x264 vs other H.264 encoders.

[Chengbin]

Why would interlace video be harder to decode?

Why would you encode interlace anyway?

[benwaggoner]

Why would interlace video be harder to decode?
First, it's 30 fps instead of 24 fps.

Second, there's an overhead in dealing with MBAFF and all that, and then recostructing 60p video out of it for display

Why would you encode interlace anyway?
If the source is 1080i.

So far, most 1080i Blu-ray has been concert videos or nature programming. Hopefully they'll move to 720p60 production or 1080p60. In the flat-screen era, 720p60 has as much better chance of a high quality presentation than 1080i30.

[Chengbin]

If the source is 1080i.

So far, most 1080i Blu-ray has been concert videos or nature programming. Hopefully they'll move to 720p60 production or 1080p60. In the flat-screen era, 720p60 has as much better chance of a high quality presentation than 1080i30.

What I mean was, why would the videos be interlaced? Does interlace offer any advantage of some sort?

[benwaggoner]

What I mean was, why would the videos be interlaced? Does interlace offer any advantage of some sort?
No, interlaced has no practical utility in the modern era, since all our displays and imagers are progressive. Anything shot in 1080i would be better in 1080p24/30 or 720p60.

Interlaced is the new standard def; it's anti-future proofing your content.

It's just a matter of a half-century of industry momentum being hard to reverse. Sony in particular has been fighting for years to keep interlaced alive, presumbably because they feel they have a differential advantage in doing it well.

Tragically, the big reason that we have interlaced in HD at all is because the TV and Broadcast comapnies thought that real-time deinterlacing would be too hard for the PC industry to do, and would keep PC/TV convergence from eating their lunch.

Fast forward to today, and PCs have better deinterlacing than most TVs!


My book has a sidebar threating public shame to any reader discovered creating any new interlaced content :).

[*.mp4 guy]

This is relevant (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=144068&page=1). Also, I generally agree with Dark Shikari.

[shon3i]

30%? That's far, far too low. MPEG-4 pt 2 ASP was perhaps only 30% better than MPEG-2, but even VC-1 can outperform MPEG-2 by 2x or more for movie content at moderate bitrates.

Are you nuts? Even in PSNR, I've seen x264 beat Xvid by over 100% at medium bitrates. And surely you wouldn't say MPEG-2 is better than Xvid.

Heck, MPEG-4 ASP's entropy coding advantage over MPEG-2 alone might even more than 30%.

Sorry guys my mistake :), i totally mix things

Blu-ray also lacks a high fidelity manadatory audio codec, so a lot of discs get AC-3 640 Kbps + PCM, which eats up a lot of capacity.Agree, well DD + was a good way to send the DTS into past. But someone probably pay for that :D

[benwaggoner]

Agree, well DD + was a good way to send the DTS into past. But someone probably pay for that :D
Well, DTS is mandatory in Blu-ray (it has to at least decode it to stereo analog output), so it's now feasible to do DTS-only discs, which wasn't true with DVD. So if anything it's slightly better for them on a standards level. DD+ isn't mandatory, however, and the Blu-ray implementation is this lame enhancement layer model that only is useful for adding two channels to a AC-3 5.1 to make 7.1. And TrueHD on Blu-ray is just a AC-3 stream and a lossless stream muxed together.

BD does support AC-3 up to 640 Kbps, which is a nice improvement over DVD's 448 Kbps max, particularly for music-centric content. It helps the hi-hats; high frequency random percussion have always been the biggest challenge for DCT-based audio codecs.

I miss HD DVD, which was better designed in so many ways. Mandatory DD+ and TrueHD, so you could have a single 1.5 Mbps DD+ audio track for 20-bit output.

[tetsuo55]

What are your opinions on superbit DVD's?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superbit

If i understand Dark Shikari correctly, assuming good source sime of these should rival the average bluray.

