Bluray video bitrates

[Ábudos]

Not sure if this has been discussed before, but I'm quite frankly very disappointed in some of the movies I've come across because they have inexcusably low bitrates, and I haven't a clue as to why they are skimping out so poorly.

Some movies I've come across have a decent video bitrate in the low 30Mb/s and others somewhere in the 20s. That seems fine, but I've seen several with rates closer to 13Mb/s.

Examples I've found: Batman Begins and Harry Potter - Order of the Phoenix. (both Warner Brother, go figure)

Both are about 2 hours 16 minutes, and both have a video stream that's less than 14GB. I almost feel like complaining to the studio and asking for a refund. They boast 6x the resolution and here they have barley if at all doubled the bitrate of a standard DVD. It's my guess that they are skimping out because they think the average person will never notice the lack of quality and will instead be intrigued by the "bonus content". Meanwhile they save money by not having to press a second disk.

Has anyone else noticed this?

[Jay Bee]

I noticed that this site (http://www.blu-raystats.com/Stats/Stats.php) confirms the low bitrate for the movies you mention. Maybe you can at least avoid them by using that site. It only has bitrates for US releases though...

[toytown]

I'm quite frankly very disappointed in some of the movies I've come across because they have inexcusably low bitrates

If you were disappointed in the visual quality of the movie then i could see your point, but you seem to be looking at the bitrate for the movie and using that as some kind of indication of how its going to look.

If you bother to read most reviews you will see that both Batman Begins and Order of the Phoenix have excellent picture quality according to most reviews and on the AVS forum there both given a Gold rating. Ive not seen the Order of the Phoenix myself but can backup the Batman Begins claims.

[nurbs]

Rule of thump for 1080p is that everything above 8 to 10 Mbps will be transparent anyway (for AVC and VC1).

[greath]

These were originally encoded for HD DVD, so I guess that's why they are smaller in size than the films that were encoded for Blu Ray only, where the bitrate budget was probably set higher since the compressionist was being lazy and didn't want to spend time optimising.

This just shows though, since you didn't complain about the picture quality, just the bitrate, that the thresholds given by tyoytown ( 8 - 10MBPs for VC-1 and AVC encodes ) are about right. Why waste space on the disc for something that you won't notice, only to please the PS3 fanboi who watches the bitrate meter rather than thet film as an indication of "quality"............

[Flux]

I'm more pissed about chroma subsampling. Blu-ray has plenty of space but still they are not using full original color resolution but some 4:2:0 compromise. Full would mean 4:4:4 so there is 50% cut.

[um3k]

Actually there is 75% cut.

[Ábudos]

If you were disappointed in the visual quality of the movie then i could see your point, but you seem to be looking at the bitrate for the movie and using that as some kind of indication of how its going to look.

If you bother to read most reviews you will see that both Batman Begins and Order of the Phoenix have excellent picture quality according to most reviews and on the AVS forum there both given a Gold rating. Ive not seen the Order of the Phoenix myself but can backup the Batman Begins claims.

It was the quality of these two videos that made me question the bitrates and go threw all of the disks and check them in the first place. I was very disappointed right away when I put Batman Begins in. I was sure that being s relatively new movie that it would have been encoded very well from a high quality master, but the second I put the disk in I questioned whether or not it was even really HD.

I watch everything on a 24" LCD monitor at 1920x1200 and I have a very keen eye for detail. Maybe you cant tell the difference between anything over 8MBs, but I can spot any 1080p AVC film that's under 20Mb/s, with 13MB/s looking like an up-converted DVD. All of my favorite Blurays have a video stream 25Mb/s and up, and they were my favorite before I went threw and checked. I feel VC-1 can get away a little better with a slightly lower bitrate than AVC, from what my eyes tell me.

