Two movies released with a HD WM9 DVD

[The Belgain]

Two titles are being released as a two disc set with one standard DVD disc, and one featuring high res WM9.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9270

Does anyone know what kind of res this is? It certainly sounds interesting as a development. It would be nice to see how much better this looks. Also, it would be nice to see this on more recent film (LOTR, Matrix Reloaded,...?). It says in the article that the res is substantially below HDTV...could this be roughly the same kind of res as some of the newer Quicktime trailers (1000x...)?

[trbarry]

"Does anyone know what kind of res this is?"

The Standing in the Shadows of Motown disc is 1024x576. I have this and it looks pretty good considering some of the source material is older.

The T2 disc is supposed to be 1440x816, horizontally anamorphic. I'm looking forward to this one.

- Tom

[The Belgain]

Is it likely there will be a lot of such releases before a new standard officially emerges (maybe some using an MPEG4 codec rather than WM9)?

Out of interest, is the audio 5.1 wma, or have they taken advantage of being able to use 7.1 wma?

[Atamido]

Has anyone seen a 7.1 DVD? I could have sworn that I spotted a 6.1 DVD, but I can no longer track it down.

[The Belgain]

Are there any other films at all that have been released in HD (not including trailers that is)? Will T2 be likely to be very good quality given that its a fairly old recording?

[Atamido]

Even an old recording like T2 has more information on the film than is conveyed with the standard DVD resolution. I think that the reason StarWars 2 was the first movied filmed in complete digital is two fold:

1. The equipment is hella expensive.

2. Up until recently, digital cameras didn't approach the resolution provided by film. And if I remember correctly (someone correct me if I'm wrong), the video feed is split into 4 seperate streams, and those 4 streams are encoded sperately because of the amount of data that has to be dealt with.

So, if the digital cameras are just now approaching/surpassing the resolution provided by film, then it would make sense that scanning and recording film in HD would produce a better picture.

[morsa]

I think I didn't understand your last post very well but:

-35mm film has far higher image resolution than any video camera up today.The fact is that the image you see projected at theatres can get very degradated depending on the projector used,etc.
Best 35mm film negative resolution can be set around 320 dots per horizontal millimeter and a normal frame has around 24mm width, so that gives 7680 dots per line.

-You are correct the stream is splitted into four (Sony HD-Cam which really has a resolution of 1440x1080, not the proclaimed 1920x1080).

-Even if you were seeing a movie from the 60's it would has a lot of definition to be transferred with great quality to HighDef.

[OUTPinged_]

@morsa:

Also the 7680x resolution you mentioned is achievable only for top quality 35mm film, which wouldnt be true for 99% of movies out there.

Modern film scanners can get a pretty stable results with 3840x resolution though. Downscaling it to 1920x will be no big deal.

[The Belgain]

By the way, there's a thread reviewing the T2 release in the avsforums here:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=262553

[trbarry]

Film may have higher theoretical resolution than HDTV but it rarely seems to make it all the way through the telecine, encoding, and transmission process to our sets for some reason. It's becoming pretty commonly accepted that live HDTV video has more detail than almost any HDTV film based movies.

- Tom

edit: BTW, Microsoft just released 2 more HDTV samples in WM9, the Coral Reef Adventure in both 720p and 1080p. See the Microsoft sample page (http://windowsmedia.com/9series/DemoCenter/VideoQuality.asp?page=6&lookup=VideoQuality). These are pretty good.

[The Belgain]

For some reason "Confidence Trailer" and "A Foreign Affair" seem to play fine on my machine, but "Step Into Liquid" (both versions) and this new one (the 720p one...haven't even bothered trying the other one) don't.

Apparently this is because the Liquid clip is VBR rather than CBR so high bitrate peaks, which don't like my CPU :(

However the Coral clip is CBR. Any particular reason why it seems to be more CPU hungry.

I have an XP2000+ running at 10*166 by the way.

[trbarry]

No idea. You would think it would be easier than Foriegn Affair since it is a lower bit rate.

- Tom

[sh0dan]

@The Belgain: I looked at two of those clips - and while I was disappointed with "Condidence" (I could reach within 10% of the size using XviD Quant2), the "Step into Liquid" was really amazing compressionwise.
Almost no quantblocks or visible patterns in very noisy scenes, and very good compression. Probably the best water scene compression I have seen. I'd still go for cleaning the clip up a bit, and adding noise after decompression - but technically it was really amazing. I only wish they weren't looking so much down on users, and don't let people select postprocessing, then WMV (VCM version) would be really interesting!

[Wilbert]

@Pamel,
Has anyone seen a 7.1 DVD? I could have sworn that I spotted a 6.1 DVD, but I can no longer track it down.
Last weekend I watched A.I., this one is dolby digital EX. According to this page (http://hypercubemx.free.fr/html/the_audio_formats_jungle.html), it is stored as 5.1, but has 7 channels after decoding. Don't know what to do with that extra channel though.