[Fr4nz]

Well, DTS is mandatory in Blu-ray (it has to at least decode it to stereo analog output), so it's now feasible to do DTS-only discs, which wasn't true with DVD. So if anything it's slightly better for them on a standards level. DD+ isn't mandatory, however, and the Blu-ray implementation is this lame enhancement layer model that only is useful for adding two channels to a AC-3 5.1 to make 7.1. And TrueHD on Blu-ray is just a AC-3 stream and a lossless stream muxed together.

BD does support AC-3 up to 640 Kbps, which is a nice improvement over DVD's 448 Kbps max, particularly for music-centric content. It helps the hi-hats; high frequency random percussion have always been the biggest challenge for DCT-based audio codecs.

I miss HD DVD, which was better designed in so many ways. Mandatory DD+ and TrueHD, so you could have a single 1.5 Mbps DD+ audio track for 20-bit output.

Ben, speaking of opensource AC3 encoders, did you ever try Aften? What do you think about that? Is it a good encoder?

[Dark Shikari]

What are your opinions on superbit DVD's?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superbit

If i understand Dark Shikari correctly, assuming good source sime of these should rival the average bluray.Why would they? Going from 4 megabit to 6 megabit doesn't magically make them have 720p-1080p of detail.

[tetsuo55]

Why would they? Going from 4 megabit to 6 megabit doesn't magically make them have 720p-1080p of detail.

You said this:


Blu-rays are generally crap. In my experience the majority either have way too low a video bitrate (in which case the 1080ps have hardly even 720p of detail) or a terrible source (in which case they're often no better than SD).

You must have meant something different from what i read:

Good source, high quality DVD can rival a bad source bad quality Blu-ray

[Dark Shikari]

You must have meant something different from what i read:

Good source, high quality DVD can rival a bad source bad quality Blu-rayIn theory, but usually if the Blu-ray's source is bad, the DVD's source is no better.

[benwaggoner]

What are your opinions on superbit DVD's?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superbit#Superbit_Deluxe_.282-Disc.29
Marketecture for the most part. A 2-disc set is barely more expensive in total costs than a single-disc, so if extras had any impact on video quality, you'd should just punt them to a second disc. Having a brand for high-quality compression leaves me asking what's up with their other discs.

The primary limit for DVD qualty is PBR, not ABR in most cases. And the SuperBit discs were AC-3 + DTS, using a lot of bits that way, and extra audio is right off the top of PBR as well as ABR.

Other than for concert videos, I've never found that DTS's minor-at-best quality improvement was worth the impact on video quality for DVD. That said, I'm more of a video guy than an audio guy :). DTS's 1.5 Mbps mode is pretty impressive, but DVDs almost always used the half-rate mode due to space reasons.

So if I was going to use DTS on DVD, I'd only both to use it at 1.5, with content where the audio merited it and the video could afford it. Fingers crossed for 24p, not 30i :). Unfortunately there's a lot of bad-looking concert DVDs shot 30i with lots of strobes etcetera. Makes for a good DCT and quantization tutorial...

[benwaggoner]

In theory, but usually if the Blu-ray's source is bad, the DVD's source is no better.
Well, there's a couple of things going on there.

If we consider grain "noise" the SNR of film goes down as the frame size goes up, as frequency detail is increasingly dominated by grain. So simply scaling down from 1080p to 480p (that's 1/6th the pixels) averages out that grain and so results in a better SNR all by itself.

We wouldn't expect a given 16x16 block of SD to look like a 16x16 block of HD. I think its that expectation that's driving a lot of this degraining/sharpening trend.

But, depending on your expectations, the HD master can look a lot "worse" than a SD downconverted version of it, even without any image processing, and even with both being as accurate to the source as possible.

So we can definitely have cases where a BD doesn't appear to be that much more detailed than the DVD of the same content, and it just reflecting that the source was soft and grainy, not any defect in preprocessing or compression.

This is going to be more true as we get into older, indie, and particuarly 16mm shot content. Something like the 40 Year Old Virgin wasn't a tentpole big-budget studio film when they were making it, although it turned out to be quite popular. I doubt it got a digital intermediate or a lot of CGI VFX, certainly. So the interpositive was probably pretty grainy and without the kind of detail we're going to see in a Transformers 2 or whatever.

