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BD's in general and contrast ratio

post #1 of 10
9/5/11 at 10:43am
Thread Starter 
I purchased three new BD's recently; The Postman, Cliffhanger and Event Horizon. I own all three on SD-DVD and have watched them all recently so my comparison is fresh. All three have a contrast ratio much different than the SD-DVD. All three of them appear to have the overall exposure level dropped by a full stop (photographer speak) which helps preserve highlights but at the expense of shadow detail.

In the case of The Postman the effect is an improvement as I felt the SD-DVD was overexposed and much of the color washed out.

Cliffhanger has a similar feel but to a lesser extent. There is an opening scene in Çliffhanger where Stallone is hanging below a cliff and there is a bright sky in the background and the area below the cliff is in shadow. The SD-DVD appears to favor the shadow region below the cliff and in the BD version the highlights are preserved better. It is as if the contrast ratio is to great to be captured by either format and the SD-DVD goes for the shadows at the expense of highlights and BD saves highlights at the expense of the shadows.

Event Horizon is just darker period. I have already posted in that thread and most people seem to think the PQ if fine. Maybe my PJ is off but SD-DVD's, HD-DVD's and many of my other BD titles are fine. I really only notice this for titles where I have both BD and SD-DVD. Alien vs. Predator is spot on so I don't think I have a setup issue.

Anyone else notice this when comparing SD-DVD to BD?

Greg
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post #2 of 10
9/5/11 at 11:36am
There is a big trend of applying more 'contemporary' color grading and contrast changes to older films.

A popular one is crushing dynamic range in the lower end and clipping/blooming the top end of the spectrum for a more 'punchy' effect.

Sometimes things are actually being corrected that were wrong on prior SD releases. I have not seen your examples so I can't make any specific comment about those. I believe it was discussed in the Event Horizon thread that some shadow detail was lost in the BR along with distorted geometry.

Best Regards
KvE
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post #3 of 10
9/5/11 at 11:46am
DI's are ruining the individual look of movies, they all look the same. Post grading an old movie is the work of satan.
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post #4 of 10
9/5/11 at 12:34pm
I have also not watched any of the titles given above to confirm, but it seems to me that there are three possibilities here:

- The Blu-rays simply have bad transfers.
- The DVDs had bad transfers, and the Blu-ray transfers have been improved with more accurate contrast.
- The o/p's display is not properly calibrated and is giving different resuts at each resolution.
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post #5 of 10
9/5/11 at 1:24pm
I like how the comments so far are just vague condemnations of modern DI/color grading trends, without any direct addressing or questioning the accuracy of the OP's claims re: these releases. OP, with all due respect I think it might be something somewhere in your HT chain (colorspace settings in your BD player maybe?) which is causing the discrepancy in color/contrast between the dvds and blu-rays of the titles you mention. I own both the previous dvd and BD of two of the titles in question (Cliffhanger and Event Horizon) and on my setup there is no difference in color/contrast between the dvd/bd beyond the obvious disparity due to BD's increased detail and resolvable color gamut. I'm pretty certain that on both of those cases the BD release just recycles the HD master used for the previous dvd, "as is". While there is a definite trend for "modernizing" catalog titles by tweaking color/contrast to "pop" more, I don't think it has with those two titles. Just like the screencap comparison I linked to in the Event Horizon thread, there is a Cliffhanger comparison between the BD/previous DVD that bears out what I'm saying. Those caps are taken direct from disc as is, so any major discrepancy would be reflected there. No tweaks in color/contrast in the move to 1080p, or at least the kind suggested here (e.g. crushed shadow detail). I can't speak for The Postman or AvP.

Edit: Ok, a couple of those Cliffhanger caps due exhibit a fairly pronounced disparity in color (#5), but again I feel that's just a case of increased color accuracy on the BD vs DVD. Most of the shots in that comparison are extremely close in color/contrast.

