Jump to content

Blu-ray


William Henning

Recommended Posts

Hi Guys. I'm just here to learn about movie making for myself and watching on Blu-ray. Does Blu-ray get the same type of treatment feature films get when they're edited...like with color grading and other things? Sorry if it sounds like a stupid question...I'm new to all this technology, the process and how it all fits together from the making of the movie to the box office and to Blu-ray.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's just another delivery format as far as I know.  I always have separate output workflows from the original material for different delivery methods....TV broadcast, DCP, internet, DVD or BluRay all need finessing of the sound and picture for the final product to insure consistent results between them all.

Someone with more experience here may know a different and more specific answer than me.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Generally Blu-Ray gets the same treatment as the theatrical version, but sometimes with some minor adjustments.  If you have a good TV that is correctly set up than it should look as good or better than your average multiplex.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks Dylan and Bruce. I've always wondered about what happens with Blu-rays...wasn't sure if anything was done or not. My TV is setup using the preset Cinema mode and all enhancements turned off with sun-block curtains in a dark room. I get a great picture which is better than the theaters I've been to...which made me question the theaters and my setup. I've yet to see a theater that looked as good as my setup but went to a Regal RPX yesterday and saw Captain Marvel. Looked a lot closer to mine than other theaters. Will be going to Atlanta and will check out a Dolby Cinema there to see if that's close to my setup. There are some terrible theaters where I live so I wasn't sure what a movie was supposed to look like. I used to compare what I have at home to what's in a theater but I'm understanding I shouldn't do that...Blu-rays are much better from what I've seen so I'm searching to see if there are any theaters as good as Blu-ray. Thanks guys!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

24 minutes ago, William Henning said:

Thanks Dylan and Bruce. I've always wondered about what happens with Blu-rays...wasn't sure if anything was done or not. My TV is setup using the preset Cinema mode and all enhancements turned off with sun-block curtains in a dark room. I get a great picture which is better than the theaters I've been to...which made me question the theaters and my setup. I've yet to see a theater that looked as good as my setup but went to a Regal RPX yesterday and saw Captain Marvel. Looked a lot closer to mine than other theaters. Will be going to Atlanta and will check out a Dolby Cinema there to see if that's close to my setup. There are some terrible theaters where I live so I wasn't sure what a movie was supposed to look like. I used to compare what I have at home to what's in a theater but I'm understanding I shouldn't do that...Blu-rays are much better from what I've seen so I'm searching to see if there are any theaters as good as Blu-ray.

Let me put it another way. Is what you see on Blu-ray on a properly set up TV what the Directors intent is or what it's supposed to look like? I haven't seen anything in a theater yet that's as good as Blu-ray. After watching at a theater I'd come home and wonder if I need to dial back my settings on my display to match what I just saw in the theater. I don't have my setup on vivid or dynamic but it might look that way after seeing the dark and blurry picture I just saw...like watching the movie through a grey cloud.

 

Edited by William Henning
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

So the workflow for theatrical and Blu-Ray today, are nearly identical. 

They grade the film and then export a Pro Res or DNX file in Rec709 directly out of the grading tool for "home video" and then they'll make a Rec 2020 and DCI-P3 version as well. 

The key here is that quite a few movies aren't finished when they hit theaters. Key visual effects are rushed, clean up work is rushed and even the audio mix can be in a non-final state. So the movie CAN look different from the theatrical version to the home video version, only because they're sometimes, not always, rushed to meet theatrical release deadlines. This would NOT be the case for non-wide release theatrical content. 

With that said, Blu-Ray is a 8 bit 4:2:0 color space @ 18 - 54Mbps (megabits per second) .h264 file, which is basically the lowest quality "acceptable" delivery format on the market. Where the DCP JPEG2000 file played in theaters is 12 bit 4:4:4 color @ 250 MBps (megabytes per second) and even with just DCI-P3 color space, it's an entirely different experience. WIth UHD BluRay, the format is entirely different in SOME cases, not all. There are "HDR" UHD's available, which are the highest quality media available for home video viewing. They are .h265 10 bit 4:4:4 color space @ 50 -128Mbps. This isn't quite to the quality theaters have, but it's a marketable improvement. 

Theaters have a huge problem, they rely on very old multi-imager DLP technology which can fall out of calibration very easily. Many theaters also have older imager systems which have big black lines between each mirror. These create a noticeable grid on the screen that can become distracting. So when projectionists are setting up these projectors, quite a few times they defocus it slightly, to get rid of that grid. Also, since digital projectors are somehow magical (not the case), maintenance just isn't done on them. With film projectors, the lens, gate and even the window was cleaned per screening. With digital, the service schedules are far in between, generally when breakdowns happen. You have to be in a media city at a premiere theater, to insure the quality is good. Then you pay out the ass for tickets at a "decent" theater that has good projection. Let me tell ya, Dolby and IMAX laser projectors are no joke, but again you're shining light through a room and bouncing it off a screen. So many things can affect the image,  it's really a toss-up to know what the issues are that cause a bad image. This is part of the reason I don't watch movies in theaters anymore, unless it's something I must see for a particular reason. I have a perfectly good DLP projector at home, decent home theater and easy ways to access high quality sources. Only thing that for sure gets me to theaters is a screening on film, because it's so rare these days. I think the biggest mistake the industry made was allowing HD and UHD media into the home. They're basically killing theatrical for themselves. 

In terms of watching at home. Television sets are not what people watch movies on in the theatrical business. Everyone watches using DLP projectors of single chip and multi-chip, laser and xenon lamp. The systems are all calibrated to either Rec709 or DCI-P3 in most cases, with Rec 2020 hitting recently, especially for 4k releases. This would include your coloring bay and even audio mixing bay. The films are screened with projectors as well. So when you watch it on a TV using base settings, no way is that what it's suppose to look like. Generally TV's make the image too bright and have too high of a contrast ratio.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

here it is common to do the blu-rays from prores tv masters. just the required audio channels selected and then encoded from it. 

So it is basically exactly the same grade version as the TV version. the tv version's grade is fine tuned after the cinema grade is made to ensure that the darkest scenes can be seen in typical living room setting which has lots of ambient light, and that the movie is also in right color space etc. 

Some very big movies might do separate grades even for every delivery version I have understood but for normal use one typically only needs the cinema version and the tv version and that's it. taking into account the typical post budgets it is pretty uncommon to have any extra grading time or deliveries unless the customer is paying for them separately ;)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Small correction it is -- 250 Mbits/sec ( 31.2MBytes/sec) NOT 250MBytes/sec according to the DCI specs:

 

• For a frame rate of 24 FPS, a 2K distribution shall have a maximum of 1,302,083 bytes per frame

(aggregate of all three color components including headers). Additionally, it shall have a maximum of

1,041,666 bytes per color component per frame including all relevant tile-part headers.

 

• A 4K distribution shall have a maximum of 1,302,083 bytes per frame (aggregate of all three color

components including headers). Additionally, the 2K portion of each frame shall satisfy the 24 FPS 2K

distribution requirements as stated above.

 

Note: For information purposes only, this yields a maximum of 250 Mbits/sec total and a maximum of

200 Mbits/sec for the 2K portion of each color component.

 

https://www.dcimovies.com/

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member
4 hours ago, Alex Lindblom said:

Small correction it is -- 250 Mbits/sec ( 31.2MBytes/sec) NOT 250MBytes/sec according to the DCI specs:

Yes, sorry... my bad. I didn't bother checking the spec and I remembered it being measured in megabytes not megabits. Thanks for the correction. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...