I haven't seen that disc, so it's perfectly plausible that they messed it up further trying to make it not like that. But there's no way that it was going to turn out like a film with a $40M post budget where every frame with through digital grading. Pixel-perfect is just not going to be possible for 95% of content, and we really don't want the studios thinking that overprocessed look is neccesary for marketing reasons.

Sometimes, we just have to lean back, stop focusing on the pixels, and enjoy the movie. Even if that means pushing our couch back a little further from the screen :).

[shon3i]

Well, DTS is mandatory in Blu-ray (it has to at least decode it to stereo analog output), so it's now feasible to do DTS-only discs, which wasn't true with DVD. So if anything it's slightly better for them on a standards level. DD+ isn't mandatory, however, and the Blu-ray implementation is this lame enhancement layer model that only is useful for adding two channels to a AC-3 5.1 to make 7.1. And TrueHD on Blu-ray is just a AC-3 stream and a lossless stream muxed together.sadly but true

I miss HD DVD, which was better designed in so many ways. Mandatory DD+ and TrueHD, so you could have a single 1.5 Mbps DD+ audio track for 20-bit output.Well yes, realy shame on BD side.

Anyway since you know many details :) about BD and HDDVD, did is somewhere AAC mentioned as at least option codec? in some alfa stages of BD or HDDVD discs?

[Lyris]

I thought the human eye isn't very sensitive to high frequency contentThis argument was used in justifying the routine low-pass filtering of just about every DVD-Video encode ever made, and I've always thought it was bunk.

But yes, source quality is always a problem. And there's the big "grain reduction" debate. In some circles, it is felt that having an HD "pop" results in better reviews from the home theater magazines, and so the masters can wind up denoised and then sharpened. In other cases,
It's a scary world where magazine reviewers are allowed to dictate content. Yes there are some good ones, but I've also read some truly incompetent video quality analysis from people absuing their position.

What are your opinions on superbit DVD's?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superbit

If i understand Dark Shikari correctly, assuming good source sime of these should rival the average bluray.
I know you didn't ask me :) but I'll add my 2c. Some of the SuperBit titles were certainly pre-filtered less than other titles so did indeed have more resolvable detail. But in the end, as others have alluded to, it became a marketing exercise. There's a truly dreadful release of "Leon: The Professional" which is branded as SuperBit.

One last thing which people here may be forgetting: the perceived quality varies so, so much depending on the display device, and how it's set up. My own projector's optics do a fantastic job of masking compression artefacts in 1080p sources (which is why I use it to enjoy films... scrutinising their video quality is best done elsewhere).

Movie studios know absolutely nothing about encoding, as they have proven for a decade now with utterly incompetently encoded DVDs.
I wouldn't like to say they know nothing about encoding, but I wholeheartedly agree with the latter part. I would hope their inability to take MPEG-2 to its max potential would be some sort of internal bureaucracy rather than out-and-out incompetence.

[Dark Shikari]

I wouldn't like to say they know nothing about encoding, but I wholeheartedly agree with the latter part. I would hope their inability to take MPEG-2 to its max potential would be some sort of internal bureaucracy rather than out-and-out incompetence.Well, somewhere between the hard telecining, field-blending, double telecine, chroma bleeding, rainbowing, and outright epic failures like this (http://i39.tinypic.com/2uhsept.png), I think they're pretty incompetent.

[Lyris]

Agreed. That looks like a difficult scene, but there's no excuse for artefacts that bad on a legitimate DVD.

Lucky you're in the US, or you could have added "crappy standards conversion performed on film material that should not have been standards converted in the first place" to your list. Have you seen some of the UK Studio Ghibli DVDs? Yikes....

