Question about new HD DVD technology...

[drvs]

Hi all,

I apologize if this is not the most appropriate place to ask this question, but i figured this is a good place to start.

Concerning the upcoming HD DVDs, when these are made, are they forced to upconvert existing film to make them HD. In other words, i thought that HD quality required special cameras. Is normal film quality good enough at its source to be true HD, or are the just converting?

I understand that HD titles will be displaying more pixels of the picture than SD, but are these "real" pixels from the original?

[Doobie]

Film quality is much better than DVD/SD quality. So, they'd make the HD video from the original film, not from DVDs (I'm sure there will be some crap HD video that uses DVD video as a source). The best quality HD video will come from HD digital movie cameras, which is the future.

The movie makers aren't going from film to digital cameras to improve video quality. They're doing this to cut costs.

[foxyshadis]

Something that will get increasingly obvious as HD plows ahead is that film grain goes from a pixel or two to 4-12, which can be very noticeable and harder to process away. Films that already have heavy grain will look like older b&w films do on dvd today.

[Didée]

Something that will get increasingly obvious as HD plows ahead is that film grain goes from a pixel or two to 4-12, which can be very noticeable and harder to process away.
Yep, that's gonna be a great problem for the filtering camp indeed. Where, say, a 3x3 median filter has good grip to film grain on SD frame sizes, on HD frame sizes it will grip nothing but empty air.
Luckily, with the promised unbelievable quality of HD releases, there'll be no need for filtering. They all will be just perfect. :D

[siddharthagandhi]

Yea, I was wondering about that. I'm like, back then when they filmed the movie they probably didn't film it in HD, so how could they make it into an HDDVD..

[adam]

Most films are shot in 35mm which has an effective resolution many times greater than HD. The same is true even for 16mm so even old films have the potential to look great in HD. It all comes down to the quality of the master and the transfer.

[smok3]

yep, quick google would reveal:
"a 4K scan of 35mm Academy-aperture color neg is 4096 x 3072, requiring about 52Mb of storage at 12-bits. 65mm 5-perf is 6000 x 2500."

[Soulhunter]

http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/463/e83d5pink59ad.th.jpg (http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/463/e83d5pink59ad.jpg) http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/9364/97ac1underw38dk.th.jpg (http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/9364/97ac1underw38dk.jpg) http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/3199/aultraviolet610tc.th.jpg (http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/3199/aultraviolet610tc.jpg)

And now imagine they wouldnt be compressed to LQ JPEGs... ^^


Bye

[SeeMoreDigital]

And now imagine they wouldnt be compressed to LQ JPEGs... ^^Hi mate,

May I ask where you found these images? As I've been trying to find something similar but showing the film perforations too!


Cheers

[Soulhunter]

Most of this stuff is promo material released by the studios...

Never seen a non cropped scan so far, but if I find one, I gonna send ya a PM!


Bye

[SeeMoreDigital]

Never seen a non cropped scan so far, but if I find one, I gonna send ya a PM!Thanks....

I'll ask around and see if I can get my hands on some "cutting room floor" bits of film also ;)

[niknik]

But keep in mind, many (most?) movies, even in "high quality" film, don't have that "clean" digital look most will expect from HD.

Low light scenes, slight "out-of-focus", etc. All that are highly noticeable on HD.
That can be easily seen by comparing a it to an animation movie in HD (perferably a CG movie). It really has an amazing picture.

Not to say there aren't nice HD transfers, indeed there are. And getting HD into the mainstream will hopefuly force producers to make even better content.

[Soulhunter]

Thanks....

I'll ask around and see if I can get my hands on some "cutting room floor" bits of film also ;)

Just stumbled over this...

- 4k film scan (http://www.cintel.co.uk/technology/images/lock_house_4k_full_image.jpg)
- 2k film scan (http://www.cintel.co.uk/technology/images/lock_house_2k_full_image.jpg)
- 35mm frame (http://img293.imageshack.us/img293/363/35mmareas5hi.gif)


Bye

[lexor]

Just stumbled over this...

