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Best (and Worst) High-Def Discs of 2006
An anonymous reader writes "High-Def Digest has released their first annual 'Best (and Worst) of the Year' list of movies released on HD DVD and/or Blu-ray. Not surprisingly, the 'best' list is heavy on superheroes. Superman, Batman, and the Hulk all made the list. Not a bad cheat sheet for those of us with a Blu-ray capable PS3 or an XBox 360 HD DVD add-on on our Christmas lists."
Batman Begins is #88 on the IMDB Top 250 and is rated a solid 8.3. Do you really expect us to take you seriously when you're trashing what is arguably the best superhero movie (let alone Batman movie) in the past decade?
1080p transmission is a farce when you're dealing with movies. There is basically no difference between transmitting in 1080i vs 1080p when viewing content at or below 30 frames/second.
h tm, but both hd-dvd and blu-ray, and presumably network tv are all shot in a progressive format, so your deinterlacer is reassembling the same image you'd see over 1080p.
When talking about high def tv's, you're mostly talking about progressive displays (plasma, lcd, dlp, lcos, etc...) and in the US those displays are running at 60hz or 60 frames per second. Movies on the other hand are shot and encoded at 24fps. Now both an hd-dvd player and a blu-ray player, whether by component, dvi or hdmi are transmitting data to your tv at 60 fps. 1080i sends half the image on cycle 1 and half the image on cycle 2, your tv deinterlaces the image fields and shows you a progressive image for 2 frames. 1080p on the other hand sends the whole image on cycle 1, and nothing on cycle 2, and shows the progressive image for 2 frames as well. When you put down $1000 for a 1080p player, you've just paid $500 extra for a marketing term and the belief that movies will ever be shot at 60fps in the forseeable future.
Alot of people will probably chime in and start screaming about interlace artifacts right now. The only way you get interlace artifacts on a progressive tv, is if the source material was shot as interlaced, for example http://thewebfairy.com/911/presentation/artifact.
Except that some TVs can output in 1080p/24. So they can show the movie at the same frame rate as it appeared in the cinema. Getting a player to output in that is another matter. The PS3 can't (at the moment), but allegedly a firmware patch will add that support (see here for details).
1) No, 1080i and 1080p work just fine on the 360. Image Constraint Token has not been implemented on a single public disc yet, and is highly unlikely any time in the near future, given the speed at which these add-on drives are flying off the shelf. By the time it does become an issue, you'll have almost certainly got your $199 worth of fun out of the drive, and the standalone players that you'll need will have come down by that much.
2) The grandparent is strictly off-topic. Burning karma to get his question answered is, I'd suggest, a real issue.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
I'd suggest you start with Casablanca, which is even better than that blurb makes it sound - the amount of texture detail and those deep shadows are just stunning. I can't believe this film looks better than I've seen far more recent movies look when projected from actual 35mm film, when watching on an 8ft screen.
Next up, and almost as good (the larger grain of the original print being pretty much about it) is The Searchers. Finish off an initial purchase run with Forbidden Planet, and you'll be very happy.
Blu-Ray has suffered quite a bit, if you ask me, from a studio perception that it's going to be almost entirely for people with PS3s, rather than standalone players. So the movies are being picked to appeal to that sector of the market, and pretty much only that.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
The interlacing part isn't as simple as you make it out to be. For film it's actually showing the odd lines of the first movie frame, the even lines of the same frame, then repeates the odd lines, shows the even lines of the second frame, then the odd lines of the second frame. Note that inbetween there's a video frame that is made up of odd lines of the first movie frame and the even lines of the second, so the deinterlacer has to start assembling some frames with odd fields and some with even ones. More on this in Wikipedia or secrets of home theater and hifi.
Man, that page sure makes it seem that Blu-Ray sucks ass. I'm not sure what they based their selections off of...
If you want some better lists to work form, the guys over at avsforum are a much better information source, if you ask me:
HD DVD Picture Quality Tiers List
Blu-Ray Picture Quality Tiers List
I have no mod points, so I can only respond and say you're right. The source material of HD DVDs and Blu-Ray discs is 1080P. If there's an exception, you'd note it on the back of the case. From what I understand, if the source material is 1080P but your TV is 1080i, you most likely won't see any difference unless you have a very poor deinterlacer.
Even if your TV is 720P, you'll still see a difference between regular broadcast / DVD and HD discs. Some people (myself included) claim to see a difference between HD discs and HD broadcast; for me, this is mostly due to HD DVDs having none of the compression artifacts and color banding you find occasionally on your HD broadcast.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
It all depends what FPS the content was created at. If you're talking video games, its 'content' is created procedurally by a GPU at as many FPS as it can crank out. If you've got a movie that was shot at 30 FPS, viewing it at 60 FPS will cause each source frame to be displayed on the tv for 2 frames (or cycles, or whatever you want to call it). Even though the FPS on a tv is higher, it depends on the FPS of the content you're displaying.
An example would be if in one frame of a 30 FPS source, my hand is on the left side of your screen. My hand moves so quickly to the right so that in the next frame it appears on the right side of the screen. So one frame has my hand at the left, then the very next has my hand at the right. Even if you view it at 100000 FPS (impossible, I know, but stay with me) there would be 50000 frames showing my hand at the left, followed by 50000 frames with my hand at the right. Even though you raise the FPS, there are still no frames that exist with my hand anywhere in between left and right. Unless 60 FPS TVs are able to interpolate between the two, there's just nothing available to show during the 'extra' frame so it stays the same.
When it comes down to it, a movie is still a finite amount of pictures shown in rapid succession (mainly 30 of them per second). Even though a TV can be capable of displaying twice that many in a second, it's not capable of 'making stuff up' to show you every other frame. So I guess I'm trying to say its the content, not the TV that determines the 'smoothness'.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
For you youngsters here: Cinerama was to 35mm movies as HD is to NTSC. It used three synchronized projectors on a deeply-curved screen subtending a 146-degree arc. Everyone who has ever seen it was bowled over by it. It is still shown on rare occasions when fans arrange it. It is universally acknowledged to be better than the later wide-screen processes such as CinemaScope, VistaVision, etc. all of which were pretty much acknowledged to be ways to get something sorta-kinda-not-quite-almost like Cinerama, but on the cheap. Many who have had an opportunity to compare it with present-day IMAX have judged it to be superior, too, although that's trickier. IMAX suffers by having too much height and not enough width; when presented on a flat screen, it's flat, and when presented on a dome screen, it's hopeless washed out by cross-reflection (unlike Cinerama, which was always pitch-black in the shadows). Of course CInerama had those awful panel joints... but I digress. Here's the point:
Cinerama was never more than a footnote, because it was only suited to spectacle, not to storytelling. Only two Cinerama features were made with a conventional storyline: "How the West was Won," and "The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm." The rest were pastiches of spectacle: travelogues, ride-film-like experiences, and so forth.
It bodes very ill for high-definition that most of the "best" films are special-effects sci-fi extravaganzas.
I'm glad to see they have Casablanca on their list, but it's not clear that they're saying the actual experience of watching the movie is any better than on DVD. They seems to like the many extras bundled in. Is Rick more world-weary in high-definition? Is Ilsa lovelier? Do the heartrending scenes rend your heart any more? I haven't seen it... but I doubt it.
I like seeing superheros hurtle through space and things blow up as much as the next guy, but these are not enough to carry an expensive video format.
How, exactly, is high-definition going to help directors evoke emotion and tell a story?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
After all, what good is having a 360 HD drive when you're only going to be watching the stuff at 720p or 1080i anyhow?
Anyone?
Um, because it will still look an order of magnitude better than 480i?