Transformers (Blu-ray) Official AVSForum Review - Page 2

Toshiba bug shows up when playing back AVC encoded discs.

Thanks for the review, Ralph! I owned this movie on HD before HD DVD died and I sold all of my movies and equipment. I'll have to see if I can get a decent price on Transformers and pick it up soon.

FM,
I can't think of one lossless and lossy comparison that didn't suggest the LFE was deeper and tighter. Makes you wonder how this happens.Given your expertise on the subject, I will default to you. I have noticed using my Anthem AVM50 with ARC, that some scenes have less LFE and others have more, but overall the bass is tighter and smoother. I will be very interested to try this disc and compare with my HD DVD as well the U571 as well
John

It's AVC at 24fps that causes the problem.

One of the things that needs to be taken into consideratin is that it is sometimes hard to distinguish LFE if you are using bass management, which most users are.... one of the things that lossy encoders do, and to a lesser extent as the bitrates increase, is share frequency information common to both channels, which could impact the "depth" on LFE.... I'll be curious to look at the HD DVD vs. BR on the measuring stick to see what the difference is...

i wonder if pq would still be indistinguishable tho had paramount decided to sacrifice video bitrate and include lossless audio on the hd dvd. it seems you have to reach a certain point in bitrate to get to where higher bitrate wont benefit the pq, but to get to that point lossless audio had to be omitted on the hd dvd. so far from the reviews that did comparisons there is a diff between the lossy and lossless tracks.

here's to hoping my brother's eD a2-300 will arrive before september 2nd.

To really bear out this "bitrate vs. pq" theory, I think we need to actually take a look/compare scenes where there actually is a bitrate "peak" in the encoding. That's when things are going to be stressed. Just noting the averages or looking at scenes where bitrate is "nominal" is certainly not where you would find differences, imo.

Naturally, no one is going to bother to go through the trouble (I'd expect)...but that is where the answer will live until the day it is discovered by someone who is looking in the right place for it.

...and for all it's worth, it may simply come down to something that isn't really tangible on our end, rather something that appears in the actual production of the encoding. Maybe the br encode was simply less trouble to execute, once it is allowed to take whatever bandwidth it needs for a given scene situation, whereas, the hdvd encode required a watchful eye to optimize the parameters scene-by-scene (which also opens the inevitable possibility that some scenes slip through w/o the necessary TLC treatment). Maybe the master that was approved for either encode, was already graded down to some degree as to make it easily fit into an hdvd profile, anyway Who really knows? Certainly, there are lots of possibilities.

Until then, there will simply be 2 groups of people- one group that needs to believe the copy they bought way back when it was in hdvd is the best one that will ever be, and the other group that is simply happy that the title can now be had on br and appears to exploit the format to its fullest in video and audio.

The only way to do a true "test" is to have a split screen or have the exact same equipment (except the players) showing the pictures side by side.

I would be willing to bet in double blind testing the results would be "inconclusive" for both the audio and the video

Or look at screen caps...like was done on The Mummy...which showed an increase in detail on the BD version on scenes where no DNR was applied.

Brandon

True, but screen caps versus live action are very different in the "real world."

I only have one question..... How does Megan look on Blu-Ray?

J

Thankyou Ralph for the review.

Excellent review Ralph. Couldn't ask for more.


Most of the educated HDM owners understands that lower bit rates could also produce excellent results but the point in keeping the bits higher is to mitigate the unknown video artefacts of any proportions that might occur when sufficient bits aren't supplied. I don't feel there is anything wrong in giving high bit rate treatments because we can at least safely assume that any artefacts that occur beyond the boundaries of higher bit rates are related to the source material.

Excellent review, not sure if Im going to double dip and buy it on blu or not. IF the bass has improved then I can only imagine it being subtle. I thought it was pretty good on HD DVD.

Great review Ralph. Now, I am really forward for this one.. A while ago I had the HD DVD version but one of the things that I remember that it didn't cut it was simply the lfe.
I watched the movie last summer in one of the THX movie theaters in downtown San Francisco and remember how powerful the bass was... Hopefully this BD is the version that i was looking for...

Can't wait to receive it! Thanks Ralph!

A nice, honest review. Finally, a real comparison of the DD+ vs D-THD tracks.

Ralph,

I don't expect to hear an increase in the level of LFE. I am expecting to hear a cleaner and deeper bass.

Cheers,

Chris

a combo player will solve this sorry can't help this OT post since i'm a proud combo owner

thanks again for this great review, can't wait to pick up the BD version.

+1
John

Same here. I havd an HD DVD copy of the movie. There is no reason to go to the Blu-ray version. If I was big on audio and had a good HDMI receiver then maybe I would consider it, but I only have a Yahama receiver that can accept optical.

Thanx for taking the time to discern the difference between the HD DVD and Blu copies.

well i am halfway thru the movie on bluray, and i'm blown away for how great it looks...

But what really really impressed me was the sound, holy crap that was good...

But sadly in dark parts of the movie which were quite a few.. it's very grainy..

I have switched settings in my ps3, stuff like RGB from limited to full and i didn't see much difference.. i'm quite disappointed about it... i had downloaded the hd version and it didn't look that bad (in the dark parts).

It looks almost like 300, i think the problem is that since there was a lot of digital work on this film like in 300 i guess there was a lot of grain because of it.

Just so people know, i have a 52" Samsung, 1080P and i have a 1.3HDMI cable and it really sucks for it to be so grainy, i have calibrated my tv with the bluray DVE (Digital Video Essentials) my contrast and brightness are quite good on every thing else, and i'm actually pretty pissed about the grainy parts but the bright parts are jaw dropping...

Anyhow, i just wanted to warn to the new owners of bluray to not think that there is something wrong with your settings, just try to not pay too much attention to the grainy parts.

Elo,

Grain is supposed to be there...it is part of film. Also, low-light situations accentuate grain.

Ralph,

You got the audio portion of this review spot on. The main difference between the HD DVD and BD I noticed after volume matching is the bass response on the BD. It's light years ahead of the HD DVD....there's definitely more depth in the bass response, like deeper frequencies are being heard. The HD DVD version, although very strong, was lacking this bass response.