what it is.

Before judging disks it's a must to make sure that one's display chain is accurate and following technical standards for correct color, gamma and grayscale and all digital filtering gimmicks are turned off (no sharpening, no noise reduction, no frame interpolation...) or you are not seeing what was put on the disk in the first place. And what was put there has all kinds of visual styles and signatures, superb eye candy for some, yucky garbage to others. Never trust a display you have not calibrated yourself or at least checked with reference material.

Good looking Blu rays? There are lots and lots.

Blade Runner

Predator

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Shoot Em Up

The Tudors

The Other Boleyn Girl

Cool Hand Luke

Black Narcissus

Baraka (mostly)

Atonement

Ratatouille

WALL-E

Der Fuchs und das Mädchen

The Prestige

Apocalypto

Matrix 1-3

...

 

Your argument makes no sense.

The DVD of Transformers doesn't look like crap. The colors are not over saturated. The motion is nice and smooth. The cuts are almost seamless. The Blu-ray is not.

[Michel Hafner]

Your argument makes no sense.

The DVD of Transformers doesn't look like crap. The colors are not over saturated. The motion is nice and smooth. The cuts are almost seamless. The Blu-ray is not.

You can see DVD versus HD-DVD here:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread....ht=transformers

The Blu Ray looks practically the same.

If you have very different colors between the DVD and the Blu Ray on your equipment I suggest you check where your equipment goes wrong. It does not show what's on the disk. Concerning motion there should be no difference either. The DVD and the Blu Ray have 24 fps video which is output depending on what player you have, what display you have and how they cooperate. You might see 24fps at a multiple of 24 Hz, or 60HZ with pulldown, or maybe you watch on 50HZ PAL equipment? Or use 120Hz and frame interpolation? Whatever, Blu Ray as a system has no motion issues with 24fps material from film sources. Your specific player and display combination may well have though. Without specific details how you watch your stuff it's pointless to try to diagnose this further.

[K Borowski]

The disc is well compressed and the colors, contrast and sharpness are what Bay wanted them to be. The disk has neither excessive sharpening applied nor can I see anything else wrong with it in the technical department. Wanna bet digital projections in 2K of the film looked quite close?

 

Lest you disseminate my post sentence by sentence, I am going to answer with a snappy one-liner; is comparing a 2K DIGITAL intermediate copied three times really the fault of film dupication, or the fault of the lazy digital step?

[Paul Bruening]

See? This is why I endorse the daguerreotype. You never heard this kind of competition on the internet back in the good ole' days of the daguerreotype.

[David Mullen ASC]

For most new titles, there is a 1080P HD master created (either from the 2K or 4K D.I. master, or an HD telecine session) which becomes the basis for both the Blu-Ray and downconverted DVD version, so the two should look similar except for the increased resolution of the HD version compared to the SD version.

 

Now between the 2K or 4K D.I. version and the 1080P HD master, there is usually a second quick color-correction session to make sure that it looks correct for Rec 709 4:2:2 HD presentation, some basic trimming after it is converted to Rec 709. Same goes for making a 2K DCI master for digital cinema presentation from the D.I. master, there is a trim pass for the DCI-P3 color space.

 

If the Blu-Ray of "Transformers" looks saturated, contrasty, and occasionally grainy... then it sounds pretty accurate to the look of the theatrical version.

[Keith Walters]

Remember that a Blu-Ray disc, like DVD and CD discs is just a means of storing digital data - just a long stream of 1s and zeroes. All these formats have extensive data redundancy and error correction, and they are specifically designed to allow recovery of the entire data stream, even with a substantial number of scratches, pinholes in the reflective layer and so on.

 

Unless the disc has been considerably degraded, the 4 billion or so bytes that play back off a single layer DVD disc (or the 25 billion or so from a Blu-Ray disc, or the 800 million or so from a CD) will be identical to the ones that were stored in the mastering computer. This is something that few people seem to understand: only in extreme cases is actual error concealment used; most of the time there is 100% recovery of the original data.

 

All else being equal, the quality of your movie viewing experience is going to be determined by:

• The quality of the source material
  
• The quality of the transfer/restoration of the source material
  
• The quality of the software in your player
  

I have personally had the same experience of seeing Blu-Ray and DVD versions of the same movie looking very similar on identical monitors.

However in my experience, I don't think it was because the Blu-Ray version was particularly poor, it think it's more that with good material, modern DVD player chipsets can do such a first-class job of upscaling SD video.

 

The problem might be that Blu-Ray and HD origination don't really have anywhere further to go with current display technology.

[Michel Hafner]

Lest you disseminate my post sentence by sentence, I am going to answer with a snappy one-liner; is comparing a 2K DIGITAL intermediate copied three times really the fault of film dupication, or the fault of the lazy digital step?

Are you trolling now every thread where I post? Sorry, I won't play along.

[Michel Hafner]

The problem might be that Blu-Ray and HD origination don't really have anywhere further to go with current display technology.

The best Blu Rays seem to be close to what you can do with the format. High bit rate AVC/VC-1 with average of 25 and more and peaks above 40 Mbit/s looks transparent to the 8 bit 4:2:0 master in most cases and with normal viewing conditions. To improve further on image quality the Blu Ray parameters have to be changed and displays have to improve. Going 10 bit and 4:2:2/4:4:4 plus cinema color gamut would be the next logical step, together with doubling the bandwidth of the system.