[CruNcher]

In the test phase of WMVHD (preparing for VC-1) studios sourced out the Encoding into Romania (Paramount) and the quality was nice even with the low capabilities of WMV :P so i really wonder what goes wrong in Hollywood, the 40 Virgin Blu-Ray VHS should have made big news and Hurt them really bad for fooling customers it's so hilarious.
I still have the 720p WMVHD of Tomb-Raider here and the Grain amount is fantastic if i look @ some Blu-Rays i feel like in the past and 40 YAV blows it :D. They shouldn't try to compensate bad Encoders they should start replacing them and if they even decide for Commercial stuff like from Ateme or Mainconcept geez still better then what you see these days used from the so called ELITE Companies with the big money in the back.
Superbit is also such a customer fooling selling higher bitrate as new technology is the master fool but these days you get fooled by everyone that's also why i started to look more into the Indie movie world im so pissed of Hollywood and the movies quality is so low now even the final output quality starts to suffer for the last saved buck (and i really wonder what buck try to save with 40 YAV sorry it's unacceptable if i had been the compressionist in charge of that Blu-Ray i would have quit the next day, the day before i would have gone right into the boss office and told him that wouldn't work the quality will be nothing near HD we gonna make fools out of ourselves). Executives should get replaced fast and new fresh people should take over and bring back Hollywood. I would have even told the boss i work these 3 days for free on it you dont have to pay me just to save them from these mess.

The only one that are Happy here are Microsoft currently winning this war again by being much more clever then the rest it sucks now Microsoft could try to sell the other H.264 studios their Framework with very special advertising i hate all those that drive H.264 into the Joke area and make it so easy for Microsoft to take over.

They could startup a new Marketing Campaign and mark these Blu-Rays as Recession HD Quality (RHD) :P

[benwaggoner]

Agreed. That looks like a difficult scene, but there's no excuse for artefacts that bad on a legitimate DVD.
Who was the post house on that title? I agree it doesn't look good, but that's doesn't look like a major studio disc.

Lucky you're in the US, or you could have added "crappy standards conversion performed on film material that should not have been standards converted in the first place" to your list. Have you seen some of the UK Studio Ghibli DVDs? Yikes....
Oh, you mean 24p to 23.976 to 3:2 to 60i to 50i conversion?

There is a ciricle of hell for people who do that.

Back around '99-'00 we had a contract to do a bunch of music videos, many of which came from Beggars Banquet in the UK. So what we had was stuff shot 24p, edited 30i, converted to 25i, and then captured.

And they had the gall to complain that the motion wasn't smooth! I told them that all they had to do was get us the original NTSC D1 tapes before the PAL conversion. I even offered them a discount. Turns out they didn't care all that much...

As a professional compressionist, I'd say the single most valuabele thing you can have is a good relationship with the archive librarians so you can get the real version of the piece the sales guy sent you a VHS tape of.

[Dark Shikari]

Who was the post house on that title? I agree it doesn't look good, but that's doesn't look like a major studio disc.I think Bandai did the R1 release.

Unsurprisingly, R2 looked far better.

[benwaggoner]

In the test phase of WMVHD (preparing for VC-1) studios sourced out the Encoding into Romania (Paramount) and the quality was nice even with the low capabilities of WMV :P
Yeah, that was a really paleolithic encoder back in 2004. Only 1-pass CBR wouldn't drop frames in some cases, B-frames weren't implemented yet, no chroma search, I don't even know if in-loop deblocking was on for higher bitrates.

We can do in 4 Mbps VBR what took 8 Mbps back then, via improved tooling.

so i really wonder what goes wrong in Hollywood currently though the 40 Virgin Blu-Ray VHS should have made big news and Hurt them really bad for fooling customers it's so hillarious. I still have the 720p WMVHD of Tomb-Raider here and the Grain amount is fantastic if i look @ some Blu-Rays i feel like in the past and 40 YAV blows it :D. They shouldn't try to compensate bad Encoders they should start replacing them and if they even decide for Commercial stuff like from Ateme or Mainconcept geez still better then what you see these days used from the so called ELITE Companies with the big money in the back.
Tomb Raider was an A-list action title with lots of VFX, so we'd absolutley expect it to have a much more detailed, low-grain master. Among other things, it's a lot easier to do effects matching with lower grain, so those pictures have long paid extra for lower-grain negatives, and light accordingly.