- 4k film scan (http://www.cintel.co.uk/technology/images/lock_house_4k_full_image.jpg)
- 2k film scan (http://www.cintel.co.uk/technology/images/lock_house_2k_full_image.jpg)
- 35mm frame (http://img293.imageshack.us/img293/363/35mmareas5hi.gif)


Bye

those need filtering. bad.

[Shinigami-Sama]

thats what I was thinking, granted, they are jpegs..

[toytown]

those need filtering. bad.

Actually they need to be re-scanned. At a previous company i used to work for, we used to scan 35mm film into 16base resolution (3kx2k) and the image would only normally look that bad on the older type of scanners we had.

Our maximum resolution we could handle was 64 base (6kx4k) and if scanned properly with a compent operator, gave outstanding results.

[Soulhunter]

FFT3D -> LimitedSharpen -> 2 step downsizing -> level + color correction and you're done... ^^


Bye

[toytown]

FFT3D -> LimitedSharpen -> 2 step downsizing -> level + color correction and you're done... ^^

Try doing that for every single frame of the movie, keeping all the color corrections uniform across each scene, then compare it with the frames that have been re-scanned. I would consider the above a botch job fix. Seriously if you were trying to achieve the very best quality for a HD transfer then a rescan would be the best step.

[Backwoods]

The newer machines probably do some post-processing of the image before it's saved. I'm pretty sure an unfiltered frame of 35mm should look like that.

[Soulhunter]

Fine, as long they dont use some crappy temp denoising... (http://forum.doom9.org/showpost.php?p=798228&postcount=42) :rolleyes: ;)


Bye

[*.mp4 guy]

Just for comparison heres (http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/4926/dsc00622lu.jpg) a shot from a high quality digital camera. keep in mind that It had to be recompressed. [edit] Here (http://img142.imageshack.us/img142/2466/dsc0062postprocessed3qq.jpg) it is processed to look similar to television.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Nice.... Good to see the camera shoots at 1.5:1 - just like 35mm film.

How many MB was the source "snap"?

[*.mp4 guy]

1.58mb, also it wasn't processed at all.

[SeeMoreDigital]

1.58mb, also it wasn't processed at all.Could you e-mail it to SeeMoreDigital@msn.com please?


Cheers

[Soulhunter]

The beauty of digital hi-res... ^^ I also have some 5-15MPix pics (mainly paparazzi stuff and magazine photoshoots, lol) but unfortunately they are all JPEG compressed (tho some are 30MB huge). Someone knows where to get non-compressed content? EDIT: Besides the 40MPix PNGs from the NASA page... ;D


Bye

[Backwoods]

http://www.cleanandquiet.com/upload/store/uncompressed.zip

RAW picture from a Nikon D50.

[*.mp4 guy]

In order to open NEF files (Special 9.4bit tiffs) you need this (http://support.nikontech.com/cgi-bin/nikonusa.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=13760&p_created=1131989543&p_sid=CODDDY4i&p_accessibility=0&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPSZwX3NvcnRfYnk9JnBfZ3JpZHNvcnQ9JnBfcm93X2NudD0yMiZwX3Byb2RzPTQyLDQ0JnBfY2F0cz0xODUmcF9wdj0yLjQ0JnBfY3Y9MS4xODUmcF9zZWFyY2hfdHlwZT1hbnN3ZXJzLnNlYXJjaF9ubCZwX3BhZ2U9MQ**&p_li=&p_topview=1) program from nikon.

[Soulhunter]

Thanks... ^^

Btw, I was able to open the file in IrfanView, no need for 37MB Nikon software!


Bye

[*.mp4 guy]

Thanks... ^^

Btw, I was able to open the file in IrfanView, no need for 37MB Nikon software!


Bye
Heh, I assumed since the GIMP couldn't open the NEF's I have that it was some sort of proprietary format. ;)

[Soulhunter]

Could be, coz its surprisingly small... ^^

Recompressing to PNG or TIF via IrfanView nearly doubles the filesize!

EDIT: Probably coz IrfanView decodes and saves it in 24bit RGB and not 12bit, heh!?


Bye

[Backwoods]

Or the free RAW Camera plugin for Photoshop (which is obviously not free).