Hey all,

Noticed something interesting today. CBC in Canada is showing Finding Nemo right now in HD. It's definitely HD - not an upconvert.

Obviously, this suggests that there is indeed a Finding Nemo HD transfer in circulation.

Wondering if a Blu-ray release announcement could be coming at some point.

Of course there's an HD version. It's a digital film, and the original digital renders and Pixar's own digital master were done at 1080p.

As for Blu-ray, it's a question of "when", not "if".

As for Blu-ray, it's a question of "when", not "if".

Well... let's not forget Cars.

Same for Cars. They just made us ask the question again, is all. I never said "soon".. hehe.

ABC is showing it in 720p, and it doesn't look much better than the upconverted DVD.

How were you receiving your ABC feed? I'm just curious, because I get ABC from New York via DirecTV, and the 720p feed for me looked fantastic. I was fully expecting to see macroblocking on the faster scenes, and was pleased to see none. On my display (Toshiba 52hm84 720p DLP), as far as the networks go, ABC seems to offer the best HD, followed closely by Fox (also provided by the New York feed). I get NBC and CBS OTA, and my local affiliate HD signals are extremely poor. I hate it when my football team is playing on NBC; it's like watching an internet feed.

Anyway, like I said, I thought the DirecTV Network feed looked great, and I have about 60 previous viewings of the SD-DVD upconverted on either my Panasonic S-97s, HD-A1, HD-A2, or PS3 (with FW 1.8) to compare it to (thanks to my 3 1/2 and 1 1/2 year old daughters).

I'm in New York City (Manhattan), and I'm on Time Warner digital cable.

Viewing on my SA8350HD DVR, I noticed the 720p was soft at times. But I believe this is intentional on the part of the director. Great colors, my parents were visiting and my mom went gaga over the opening ocean montage. It's like an orgy of color palettes.

I was watching Nemo using an antenna on ABC. So, highest bitrate possible right now.

The colors didn't 'pop' the way a good HD program should(not like a BD to be sure). And didn't have that razor sharp look Scanner and Corpse have.
No macro blocking, just not a particularly stunning picture.

The American version definently was not from an HD source. I'm thing upconverted dvd.

I was watching Nemo using an antenna on ABC. So, highest bitrate possible right now.Highest bitrate for your market. ABC network feeds are re-encoded by the station's ATSC encoder, so the PQ and bitrate can vary from station to station. Some ABC O&Os are in the 11-12 Mb range due to multicasting.
The American version definently was not from an HD source. I'm thing upconverted dvd.I've not heard of 16:9 SD delivery for broadcast of features. A remote possibility may be that 16:9 SD was unconverted to a HD format before delivery, but that's doubtful too. One reason that this feature may appear soft is the lack of detail enhancement commonly used in film transfers.

720P will always lack the "pop" of 1080i. Sports in 720P is soft compared to 1080i. 720P is useless except for online downloads

720P will always lack the "pop" of 1080i. Sports in 720P is soft compared to 1080i. 720P is useless except for online downloads
To put it gently, the foregoing assertion is controversial. I could amplify my remarks, but I'm too nice a guy. :)

being gentle aside, the foregoing assertion is absurd.

I was watching Nemo using an antenna on ABC. So, highest bitrate possible right now.

The colors didn't 'pop' the way a good HD program should(not like a BD to be sure). And didn't have that razor sharp look Scanner and Corpse have.
No macro blocking, just not a particularly stunning picture.

The American version definently was not from an HD source. I'm thing upconverted dvd.
Why would you expect a computer generated animated movie to look like movies shot on 35mm film? It has the resolution that the CGI was generated at, which is likely to less than a true 1920x1080/24p given that Finding Nemo was made a few years ago. I'm sure there are people who can provide the technical details.