[kolak]

I've seen lists of Blu-ray bitrates, and most seem to be in the mid-20s or even below 20 megabits average. Assuming that many of these encoders are at least 30-70% worse than x264, that surely can't be anywhere near transparent.That's part of the problem as well. They need to start using real HD digital cameras ;)

Which of these "many" AVC encoders used by the studios are 30% to 70% worse than x264????
I know most of them and none of them is even 30% worse than x264 and saying 70% makes your statement radiculous.

Just to note- we're not talking about encodes <15Mbit average, but around 25Mbit average.

[Chengbin]

I'm a bit of a noob in this, but what is DNR and VFX?

[kolak]

No, H264 is rougly 30% better than MPEG2 in very low bitrates, so on high bitrates, H264 is still better but by invisible margin, i'd say at <25mbps MPEG2 vs H264 is totaly transparent each other, but can depend on implementation, at 30mbps i think there is no way to see any difference with any of H264, VC-1, MPEG2 implementation.

Not true- definatelly not for interlaced stuff.

[benwaggoner]

I'm a bit of a noob in this, but what is DNR and VFX?
Sorry.

DNR=Digital Noise Reduction

VFX=Visual Effects (aka "special effects")

[Yoshiyuki Blade]

Movie studios know absolutely nothing about encoding, as they have proven for a decade now with utterly incompetently encoded DVDs.

You can say that again. My jaw just dropped when I watched the DVD version of The Dark Knight a while back. I mean, DVD is ~10 years old and some people still cant put out a decent quality encode? The Blu-ray version was awesome though.

[shon3i]

Not true- definatelly not for interlaced stuff.
I alredy said that i mixed stuff about percents http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1289759#post1289759, but i am still convinced that any encoder at 30mbps can not make poor quality(if is everything normal with implementation), and still MPEG2 can probably keep higher fidelity easier than others, like for example DTS 1.5 comparing to DD 448/640 in most cases. I don't know about interlaced stuff because i always deinterlace.

[Lyris]

@Yoshiyuki Blade: Dark Knight, even the BD was sub-optimal, though.

Oh, you mean 24p to 23.976 to 3:2 to 60i to 50i conversion?
I've seen that done too, but in this case, it was 24p -> 50i with field blending. Nothing like as bad as that nightmare scenario that you describe, but still, I'd rather have nice clean, whole frames, even if it means the film is running one frame too fast.

The PAL version of "Mamma Mia" looks like it was done the way you describe, understandably it wasn't done at 2:2 25fps to preserve the speed of the music, but if they absolutely have to use frame interpolation on a movie, you'd think they'd do it with some better hardware. This was done by Deluxe as well, not a rinky dink authoring house.

I think Bandai did the R1 release.
Any idea if Bandai encode and author in-house?

[benwaggoner]

I've seen that done too, but in this case, it was 24p -> 50i with field blending. Nothing like as bad as that nightmare scenario that you describe, but still, I'd rather have nice clean, whole frames, even if it means the film is running one frame too fast.
Oh, field blending is definitely an act of callous evil as well.
The only good way to do 24p on PAL is 4% speedup to 25p.

And converting from SD NTSC itself is a crime, since it's 720x480 to 720x576, and hence a vertical stretch.

The PAL version of "Mamma Mia" looks like it was done the way you describe, understandably it wasn't done at 2:2 25fps to preserve the speed of the music, but if they absolutely have to use frame interpolation on a movie, you'd think they'd do it with some better hardware. This was done by Deluxe as well, not a rinky dink authoring house.
Deluxe is normally pretty good. But yeah, a musical's a hard one.

PAL HD supports 30i and hence 24p content, so the Blu-ray should be good. But that kind of format conversion really merits a good motion-adaptive conversion, even if it's a few weeks of software rendering with scene-by-scene tweaking.

I'm sure it's a big-selling title, so they should have had the budget.


