I asked this question on another thread but unfortunately that thread was closed......i have read reviews stating there is posterization in the underwater scenes of Superman Returns when watched on HD DVD and thats using the VC-1 codec.......I have viewed the MPEG 2 side and i didn't see any problems ( perhaps because i'm not sure what i'm looking for or perhaps there isn't any problem )

Quick question.....can someone check the HD DVD and normal DVD sides and compare the underwater scenes and tell me if they are the same or if one is better than the other....forget the resolution for a second and just compare the image...one will obviously be lower resolution but i just want to know if there is a problem with the VC-1 codec regarding certain scenes and this scene has been brought up on more than one occasion.

Perhaps someone can check the audio too and compare the Dolby TrueHD track to the DVD's 448kb/s Dolby 5.1 track........i personally thought the 5.1 track was ok but wasn't particularly overwhelmed by it.

Greetings

Both are VC1 ... BD is not mpeg2 from Warner.

Regards

Greetings

Both are VC1 ... BD is not mpeg2 from Warner.

Regards
I think he was talking about the SD DVD version of it. Well of couse the HD side is better, but what you are talking about was their to start with(if I am not mistaken). I am pretty sure when I saw it in Imax that the water had that effect, not dont hold me to it, I could be wrong.

Greetings

Ah ha ... yes ... sorry.

Regards

Banding in very subtle gradations is most likely due to the color bit depth, or was present in the master. I don't know if I would blame the compression, because the authors should have been able to crank up the bandwidth during that one scene well enough to eliminate any such artifacts, so it was likely there in the source but I can't say for sure because I have never seen the master.

I have certainly noticed in that ONE scene a lot of Banding, or perhaps it was color depth, but I agree I will reserve TOTAL judgment until I get the XA2 and a better TV.

Even the player and the TV may make no difference if the HD master is the culprit, which I suspect to be the case here.

It's there on the DVD side as well.

We rented the combo disk at a local BB for $5 for one night, and we were greatly disappointed in all its aspects. We were playing it on the HTPC with the XBox 360 drive, and I thought the excessive banding was due to incorrect picture/color setup (still tweaking it). We only saw King Kong and Batman Begins before, which were both superb, so I guess we set our expectations way too high. I had to check that we didn't accidentaly put the DVD side, but no, we didn't. Of course, I had to check the DVD version before we returned it. It did look a little bit softer, but there was less banding.

So it surprises me that the Toshiba units show ths problem as well, and that the problem seems to be in the master. If the other Tier 2 movies are like this, then this is a serious problem.

When I watch Superman Returns it looks to me like there are a lot of colours missing from the images. The whites are not white they looked cropped down from 255 to about 230. I have read that they used a Sony Genesis camera. This camera uses a big pallette 4:4:4 YCBCR. It is supposed to be compatible with RGB colours. But to me it looks like the conversion to RGB went wrong, and all the colours are clipped. That would explain why Superman's costume keeps changing colour throughout the movie. sometimes it is Burgundy, and sometimes it is Brown, there is a scene where it is grey as well. This would cause colour banding if true.

the exaxt same banding is there, but on the DVD version it have HUGE Macroblock and all the presentation, you have the MPEG2 DNR going ON and OFF have each 2 sec witch is mighty disturbing...