I'm more pissed about chroma subsampling. Blu-ray has plenty of space but still they are not using full original color resolution but some 4:2:0 compromise. Full would mean 4:4:4 so there is 50% cut.

um3k, 75% of color information is thrown away, but its an overall 50% reduction in data. You have a Y channel that's 1920x1080 and the Cb and Cr channels are 960x540. This has always been something that's bothered me, especially when it comes to video cameras. DV video cameras have a 720x480 resolution normally, but NTSC cameras use 4:1:1 which gives you color sampled at 180x480, 25% horizontal resolution. Makes things like good chroma keying almost impossible.

I personal would like to see future video codecs and systems use RGB instead of YUV with chroma subsampling.

[nurbs]

I watch everything on a 24" LCD monitor at 1920x1200 and I have a very keen eye for detail. Maybe you cant tell the difference between anything over 8MBs, but I can spot any 1080p AVC film that's under 20Mb/s, with 13MB/s looking like an up-converted DVD. All of my favorite Blurays have a video stream 25Mb/s and up, and they were my favorite before I went threw and checked. I feel VC-1 can get away a little better with a slightly lower bitrate than AVC, from what my eyes tell me.

Unless you have the lossless master those videos where encoded from how can you tell that the encode is not an accurate representation of the source material?

[toytown]

It was the quality of these two videos that made me question the bitrates and go threw all of the disks and check them in the first place. I was very disappointed right away when I put Batman Begins in. I was sure that being s relatively new movie that it would have been encoded very well from a high quality master, but the second I put the disk in I questioned whether or not it was even really HD.

It could be a problem with your setup, again i can only speak for batman begins, but i thought it was an excellent transfer, the best ive ever seen.......no, but a great transfer. Like i mentioned just checking the various review sites and AVSForums PQ tier rating (which i tend to give more credence to than review sites) also gives this a gold rating, which is just below there best.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Well, here's the story with chroma subsampling.

It's not such a big deal when it comes to the actual look of an image.

I bet just about everyone would be hard-pressed to tell any difference between an RGB and a YV12 image (properly converted back to RGB for display, of course)!

Where full color resolution DOES matter is in post production. You want to have lots of resolution to make subtle changes, and not produce artifacts. As long as post-production is done at full resolution (or at least 4:2:2), you can convert to 4:2:0 and not lose much from the viewer's perspective.

Now, about bitrates...


I can spot any 1080p AVC film that's under 20Mb/s, with 13MB/s looking like an up-converted DVD. All of my favorite Blurays have a video stream 25Mb/s and up, and they were my favorite before I went threw and checked.


Nah, you can't :) I understand what you're saying, but you cant just assign numbers to a level of perceived quality like that. Maybe this standard holds true for most BluRay releases, because to be honest the H.264 encoders most studios use aren't that great. That being said, I have _TONS_ of video at ~9mbps that would blow your mind. Seriously. We're talking 95% transparent to a 200mbps RGB MJPG master. x264 is amazing :D

~MISfit

[Sagekilla]

Have you even compared upconverted DVD to a 13 mbps Blu-ray stream? There's a huge difference, in fine detail and level of artifacts. Yes 13 mbps video should look "worse" than 30 mbps, but the reality is the difference is so subtle it's pointless to look for differences, or even say there are any. Even when I encode @ crf 18, I never get more than 8 mbps @ 1080p!


Even better? I have a 720p encode of Superbad (from the blu-ray) that takes up only 1.8 GB. It's ~1800 kbps for the video and 448 kbps for the audio. Plus it looks just as good as the original when I watch it. No blurriness, blocking, ringing, banding, etc.

[Ábudos]

Whatever the case, I am able to see the difference. So many people are quick to dismiss quality of video at low bitrates, but if I was to say there is no point in wasting space with RAW\PCM or TrueHD audio, audiophiles would scramble out of the woodwork to counter that saying it was a clear audible difference.

