Apollo 13 comparison *PIX* - Page 7

No more detail but the sharpening edge halos converged on each other to the point that the o's and zero look like they have a light in the center.

Art

Art, you sure that's not a cgi shot that's biased against the blu-Ray?

seriously, how ridiculous does that sound?

I think part of the problem here is that a lot of people don't realize we have been looking at screen shots for about a decade now. This is not some recent phenomenon. Many of us spend 3 tenths of a second looking at a screen shot and immediately see problems like edge enhancement. Others you can sometimes get to see the problems by making crops and pointing out problems with arrows and such. Then there is a group that is just not able to see the problems even when extreme effort is put forth into demonstrating the problem. Lastly there is that group that for whatever reason sees the problems and decides that it's actually a marked improvement upon the original untouched source because they feel it looks "better". It's the first and the last group that battle it out in every thread with subpar image quality. As long as the thread goes on, it's a continuous battle for each of these groups to not let the other have the last say on the matter.

I don't know what the solution to this problem is, but it gets really old when it feels like it's not worth discussing problem movies because it's just going to devolve a who gets the last word battle. I mean this movie obviously has problems with edge enhancement and something that appears to be DNR, but instead of discussing those issues, it's just devolved into a battle between "it looks good" and "why would they do this to a master?".

To a large extent, I understand the quality disagreements when it comes to things like grain and DNR. These two play against each other and have a sometimes intangible quality that is hard to define. There is room for interpretation.

On the other hand, how is it possible that people can be oblivious to gross edge enhancement? C,mon...Kevin Bacon is walking around with a thick white line around him! How can people not see that?

I can sit here and argue about difference in general appearance being caused by grain, older masters, multi generation prints or digital noise reduction. One person might look at a cleaner image and see a better print. Another person might look at that same image and see a print scrubbed by DNR. Fair enough. Different interpretations. Fair arguments.

But I'm pretty sure that the REAL Kevin Bacon doesn't walk around with a thick white outline! That shouldn't be the kind of thing that people don't notice.

I'm teaching edge enhancement classes next Friday, unfortunately some from this thread have already called in sick as they just don't want to learn.

I better sharpen up my jokes for the next post. After all you can never be too sharp, right!!! ( wrong )

To get serious for a moment i agree entirely with your post.

I think it's abundantly clear that these releases are sourced from two different transfers, the older of which appears to have been relegated to Blu-ray.

nice.. room 101. wonder if that's actually an in-joke at NASA.. or perhaps for the film. (as they appear to be getting their medical there)

I definitely noticed the edge-enhancement when I watched the movie. But one thing you need to remember is that the shot of Kevin Bacon you're talking about only lasts for about 2 seconds. He's not actually walking around the room with a white glow around him.
Most of the movie takes place in a dimly lit environment, so this edge-enhancement doesn't really affect the entire movie.
I'm not saying that edge enhancement is a good thing, just that many people (including me) never bought an HD-DVD player, so to me this is the best transfer available to buy right now. I don't understand why Universal didn't just use the same transfer from the HD-DVD, but I don't see them going back and fixing this anytime in the near future.
I guess all I'm saying is that while the Blu-Ray transfer is not perfect and could be better, it is still completely watchable and enjoyable.

How do you know? Ever meet him?

That the white area is actually a halo, his aurora of energy showing through, thanks to the incredible detail revealing use of EE and blu ray...

BTW this halo is a well known (to experienced users of earlier versions of Photoshop) effect of using earlier and more crude methods of sharpening, to the point where it is considered "over sharpening" of a photo.

Later systems when used properly, do not produce the artificial effects such as halos, in photos...

and really if anyone has the HD and a player, then play both on the respective players and switch back and forth....you will see how they screwed up the BD

What i said...it cracks me to hear complaints about color saturation levels and so forth...because those things can be adjusted, as irritating as that may be......

but once the details are blown out by too much brightness or contrast, the DNR over-used, coupled with the classic over-sharpening in the disc....stick a fork in it, it is toast

Good post. If Universal could just "re-use" the transfer from the HD-DVD, they would, because it would be the cheapest way to go. There must be some technical reason why that can't be done, otherwise they'd do it. Perhaps they put so much money into HD-DVD, they don't have the budget to do it again for blu-ray at the same level of effort? Maybe they plan to pull out all the stops just for their treasures (E.T., Jaws, etc.)? Who knows.

I honestly don't think this is intentional. I just can't imagine some technician sitting there thinking "I'm going to add some EE here just to piss off those AVS geeks...". I think they are probably doing the best that they can with the technology their budget allows. I don't know all the technical details of how movies are mastered onto blu-ray, but there must be qualitive differences depending on the time and money invested. Look how the Wizard of Oz was done: 8k frame-by-frame mastering. The results are stunning, but the cost of doing that must be equally stunning.

Hopefully technology will resolve this so all transfers can be done perfectly at a low cost. This is the best there is right now so I'll enjoy it.

Authoring houses get paid for additional services. Most likely what happened is someone demonstrated the "Improved and Better Mastered" techniques, aka torch-mode, they can provide and it wowed the clients with the supposed improvements. Resulting in the approval of the additional tinkering since making things POP is more important than proper reproduction.

Now I have to hunt down the HD-DVD before everyone else does.
Much of these enhancements are nothing more than misguided revisionism that actually degrades picture quality.

