2K or HD telecine?

[Donald Riley]

Would 2k compressed to H.264 produce a better picture than 1080p compressed to H.264? Is 2K telecine only used for film prints and digital projectors?

[Brian Drysdale]

2k is the theatrical format you won't see any real quality difference, it will just be wider - 2048 pixels as against 1,920 pixels, giving a different aspect ratio (more or less 1.85). It really depends if you're going for a theatrical distribution, even then many films are shot 1920 x 1080.

[John Sprung]

It'll be very close. With 1920 wide instead of 2048, if you compress both into the same data rate, you'd have a little less compression. That's the trick of original HDCam tape -- they filtered down to 1440 across in order to compress it less.

 

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[Will Montgomery]

There are many more important variables that go into the compression than a few extra pixels to start with. For instance noise & grain levels effect compression much more.

 

The real advantage to a 2K scan is that you'll get the full frame and you can crop without a resolution penalty. 2K scans of 4-perf 35mm are 2048x1556 and generally these days we crop down to 16:9.