You can't tell me that you can cut the bitrate in half and not loose anything noticeable, especially at those resolutions. I have no doubts that AVC is a much better codec than from years past, but the fact is that unless the codec employs honest to god magic you do loose picture. Maybe its the subtle noise that gives most film its characteristic, maybe it's those sharper edges. No mater how you look at it the more bandwidth you hack away the less you get. Maybe some people could care less, some people are content with the MPEG-2 quality of DVD, and even worse, some people are content with the quality of digital HD television, but I'm not, and with the surplus of storage available on a BD-ROM I shouldn't have to put up with mediocrity. My whole point was that the movies in question were sub-par when compared to the rest. Why should I have payed full price for less. And I know full well the reason, both of those titles were released on HD-DVD first, and they were just to damn lazy to re-encode a new video for the bluray release which I find down right disturbing.

[Sagekilla]

I never said you wouldn't lose anything from cutting the bitrate. I said the difference is practically negligible. Audio is another thing that I won't even get into, but with video you can see differences. And between a high bitrate of the master, and a lower bitrate \(but\still relatively large) there's going to be very little visible differences.

Also, you need to realize when you encode @ higher resolutions, there's even more redundancy in your video. That's why when you take something like a 4096x2304 source, encode it @ 1920x1080 and then @ 960x540, there won't be a direct doubling of bitrate for the 1080p. Generally it's going to be a less than linear increase in bitrates. Try encoding @ 768x432 and 1536x864 in CRF mode. It's usually not a complete doubling of bitrate.


One other thing: The fact remains Blu-ray is vastly higher quality than just about every DVD out there. Resize the blu-ray to DVD resolutions, and a DVD source will look like crap compared to it. But, what do I care? Do as you please with your money, it's yours anyway. If you think it's not worth $xx, don't buy it. No one is forcing you to.

[Dark Shikari]

One other thing: The fact remains Blu-ray is vastly higher quality than just about every DVD out there.Someone hasn't seen the Cowboy Bebop Movie Blu-ray then, it seems? ;)

[Sagekilla]

Clearly no, and if it's bad then I will be disappointed because I love Cowboy Bebop.


Then again, if your compressionist sucks and uses a low bitrate too, I can imagine the Blu-ray will come out looking like crap.

[*.mp4 guy]

One other thing: The fact remains Blu-ray is vastly higher quality than just about every DVD out there. Resize the blu-ray to DVD resolutions, and a DVD source will look like crap compared to it. But, what do I care? Do as you please with your money, it's yours anyway. If you think it's not worth $xx, don't buy it. No one is forcing you to.

Thats because the studios are retards. This actually counters your argument, if they can screw up an extremly solid, well researched format like dvd, what do you think you can expect of them in a more technically demanding situation.

Many dvds have incredibly poor quality when you consider the bitrate they are encoded at. The same thing happens with blu ray.

Also, crf 18 is not always transparent, it may be sometimes, but it often isn't. Extremely fine detail will always silently die up until you hit some nigh absurd bitrates, what saves this from being an issue is that the majority of sources aren't good enough too contain such detail, this includes blu ray.

[Dark Shikari]

Clearly no, and if it's bad then I will be disappointed because I love Cowboy Bebop.


Then again, if your compressionist sucks and uses a low bitrate too, I can imagine the Blu-ray will come out looking like crap.The Cowboy Bebop Movie was over 40 megabit, I believe. Or something like that.

But it was captured using a jittery camera off a terribly grainy and dirty film master, making it absolutely worse than the original DVD.

[Doom9]

Abudos: Especially Batman Begins is being considered a reference title. Now I believe I know why you think different - the movie looks rather "soft". You're probably one of those people (like me) who prefers a more gritty look (which upon close inspection also means the movie can get away with quite a number of macroblocks which are visible if you go frame by frame).. and AVC is more favorable to that look.
However, just because you don't like the look of a movie, it is ill advised to conclude that the choice of a higher bitrate or a different codec would've made things look better. Maybe better to you because the look is more like what you expect, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is a more accurate representation of the source - and in the end I'm afraid this is what the goal must be - an accurate representation of the uncompressed source, and not a derivation of the source in a way that is most pleasing to your eyes. You can do the latter on your own when ripping and applying filters, but the movie as you purchase it in a store should accurately represent the source and nothing else.

