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In Reply to: RE: Not at the expense of BD. It doesn't have to be either/or. posted by Jack G on June 07, 2007 at 09:39:50
The jury is still out on low vs. high bitrate VC-1 or AVC1 encodes and until we see larger sampling of movies to judge, I'll have to give the high(er) bit encodes the benefit of the doubt. A quick survey of some HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movie material using a combo player and a 126" display system suggested the relatively low bit rate VC-1 encodes had issues with edges on fast motion sequences.
Soundwise, Is it merely coincidence, there are far more Blu-ray discs with uncompressed PCM soundtracks than on HD-DVD ? The Blu-Ray discs have far more flexibility adding decent soundtracks to the movies than HD-DVD. Or you want to blame the studios for not "putting out".
As far as "Blood Diamond" is concerned, the fact that Warner's did such a lousy job, PQ-wise putting this in high definition means I'm disinclined to buy it (it's only plus is the presence of an uncompressed LPCM track you won't see on the HD-DVD version0. For similar reasons, I'm disinclined to buy "Fifth Element" or "House of Daggers" until the studios get it right. "Blood Diamond" might be the best example of what happens when you try to use relatively low bitrate encoding while skimping on the necessary TLC to prevent the video artifacts (e.g. macroblocking) from showing up on the endproduct. Heck, they probably could have gotten a much better result using well-established MPEG-2 encoding on a 50G Blu-Ray disc.
I want the studios to give me the best possible PQ and SQ on the disc before I buy it. The Blu-ray disc gives the studios the best flexibility to get it done plus still have the extra leftover space for the frills/extras some people seem to like.
Anything specifically that Bill Hunt didn't get right in his comparisons of the two formats ?
Follow Ups:
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"Children of Men", "Batman Begins", "Serenity" (?). Not exactly slouches in the PQ department and the effects weren't obvious unless you were really looking for them. And this might have been a manifestation of the particular system it was played in. I'll should revisit this again with other HD-DVD sources (this was before I acquired "King Kong" and "Poseidon") on the home front.
Nevertheless, the chances of detecting artifacts increase with increased screen size. What's not obvious on a 40" screen might become brutally obvious on a 100+" screen. [And after seeing what's possible on a SOTA 1080p Front projector, I'm not real satisfied with my 720p FP].
I don't think any of those are on the "bit starved" movie list, even by the most vocal opponents of VC-1. That said, I'm fairly sure, that if you look hard enough, you can find flaws in quite a few movies. Some people even crank up their sharpness just to see them. In some(many) cases, it may be the compressionist, not the codec. I don't have a projector, but I do have a 60" 1080p set, and I saw that there is visible banding on Planet Earth. Its still a nice box set. Hell, over at AVS, most BD titles, even exclusives, are listed as containing some artifacts. Of the few that don't, 2/3 are from Warner-Imagine that!
enjoy,
Jack
I've had my share of disappointments on Blu-ray; E.g. I thought "Night at the Museum" was good, not great and could have been much better but they had to make it fit on a 25G disc. Could the result have been better if they had a 50G constraint to work with ?
I've the impression making low(er) bitrate encodes require a bit more TLC to mask/eliminate video artifacts; if they don't put in the TLC (or they can't stand higher bitrates because of bandwidth/storage considerations), you get results like "Blood Diamond".
I only watch on a 60" set, so I haven't seen alot of jaggies.
I'm not sure why you keep emphasizing uncompressed lossless audio, when there is compressed lossless as well. Both are lossless. Both sound good. BD may have more flexability, but how many studios are taking advantage of the extra space? Sony does with their MPEG-2, because that *requires* high bitrate and lots of storage space. If that floats your boat...
As for Blood Diamond, The HD DVD won't be out for another month, so we'll see. BTW, that horrid abomination got 3 out of 5 stars in the review that set off all the blu-boys whine-fest. I'll tell you, between the blu-ray folks, and the Sony SXRD threads, you'ld be hard pressed to find a whinier site online.:-)
I do plan on eventually getting a BD player, as soon as they put out some titles I actually want to see. :-) Right now, they are focusing on a very narrow audience.
JackPS. BD has the dubious distinction of being the first of the new formats to suffer laser rot.
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