I've made this comparison many times before but it continues to be pertinent. It is like the music industry "Remastering" their back catalogs where they simply do a hack job of increasing treble and bass along with dynamic range reduction, plus permitting digital clipping. Resulting in a loud flat distorted mess that deafened ears perceive as an improvement.

Translating back to the visuals; this gives us blown out highlights, crushed shadow detail, ringing, blooming, and unnatural color renderings that POP -oh how I hate thee when it is wasn't originally intended.

Once this type of tinkering is baked in you cannot calibrate it out and if you have had taken the time and money to have it calibrated to the industry standard there is no excuse for this superfluous mitigation to address this foolishness.

Best Regards
KvE

$125,000 dollars was the number I heard for the transfer that was used for the HDDVD. At the time, that was a very expensive transfer. There is, without a doubt, a reason this transfer was not used for the Blu-ray. I have speculated that master was lost in the warehouse fire a couple of years ago. I don't beleive the transfer used on the Blu-ray is new. I suspect it was the older HD master that Uni spent all that money to replace. Instead of spending another pile of money on yet another transfer, I suspect Universal simply went the cheapest route.

I wonder though - Wouldn't it be even cheaper to just grab an HDDVD off the shelf and copy the video to the BD?

I'm starting to suspect that your suspicions are suspect.

"Taking the cheapest route" appears to be the very words Universal lives by.

This is a videophile forum. Comparisons from DVD to BD in nearly all cases just confirm the obvious (that the BD will most likely be a significant improvement) and justify to ourselves the repurchase. Even if it is a dead format, a comparison to the defunct HD DVD at least gives a useful reference point as the the quality of the transfer. Is it that difficult to simply ignore the inclusion of a caps of format you didn't/don't have interest in? Why do people here have to do things differently to accomodate your reasoning? For me, as many reference points as possible is preferred.

That pisses me off, too, and it is an excellent analogy.

agreed

why do they do this?

who can think the blu-ray looks better?

for all the talent and millions in hollywood then turn around and have some clueless marketing fool demand mastering changes or some process happy filter coder programming monkeys doing the job and send it all to ruin at the last step

and one thing for the people in the media offices to consider, if this monkeying around really looks better then why don't they do this to the theatrical release versions in the theaters? (and before they get any crazy ideas the answer is: BECAUSE IT IS NOT BETTER AND IT DOES NOT LOOK NEARLY AS GOOD)

and the thing there have been titles i have been skipping entirely or making do with the older HD DVD version etc. it's their dollars lost too

+1

It's sad that as the technology gets better and better and we could be getting better and better everything the production/remastering engineers become ever more out of touch and in love with all their fancy (and damaging) tools. (although their halo-city edge sharpening is hardly some new cutting edge tool, so don't know what to say actually)

Can they even do that?


Mine is idle speculation. If you have some hard info, I for one would be interested in hearing it.

more likely some marketing geek showed some pie charts where he calculated that by adding the words "re-mastered" and show some samples to some blind teen using enhanced oversaturation, blown contrast and edge ringing that he could elicit a quick wow and whipped out another pie chart and then some programmer who knows nothing about film really wanted to use his new toys and was "yes, yes, yes" and there you go....

which brings me to another point i've been making for years now why is it that little amateur photographer joe sitting at his puny desktop has been sharpening his photos with minimal artifacts for years and big hollywood is using an old, nasty technique that only the least post processing skilled photographers still use today???

how can this be???

if they insist on sharpening why not at least do it right???
(and sometimes after a scan you may need to do a touch of sharpening to overcome an AA filter if one was used during scanning, depends)

all the same since when does jpg compression ADD a ton of saturation and specific edge halos? Since when does any half-way reasonable leel of jpg conmpression blow highlights?

Thanks for the comparison pics. Not sure what Universal was thinking on this one. It's a great movie and maybe it's time to add the HD DVD to my collection.

I am not an expert, but i believe they could yeah. Even if the HDDVD video was in a different format than what they could slap directly onto the BD, they could decode the HDDVD video into a neutral format (should be trivial), then re-encode it into whichever format they'd want to use on the BD (should also be trivial). It's not magic. I bet people here could do it. (Which is actually something i'd be interested in...)

If I'm not mistaken wasn't Universal or Warner given software to do just that?

If not, they could've just bought this software for $60 and be done

Anyone want to try muxing the BD's lossless track with the HD-DVD's video? Quite a few Universal titles would benefit(The Thing, Army of Darkness, etc).

Early HD DVD and Blu-ray releases actually had dual-compatible encodes as seen with Warner releases. The encoding parameters of VC-1 allowed the bitstream to be compatible for authoring both HD DVD and Blu-ray, if it was configured correctly. However, if you went balls to the walls with the bitrate settings for your Blu-ray encode, you couldn't use it for HD DVD. Another example is that you can use up to 3 B frames for Blu-ray using VC-1 but HD DVD supports up to 7. If your encode doesn't meet the LCD, it wouldn't mux.

As for the idea of taking the encode from the HD DVD and porting to Blu-ray, you'd have to find out if it met the proper criteria as I mentioned. You'd certainly would NOT decode the compressed encode from the HD DVD and then re-encode it for Blu-ray. You'd end up with a terrible result.

My guess is that their only option was to take an older master transferred to tape and use it for this new Blu-ray release. It makes no sense as to why they wouldn't use the HD DVD transfer if it were still around.

I think Fast Fizzy's theory about the Universal lot fire makes a lot of sense.