Thus, unless you know what the source looks like, you can only comment on what you think is off.. but making any statement like "using a higher bitrate would've made the movie look better", or "using codec X would've made the movie look better" is pretty pointless unless you can prove this.. and you can only prove it by having access to the source material.

The next time you go watch a movie in the movie theatre, go watch it 2 times in a row.. the first time you watch it normally meaning you pay attention to the story line, and the second time around you look for imperfections in the picture. I've tried to do that in the past and I've noted that every now and then I wanted to say "did they use VC-1 with a low bitrate?".. even though the whole thing is uncompressed. But that goes to show that it is very ill advised to draw any conclusions without having seen the source (or something close to the source.. ). In the end, the look of a particular movie has a lot to do with how the director sees it and there are plenty of films which are filtered to give it a certain look. The choice of film stock and camera also seems to make a difference. Yet when all you get to see is the final Blu-ray disc, you know nothing at all of any of that - so how are you supposed to be able to tell what the movie should look like? How do you know that what you have isn't what you could get out of the master because the movie is soft overall? How do you know that the codec has not been maxed out and that pumping up the bitrate would only lead to padding with no visual benefit?

[Sagittaire]

The Cowboy Bebop Movie was over 40 megabit, I believe. Or something like that.

But it was captured using a jittery camera off a terribly grainy and dirty film master, making it absolutely worse than the original DVD.

Well here is the most important part for good encoding: Pre-process. You can produce with 40 Mbps poor percepual visual quality and the same movie with advanced pre-process at 15 Mbps will produce very better visual quality.

More generaly bitrate and quality are not directly dependant. You can make encoding at overall quant 10 with 10 Mbps and encoding at overall quant 30 with 30 Mbps.

Actually the most complex source are movie with fine grain. If you encode directly these source without pre-process you can obtain overall quant 30 with 30 Mbps. If you use pre-process (degrain-regrain, reduce spatial /temporal complexity of grain) you can obtain overall quant 20 with 20 Mbps and really better final quality with better grain retention ... with less bitrate.

[Ábudos]

Hmm, well I'm willing to rethink this whole bitrate thing. I still wouldn't mind a bit higher bitrate than 13Mb/s coming from a Bluray though. I'd settle at least for an even 20 and not complain.

I guess the real delima, and I'm thinking more will agree with me, is the overall quality of the encoding for bluray movies is lacking. They should really be using better encoders with better setting and taking the overall quality more serious, but it seems that a lot of them don't really care. A movie is a movie to them, as long as people are willing to buy it they don't need the satisfaction of quality work.

This isn't true for all of them. There are a few movies I have that I am very impressed with, but still others that I am less than pleased with.

[nurbs]

All in all I'm satisfied with the quality of my blu-ray disks, but most of them are very recent movies and shows and I don't own any of the early releases. I read a lot of those were pretty bad quality. They seem to be getting better at the authoring, but there is probably still room for improvement and blu-ray got enough space to support high bitrate encodes. If they replaced the stupid pcm tracks with lossless encodes that alone would allow them to use a couple of Mbps more for the video. As long as major fuckups like the "Traffic" HDDVD (and I'm sure there are also some blu-rays as bad as this disc too) don't happen any more I think I'll be content with the quality.

[Sagekilla]

The Cowboy Bebop Movie was over 40 megabit, I believe. Or something like that.

But it was captured using a jittery camera off a terribly grainy and dirty film master, making it absolutely worse than the original DVD.

That actually makes a good argument for why high bitrates don't mean high quality (or that low bitrates mean low quality). If they do a horrible job of transferring it in the first place (using dirty source and jittery camera) then even an absurd amount of bitrate won't make up for the fact that they screwed up the transfer process to begin with. OTOH, with good transfers you won't have to use absurd bitrates. 40 mbps will do just as well as 20 or 30.