Any idea if Bandai encode and author in-house?
Bandai Digital's got a pretty impressive operation these days (and a very cool office! Full-sized Gundam in the conference room), but I don't know how old that disc is.

Also, foreign-market discs might get outsourced anyway. The Japanese version could well have been higher quality.

[benwaggoner]

I alredy said that i mixed stuff about percents http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1289759#post1289759, but i am still convinced that any encoder at 30mbps can not make poor quality(if is everything normal with implementation), and still MPEG2 can probably keep higher fidelity easier than others, like for example DTS 1.5 comparing to DD 448/640 in most cases. I don't know about interlaced stuff because i always deinterlace.
You may be overestimating MPEG-2. I've got 1080i content I can't even get an ATSC compatible mux out of at 18 Mbps CBR.

1080p24 30 Mbps ABR is generally good, but 1080i30 is at least 50% more challenging to encode, and typically is full frame so you don't get off the hook with letterboxing.

I don't know if any MPEG-2 enocder at 40 Mbps could make the HBO logo look good, with that fade in from static.

[Chengbin]

I alredy said that i mixed stuff about percents http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1289759#post1289759, but i am still convinced that any encoder at 30mbps can not make poor quality(if is everything normal with implementation), and still MPEG2 can probably keep higher fidelity easier than others, like for example DTS 1.5 comparing to DD 448/640 in most cases. I don't know about interlaced stuff because i always deinterlace.

I have to agree with Ben. You are way overestimating MPEG 2. For the hell of it, I played with hcenc. The quality was terrible! MPEG 2 needed about 5 times more bitrate to look as good as H.264. MPEG 2 is really an outdated format. I don't know why the hell did they allow MPEG 2 to be on the Blu-ray specs. It is SO BAD compared to H.264.

[kemuri-_9]

I don't know why the hell did they allow MPEG 2 to be on the Blu-ray specs. It is SO BAD compared to H.264.

I would say they allowed it for the reasons of

A. guarantee that BD players would be backwards compatible with DVDs - to smooth things over for the consumer side transition to BD.
- let's not repeat that VHS -> DVD transition where VHS's became useless with the new dvd players (until the combo players came around, but those got clunky too)

B. smooth out the transition to BD on the production side, as companies (likely) needed to purchase and understand new encoding tools for VC-1/AVC
- and as everyone knows you can't fully understand an unfamiliar codec within the period of a few days.

[Chengbin]

What makes x264 better than other H.264 encoders?

More specifically, what does x264 have that makes it output such nice quality videos? Or, why are other encoders crap?

[Dark Shikari]

What makes x264 better than other H.264 encoders?

More specifically, what does x264 have that makes it output such nice quality videos? Or, why are other encoders crap?Many encoders don't go beyond basic heuristic-based mode decision (SAD at best) and have very limited analysis based on algorithms from the 80s and 90s. x264, like other Pretty Good Encoders (Mainconcept, JM, etc) performs significantly more analysis with better algorithms and heuristics. This is generally what sets apart Pretty Good Encoders from the general crap that's out there.

Part of this is just that the knowledge to build good encoders is surprisingly hard to come by, since 99% of academic papers on the topic are crap and those who know how to build good ones rarely advertise the information.

What brings one from Pretty Good to Very Good is psy optimizations (AQ, psy-RD, etc).

[benwaggoner]

I would say they allowed it for the reasons of

A. guarantee that BD players would be backwards compatible with DVDs - to smooth things over for the consumer side transition to BD.
- let's not repeat that VHS -> DVD transition where VHS's became useless with the new dvd players (until the combo players came around, but those got clunky too)
Clearly Blu-ray players would need a MPEG-2 decoder in order to play back DVDs.