Finding Nemo has been shown any number of times in true HD before between the premium movie channels and broadcasts on ABC. I watched a few minutes of it last night and it looked pretty good to me, although obviously not state of the art reference material. My source was WJLA-DT ABC 7 in Washington DC which has two SD sub-channels, so that does not help. (I did not check the WMAR-DT ABC 2 in Baltimore OTA picture but that has 2 SD sub-channels as well). WJLA-DT is using a 10 year old encoder. The station engineer for WJLA-DT has posted that the station has ordered a new multiplexing encoder which should in principle help with the picture quality for the WJLA-DT 7.1 HD sub-channel as it will be able to dynamically adjust bandwidth for the HD and SD sub-channels. It will be interesting to see if we can really detect a difference.

You can't say OTA is the highest picture quality possible. It is only the highest possible for your market as cable and DBS are going to start with whatever the local station puts out. If your ABC station has multiple SD sub-channels and old equipment, it may not have been the best possible picture available to the end consumer. There are a LOT of variables in the picture quality that gets to your HD TV, ending with the TV and decoder/tuner at your end. You don't provide your location in your ID, so we have no idea which station you were looking at.

CGI movies are typically rendered at resolutions higher than 1080p. For example, ToyStory, which is over 12 years old, was rendered I beleive at around 960p. Not sure what they use today, but its higher than HD for sure.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=10866437&&#post10866437

being gentle aside, the foregoing assertion is absurd.
Yep, if I squint my eyes, I can just make out the letters, T R O L L. :)

CGI movies are typically rendered at resolutions higher than 1080p. For example, ToyStory, which is over 12 years old, was rendered I beleive at around 960p. Not sure what they use today, but its higher than HD for sure.

Did you read what you just wrote? :) You contradict yourself, saying that Toy Story was higher than HD, but then say it was in 960p... and that is clearly (using math) lower than 1080p!

But to your point... I always thought the digital Pixar-type animated movies were at least 1080p by design since at that time they already knew the plans for HD TV in the US... nothing to base that assumption on other than common sense, but I can't see why they would have used that fancy computer equipment at Pixar to render at lower than HD resolutions since that was part of the point of doing their kind of high-quality movies in the first place (to be the best animation around).

I think the original Toy Story was intially rendered at around 1k. Of course it was re-rendered a few years ago so it should look great in 1080p.

I'm not sure if they'd bother rendering higher than 1080p right now. Increasing the resolution also increases the render times, by a significant margin. Which would be wasted because nothing can display it. Unless they're super-concerned with future-proofing the film, which is doubtful, seeing as how the CGI technology is obsolete by the time the movie is released. Toy Story, for example, would likely gain nothing at all by re-rendering at a higher resolution.

1080p has been the standard for quite a while now, long before it was available for home viewing, it wouldn't surprise me if Pixar has always used it for their feature productions. Which would make putting them on Blu-ray exceptionally easy, since there's already a perfect digital master sitting in their vault that needs no touch-up or remastering of any kind.

[QUOTE=HDMe2}
But to your point... I always thought the digital Pixar-type animated movies were at least 1080p by design since at that time they already knew the plans for HD TV in the US... [/QUOTE]

I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have been rendered at 1080p with television in mind. This just isn't common practice for feature films. Generally speaking most film scans are at 2k (most commonly) or 4k to provide the a decent transfer back to film during the Digital Intermediate process (though a CGI feature doesn't really have an intermediate phase since it is digital until the final film out). Because 2K is generally accepted as the minimum practical "resolution" for 35mm film, it is highly unlikely that the final film out was produced in anything less. In fact one of the very reasons Pixar employs those high power SGI & proprietary workstations is for the ability to render quickly at high resolutions.

HDTV and Blu-Ray are by-products, that generally undergo another transfer process specifically for those formats. It is very very rare for any major motion picture feature shot on film to be scanned for 35mm theatrical release at anything less than 2K, unless the movie was shot with an HD format at 1920x1080 such as Superman Returns, Collateral, Sin City, Star Wars, or Miami Vice.)