Quote:
Originally posted by Doom9
Well.. having a WMV9 source sure would itch me.. I'd consider that an unfair beginning.. I'd expect the source to be available in a format that is not one of the codecs to be tested. A high bitrate MPEG-2 HDTV broadcast seems the most suitable source imho.
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Agreed. Unfortunately, Euro1080 our European HD broadcaster, no longer transmits such images 'in the clear' (a case of real bad timing). So I am looking into the prospect of purchasing the necessary PCI card and card reader. The good news is, Euro1080 is available to anybody throughout Europe with none of the usual 'out of country' licensing restrictions.
Quote:
Originally posted by Doom9
That is not quite correct. In fact, most studios today make one high def digital master of a movie (unfortunately I don't recall the resolution and actual format.. but it's at least as good as what you can get via HDTV). From that, they make the HDTV broadcast, DVD and DVB broadcast. It is all the same source. So, DVD is a resized and recompressed version of the original digital master. Taking the HDTV version would get us much closer to the actual source.
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Agreed again. Even in my old telecine days, the equipment I had access to, in order to create analog tape transfers (from film), were capable of producing higher quality images than any of the
early DVD's I own.
However, there's no denying that DVD has taken off faster than anybody in the industry could ever have hoped for. And as a result the new transfer equipment and techniques used to transfer the film image to DVD have improved too. I guess one of the main reasons why todays DVD images look so good is because the production of the DVD is planned at the same time as the film. Also having direct access to the original film (instead of the copies) is the biggest plus of all!
Owners of the T2 Extreme DVD will get an insight of how 'film to digital' transfer techniques have changed after reading the sleeve notes. In fact the newly created digitised master (which at 24fps equals film speed) contains so much detail and resolution that only a very small percentage is carried over to the Mpeg2 DVD... To underline what I'm talking about, here's a direct quote from the sleeve notes.. "Because the video compression for DVD strips away nearly 98% of the original bits used on the uncompressed DVD master, THX reviews every shot to verify that the compression matches the source as closely as posible..."
98% eh, I don't think we'll be downloading this source master for our lossy tests then!
Cheers