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."

Comments

I know this'll burn karma...

[DarkHelmet]

But what would be even nicer than having a list of nice HD movies, how about a nice guide of HD sets that accept 1080p via composite input or VGA input?

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?

Re:I know this'll burn karma...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.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.

Re:I know this'll burn karma...

[DrXym]

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.

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).

Re:I know this'll burn karma...

[The-Bus]

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.

Re:I know this'll burn karma...

[matt328]

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'.

They all look the same...

[Anonymous Coward]

They all look the same...when you can't watch them at all.

Seriously, please don't buy into HD, unless the DRM madness ends. A few extra pixels are not worth our rights, nor the damage to the open source community.

Re:They all look the same...

[iainl]

VHS only doesn't have DRM because the D stands for Digital, anyway. The Analogue Rights Management of Macrovision is (if anything) worse, because it's actually affecting picture quality, unlike on a DVD or HD-DVD where it's invisible on a working machine.

No matter how high the resolution

[rolfwind]

The Hulk was utterly mediocre. Wouldn't buy it for $4.99, let alone whatever it is high def movies fetch.

Where are the real classics that I would actually want to see in hi-def?

Re:No matter how high the resolution

[iainl]

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.

Re:If that's the best, they're in trouble.

[Mark Maughan]

Batman Begins was arguably the best superhero movie ever.

Hulk was a Shakespearian, father-son conflict, tragedy shot comic book panel style. The only reason people thought it was awful was because they came wanting to see some piece of shit like Fantastic 4 and instead got a more thoughtful, artistic masterpiece. It was a highbrow movie about lowbrow subject matter.

They might be good HD

[clickety6]

But most of these aren't good films.

Sorry, but I'd rather watch a good film with a good plot and good acting on VHS any day over a whizz-bang technical film with crappy pretty-boy/barbie-girl actors and a script written by a committee...

I'll pass on this one

Re:They might be good HD

[the_womble]

You are clearly an eccentric.

What has good plot and good acting got to do with making a good film?

The measure of a good film is how much money is spent on making it: especilly how much is spent on marketing.

What happened to movies?

[hsa]

What happened to movies themselves. I honestly couldn't care less if I get video commentary with my HD movie or not. I watch movies for movies sake. Extras are something I watch if I liked the movie and have extra time to see how it was made. They are worth nothing if the movie sucks.

The worst movies in list are lacking in extra HD content. So what? Couldn't care less. The winning movies have all sorts of cool extra content, but it still doesn't make the movie good. I will never buy World Trade Centre, even if had best extras and good transfer.

Video quality and soundtrack are the only things I care about. Please remove the extras and put these in with higher quality.

HD DVD Advert

[dimer0]

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

Re:If that's the best, they're in trouble.

[EvilIdler]

Not just trashing it, trashing it on a geek site!

Batman Begins is back to the darkness, not quite Burton style, but very far from
Batman & Robin. I'm sure the original poster just got Batman titles confused..
Give him a notice for the record, and pull his geek license next time it happens.

Re:If that's the best, they're in trouble.

[clickclickdrone]

Hulk was a Shakespearian, father-son conflict

I tried to get Hulk via P2P to see if it was as bad as everyone said but it turned out to be a renamed porn movie file with some seriously hot action. I was happy.

Re:If that's the best, they're in trouble.

[Ucklak]

Tell that to the boom stick.