[badassdjbynight]

Rule of thump for 1080p is that everything above 8 to 10 Mbps will be transparent anyway (for AVC and VC1).

I completely disagree and I author DVDs and Blu-ray discs. I did tests on my last title at AVC and VC1 at various bit rates. All this coming from an 8-bit uncompressed HD source. The VC1 looked much better than the AVC and anything lower than 25 Mbps contained more noise and even some blocking.

So it totally depends on your source. But you can't say that anything above 8 to 10 is transparent.

[poisondeathray]

The VC1 looked much better than the AVC and anything lower than 25 Mbps contained more noise and even some blocking.

So it totally depends on your source. But you can't say that anything above 8 to 10 is transparent.

Interesting.

I agree that it would depend on the source, but my observations were just about the opposite regarding VC1 and AVC. (They look similar at higher bitrates, but at lower bitrates, AVC looks clearly better to me)

Can you post some examples?

[Dark Shikari]

I completely disagree and I author DVDs and Blu-ray discs. I did tests on my last title at AVC and VC1 at various bit rates. All this coming from an 8-bit uncompressed HD source. The VC1 looked much better than the AVC and anything lower than 25 Mbps contained more noise and even some blocking.

So it totally depends on your source. But you can't say that anything above 8 to 10 is transparent.Saying "I tested AVC" is like saying "I drive a car" when asked about your wheels. There are AVC encoders out there that are worse than some MPEG-2 encoders, let alone VC-1.

[CruNcher]

yeah sad but true it takes time before a Professional Encoder gets updated especially if the company behind it doesn't actually have anything todo with the main technology, but just creates a product out of it :)
There are only a handful off really good Video Algorithm implementers (especially PSY related) in the World that doing their own R&D, the rest is just using their SDK's most of the times :D :)
So it shouldn't be really a surprise that Microsoft can react much faster and supply the support and updates in no time for their Pro Solutions out of 1 Hand, though there are also the Solutions from the actual Patent Holders of the Technologies themselves (Microsotfs of course is also such a solution) but you rarely here anything about those like solutions from Panasonic , Phillips, Sony, Thomson...) :)
It's not quiet like the Consumer market that is overcrowded with ffmpeg based solutions :D (i counted 2 new products already this month again, but who knows how much really appear per month Worldwide) they popping out as fast as when you put some maize corn into the popcorn maker ;)

[nurbs]

I completely disagree and I author DVDs and Blu-ray discs. I did tests on my last title at AVC and VC1 at various bit rates. All this coming from an 8-bit uncompressed HD source. The VC1 looked much better than the AVC and anything lower than 25 Mbps contained more noise and even some blocking.

So it totally depends on your source. But you can't say that anything above 8 to 10 is transparent.

OK. I should have qualified a bit more what I meant by rule of thump. I meant for encoding the "average" movie, not something like Natural Born Killers where you have loads of grain to worry about, when the person encoding understands his job (i.e. uses proper preprocessing) and has the right tools (high quality encoder) a 1080p movie with ~10Mbps should look good and there shouldn't be any apparent artifacts when you see it in motion. If you have a complex source or bad encoding software you will need more bitrate. If the guy doesn't understand his job then all the bitrate in the world won't help you. My prime example for that is the UK realese of Carnivale Season 2. I don't author DVDs, but if you gave me a couple of days I could probably produce something better than this field combed (I'm not sure if that's the right term) piece of crap.

Also like other people have said in my experience the lower the bitrate the worse VC1 looks compared to AVC. At sufficiently high bitrates they become indistinguishable. I did my testing with x264 and the microsoft vc1 encoder. Results for encoders used in professional authoring may of course be different depending on the quality of the encoder used.

edit:
I see that transparent wasn't the right word. English is not my first language so sometimes I use wrong words and I also avoid typing long texts which adds to the confusion.