B. smooth out the transition to BD on the production side, as companies (likely) needed to purchase and understand new encoding tools for VC-1/AVC
- and as everyone knows you can't fully understand an unfamiliar codec within the period of a few days.
Well, that wasn't really a factor. HD DVD launched before BD, and virtually all titles were H.264 or VC-1 from day 1 there. It was pretty funny to see BD launch some months later with a lot of lousy looking MPEG-2 25 GB discs, totally invaldiating the whole "only BD can give good quality with 50 GB and 40 Mbps!" claims

Lots of the weirdness from Blu-ray is that it wasn't really designed for packaged media. The orginal concept was to replicate the broadcast-to-DVD-recorders then popular in the Japanese market into the digital broadcasting HD era. So, Blu-ray was a recordable medium originally, with the goal of being ale to record ATSC/DVB bitstreams straight to disc. Players capable of that launched in Japan before BD Movie players, and turned out to be BD Movie incompatible down the road. And a lot of the replication issues BD had to deal with came from making a recordable media into a replicatible one. Ironically, BD's still not very affordable as a writable media either; DVD and HD are both offer better $/GB, with flash storage catching up quickly.

BD was originally going to be MPEG-2 only, in fact. Once HD DVD announced VC-1 and H.264 support, BD eventually had to add the advanced codecs, as 30 GB of VC-1 or H.264 would give a lot more runtime than 50 GB of MPEG-2.

[Comatose]

Is this where I start hating Sony?

[Mr VacBob]

Any idea if Bandai encode and author in-house?

SpeeDVD (http://www.speedvd.com/) did it; I think Funimation is the only US company that can afford to do their own DVD production.

Usually you can blame this on bad masters, but in this case the DVD goes down to QP31 across the entire scene. I wonder how many of the other 99% of DVDs would look better if they'd just fix the hard-telecining, though.

[Snowknight26]

I've never seen any Blu-rays that are not significantly better than SD.

Doesn't mean they don't exist.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=14474813#post14474813

http://www.caps-a-holic.com/hd_vergleiche/index.php?full=1&vergleich=escape_from_new_york

[benwaggoner]

Is this where I start hating Sony?
Start? No :).

I shouldn't rag on Sony too much. Their contributions to video certainly are a net positive. But as Overdog they've certainly done more than any other company to:

Slow down the inevitable and neccessary death of interlaced
Enforce tiering of product features for consumer/industrial/professional content creation, even on the part of other companies
Make software-based workflows needlessly painful and expensive.
Purchase victory for Blu-ray without addressing its limitations, essentially blocking off short-run optical disc business models we had for DVD.


But they gave us the Trinitron and HDCAM-SR too, and Vegas is quite a nice product.

[Chengbin]

OK, let's change the negative atmosphere in this thread.

What are some of the best Blu-ray transfers you've seen?

For me, the best was Kung Fu Panda. Unbelievable detail, stunning colors, the movie just looks amazing in 1080p. Wall-E was stunning as well. Jumper is probably the best camera shot movie I've seen on Blu-ray (partly because the video is 34mbps, if I remember correctly)

[tetsuo55]

OK, let's change the negative atmosphere in this thread.

What are some of the best Blu-ray transfers you've seen?

For me, the best was Kung Fu Panda. Unbelievable detail, stunning colors, the movie just looks amazing in 1080p. Wall-E was stunning as well. Jumper is probably the best camera shot movie I've seen on Blu-ray (partly because the video is 34mbps, if I remember correctly)

I use jumper as my main test movie, especially because the first scene has a difficult pan and ends with the sun shining into the camera

[kolak]

I use jumper as my main test movie, especially because the first scene has a difficult pan and ends with the sun shining into the camera

Disney does it properly- they have people who knows how to use Cinemacraft HD. Most of their stuff is done with Cinemacraft HD and high bitrate and does look very good. It's not always a case with other studios unfortunately:(

[Daiz]

Speaking of DVD authoring, how about double hard telecined (or simply hard telecined, I don't remember) video with 60i credits credits overlayed on top of it? And then having the resulting mess being just purely decimated to 25fps?

I haven't witnessed this myself but I heard about this being the case for an Australian anime DVD. I can only imagine the kind of horror it would be.

[benwaggoner]

Disney does it properly- they have people who knows how to use Cinemacraft HD. Most of their stuff is done with Cinemacraft HD and high bitrate and does look very good. It's not always a case with other studios unfortunately:(
Disney also gets to encode a lot of animated content, which (if recent) is noise free.

Plus Disney has a lot of respect for their masters these days, and care a lot about presentation quality.

...making up for the era when they'd taken 4:3 (pre-TV) movies, cropped them to 1.85:1 for theatrical re-release, and then pan and scaned THOSE for the VHS release...

[Lyris]

PAL HD supports 30i and hence 24p content, so the Blu-ray should be good. But that kind of format conversion really merits a good motion-adaptive conversion, even if it's a few weeks of software rendering with scene-by-scene tweaking.
My thoughts exactly. The DVD reminded me of the standards conversions I used to watch in the 1990s on TV here.

Fortunately, the BD is as you'd expect, 24p/60hz centric.

OK, let's change the negative atmosphere in this thread.

What are some of the best Blu-ray transfers you've seen?

For me, the best was Kung Fu Panda. Unbelievable detail,Really? The entire thing is low-pass filtered (http://whiggles.landofwhimsy.com/hdcaptures/panda13.jpg) and lacks the finest detail possible. It still looks good, of course, but it could have been better. The little wrinkle (http://whiggles.landofwhimsy.com/hdcaptures/panda1.jpg) at the top and bottom of the active picture area and around what were once clean edges is the giveaway.

The Simpsons Movie has the same problem. I wonder if the HD version of Cinema Craft has the filter turned on by default like the SD version...

One of my favourite Blu-ray Discs is Warner's "How The West Was Won". Detail down to the single pixel level, which is surprising for Warner Home Video. http://whiggles.landofwhimsy.com/hdcaptures/west11.jpg

Speaking of DVD authoring, how about double hard telecined (or simply hard telecined, I don't remember) video with 60i credits credits overlayed on top of it? And then having the resulting mess being just purely decimated to 25fps?
(Facepalm)

Disney also gets to encode a lot of animated content, which (if recent) is noise free.
Even their old material has been degrained (very well for the most part though, which makes a change) to the point of looking weird when it's projected. Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty look great for the most part, but not great in the way they "should"...

[Inspector.Gadget]

Really? The entire thing is low-pass filtered and lacks the finest detail possible. It still looks good, of course, but it could have been better. The little wrinkle at the top and bottom of the active picture area and around what were once clean edges is the giveaway.

That little dark line about 4px in from the actual black border is caused by low-pass filtering? I see that on a lot of Blu-ray discs and a few DVDs and I always wondered...thanks.

[Lyris]

Yes, the sudden transition between the black bar and the active picture is past the limit of the filter.

A lot of people see these scabby halos on DVD titles and think that it's deliberate edge enhancement.

[CruNcher]

Yeah Disney gives a lot into quality even years before the others did i remember the new Herbie with lindsay Lohan my good was the detail crazy (the film not so but the technical work was excellent up to the encoding) even for the HD Broadcast i didn't saw the Blu-Ray but i guess it should look much much better they did a lot of postprocessing on that movie (though it seems part is the Artistic style of it cartoonish color usage flat textures low noise) and i guess this is the style people love that wanna go fully digital away from film and grain but with keeping the details and dont suffer from BAD DNR :) Yeah http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0400497/ if their would be technical awards for films on imdb i would give it a 10 for this new look and feel it created ;) And after that Pirates of the Caribean blown everyone else away the best H.264 Encode @ that time so definietly Disney is the top 1 for me and especialy as they are setting on H.264 and blow VC-1 away and seem the only ones that do it right even better then Sony themselves :D
Hmm seems they still didn't released the Blu-Ray i want to see that in Blu-Ray Quality up to the inner pores of the main characters *grml*

[*.mp4 guy]

looking at kung fu panda, its been lowpass filtered in essentialy the same way as most dvd's. This is quite annoying, as most of the time the lowpasses used in such cases don't have a well defined cut-off point (this reduces ringing) which makes it more dificult to clean up the mess.