[CruNcher]

once i just did some basic tests and i estimated a perfect preserved grain layer needs around 3 mbit of additional space (50% of the main bitrate) so if you think 6 mbit 1080p + 3 mbit grain = 9 mbit :) (but that would be a very good tuned encoder result like X264 and from a already compressed grain layer (H.264) ) for 720p it was around 3 mbit + 1,5 mbit = 4,5-5 mbit with Casino Royales Grain layer i even made some faint results using 3 mbit but then thinks as b-rdo and psy become essential and more encoding time is definitely needed (more compression efficiency, better grain preservation between i and p frames), but i really would like to know how much bitrate a uncompressed grain layer needs approximately of the main bitrate from the 500 mbit source :)
VC-1 has more the look @ feel of ASP and if you are a good encoder you can make it very sharp @ a bitrate where H.264 would still look (without tuneing very blurry), though Microsofts Encoder is so slow that i would rather invest time in fine tuning a good H.264 encoder for this instead of using VC-1 and then you can get very good results vs VC-1 from the look @ feel and with lower bitrates and without hitting the artifact edge (that you reach with VC-1 much faster) so fast :)

PS: You can also reach that Subjective Sharpness of VC-1 with DivX and XviD of course though you shouldn't use H263 as quantization matrix then and Qpel is essential though Qpel is sometimes to hard on edges especially @ to low bitrates it can get messy with ASP then, but it makes also no real sense trying to invest time here as you cant change it's inefficiencies and it's better to go the H.264 route, with all it's compression efficiency improvements and tune it for that Scenario.
Psy though is essential here or turning of inloop completely or at least lower it but it also depends on the H.264 Encoder ( i sometimes have the feeling, they are all differently tuned in terms of visual deblocking behavior) and try to give more balance into encoding time to higher the compression efficiency and to avoid blocking that is normally avoided by the inloop deblocker, as we know when it comes into action it's to late and detail lose unavoidable, so the main Goal should be to avoid a to hard acting inloop deblocking wherever visually possible :)

Also this always let me believe that the main Goal of Microsoft was to make Hollywood happy with the Visual results of Film Sources they must have invested a long time fine tuning that Scenario which @ that time was HD-DVD, though you can also clearly see @ low bitrates this tuning is catastrophic just look @ the weak inloop effect from it, but @ high bitrates it becomes beneficial :)

[Sagittaire]

I completely disagree and I author DVDs and Blu-ray discs. I did tests on my last title at AVC and VC1 at various bit rates. All this coming from an 8-bit uncompressed HD source. The VC1 looked much better than the AVC and anything lower than 25 Mbps contained more noise and even some blocking.

So it totally depends on your source. But you can't say that anything above 8 to 10 is transparent.

Well you certainely don't know very well all the available encoder.

[Morte66]

Well, here's the story with chroma subsampling.

It's not such a big deal when it comes to the actual look of an image.

I bet just about everyone would be hard-pressed to tell any difference between an RGB and a YV12 image (properly converted back to RGB for display, of course)!

I'd agree for a film scan with grain, but on a clean (or denoised) source I find that banding is very obvious in 4:2:0 material in smooth shadow gradients (e.g. an unevenly lit wall). It's a real problem for me watching denoised HD rips, that interferes with my enjoyment of the film. I use FFDShow's DeBand to dither over it with some success.

Some time ago I experimented with the SVT film samples which are available as RGB scans with >8 bit depth, denoising them with tools for stills photography and then converting to 8 bit 4:2:0. They suffered less banding before the conversion. It didn't matter much with the grain to mask the banding, but the original format looked quite a lot better on denoised material. Alarmingly, the 4:2:0 conversion lost some crispness too -- to my photographer's eyes, it was rather like going from a true RGB scanning sensor to a Bayer pattern, but not quite as bad. I wish I'd kept all the pictures to post examples...

Of course, everybody sees stuff differently and I'm probably hypersensitive to flat areas after years of tackling x264 blocking on denoised DVD encodes. :) But still, the issue is there and I think it may become more important in future if (a) more films are shot on low noise digital cameras and (b) consumer display contrast continues to increase to make banding more obvious.

[This is why whenever we have a thread about future digital formats I say I want more bit depth and less colour subsampling before we get more pixel count -- 1080p is fine at any distance I'm likely to sit, provided you truly get 1080p of signal and don't lose it in noise/grain or colour approximation.]

[CruNcher]

yep 10 bit need to get Consumer standard i fully agree Morte66 though it will still take some time before this becomes reallity

[Mug Funky]

All this coming from an 8-bit uncompressed HD source

what format is this? i thought all the HD mastering formats were compressed? and all the uncompressed formats were 10-bit (like dpx sequences).

if we're talking 8-bit we're talking HDCAM, which is in no way uncompressed, and in fact not even twice the bandwidth of digital betacam (which encodes 1/4 the pixels). also, it's not true HD in that internally it is 1440x1080 at 3:1:1 sampling. (3 luma for every choma).

but i agree that some of the bitrates quoted here for "transparency" are very inadequate for most real-world sources. i dread the idea that a film could be abused by noise reduction to the point where 12mbps is enough for it, considering the current state of hardware noise reducers at present (which are not really up to the standard avisynth presents, albeit in 8 bit only).

[edit]

@ Morte66: digital film cameras still have a long loooong way to go. currently if you were to expose on one and capture as much dynamic range as could be captured on current film stocks (by underexposing the digital camera), you would be overwhelmed by the noise floor. grainless looks in digital movies have been achieved by very clever cinematographers lowering their lighting ratios while maintaining "film-like" contrast in other ways. the new Sony F35 looks promising but applies too much sharpness (i wonder how it would affect noise if sharpness were disabled?), and the RED is very good but suffers wavelet crud in the blacks where both the detail and the noise usually sit.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Fascinating insights, Mug Funky!

As to badassdjbynight's source, it could very well be a simple capture off HD-SDI, straight from a camera right? I worked on a shoot where we did 8 bit 4:2:2 1080p uncompressed.

Also interesting comments about the RED. I hadn't noticed much in the way of shadow problems, aside from usual sensor noise, but I've scarcely spent much time with RED sources. I knew their proprietary RAW wavelet codec was a little too good to be true... Have you noticed similar issues with CineForm, ProRes, or DNxHD?

~MiSfit

[movmasty]

Not sure if this has been discussed before, but I'm quite frankly very disappointed in some of the movies I've come across because they have inexcusably low bitrates, and I haven't a clue as to why they are skimping out so poorly.

Some movies I've come across have a decent video bitrate in the low 30Mb/s and others somewhere in the 20s. That seems fine, but I've seen several with rates closer to 13Mb/s.

Examples I've found: Batman Begins and Harry Potter - Order of the Phoenix. (both Warner Brother, go figure)

Both are about 2 hours 16 minutes, and both have a video stream that's less than 14GB. I almost feel like complaining to the studio and asking for a refund. They boast 6x the resolution and here they have barley if at all doubled the bitrate of a standard DVD. It's my guess that they are skimping out because they think the average person will never notice the lack of quality and will instead be intrigued by the "bonus content". Meanwhile they save money by not having to press a second disk.

Has anyone else noticed this?
Well, 6x res doesnt mean 6x in size, as the size increases does compression too,
substantially is always the same image to encode, and compression is smart in this,
this doesnt mean that bigger res need same bytes, but i found that a good approx would be the square root of the increased res.
and since Hres is 5x, the root is 2,236, pretty close to 2 :)

Then both batman and potter are movies with a good compression ratio.

About the colour space, it is related to luma definition, and to get same quality in luma and croma we know that croma can be subsampled,
else you will waste bytes for a given luma res,
and still think to the broadcast specs...

A movie must have the right bitrate, not more, easier to rip, easier to play ecc...