Also, while it seems pretty obvious Event Horizon comes from the master used for '06 2-disc dvd, I guess it's possible Cliffhanger received a new scan. Even if so, it appears they resisted the urge to go for the "hot" contrast "pop" effect.
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post #6 of 10
9/6/11 at 2:31am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg Matty View Post

I purchased three new BD's recently; The Postman, Cliffhanger and Event Horizon. I own all three on SD-DVD and have watched them all recently so my comparison is fresh. All three have a contrast ratio much different than the SD-DVD. All three of them appear to have the overall exposure level dropped by a full stop (photographer speak) which helps preserve highlights but at the expense of shadow detail.

In the case of The Postman the effect is an improvement as I felt the SD-DVD was overexposed and much of the color washed out.

Cliffhanger has a similar feel but to a lesser extent. There is an opening scene in Çliffhanger where Stallone is hanging below a cliff and there is a bright sky in the background and the area below the cliff is in shadow. The SD-DVD appears to favor the shadow region below the cliff and in the BD version the highlights are preserved better. It is as if the contrast ratio is to great to be captured by either format and the SD-DVD goes for the shadows at the expense of highlights and BD saves highlights at the expense of the shadows.

Event Horizon is just darker period. I have already posted in that thread and most people seem to think the PQ if fine. Maybe my PJ is off but SD-DVD's, HD-DVD's and many of my other BD titles are fine. I really only notice this for titles where I have both BD and SD-DVD. Alien vs. Predator is spot on so I don't think I have a setup issue.

Anyone else notice this when comparing SD-DVD to BD?

Greg

Maybe. Hi-def discs both Hd-DVD's and Blu ray have higher chroma levels then DVD's this can give the picture more punch especially if the the contrast on the TV is turned up. An adjusted picture that looks great and film like with hi-def can look plain wrong in sd. It's not the resolution but the overall picture. If you have some of the combo HD-DVD's around play the high def side and when you have the picture where it look good to you flip the disc over and play that. Don't be surprised if it seemed like some one readjusted your TV while you weren't looking, you are just seeing the limits of SD DVD's. More than a few SD DVD were tweaked in brightness in the past, as well as for other things
As for Event Horizon the SD DVD was probably tweaked for home video the first time around. In the theater it was visually a dark movie and the Blu ray reflects that. Sure a little brighter might help, but it could have been an artistic decision to go darker. Oh well
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post #7 of 10
9/7/11 at 9:12pm
Thread Starter 
I followed the advice of one of you and tried playing back the SD-DVD Cliffhanger in my Panasonic DMP BD60 and lo and behold the picture was every bit as dark as the BD. So something is wrong with either my old Sony SD-DVD player, the Panasonic BD player or one or the other needs calibrating. I think the Panasonic must have been set to a lower brightness setting and I'll see if I can find that. So it isn't the SD-DVD vs. BD I thought it was. I should have done this simple test myself.

Thanks for the advice.

Greg
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post #8 of 10
9/9/11 at 9:00am
One problem is that both bluray and dvd is a 8bit format. Something has to give when you have 256 shades in one colorchannel. To much protection of the midtones makes the image lose contrast and of course look less accurate to the orginal source. Crushing blacks may destroy information in the low range but still look more accurate to the orginal source then a midtone protected master.

I prefer crushed blacks over burnt out highlights. And midtones that preserves some skindetail.
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post #9 of 10
12/1/12 at 6:29pm
Thread Starter 
Well I think I found out the problem in a very round about manner.

I finally got around to plugging my BD player directly into the PJ as opposed to routing it through my Onkyo 809 receiver. The image got much brighter with better contrast. I did a firmware upgrade on the 809 and this solved the problem. I don't know what was actually fixed but at least I know I wasn't going crazy. I was able to get satisfactory viewing by tweaking the PJ's settings but now with the 809 not screwing matters up, the picture is better than ever after yet another re-calibration. I don't know why I didn't try going straight to the PJ from the BD player before. Then again if we did that with all components to trouble shoot there would be so many variations you'd go mad trying to check them all.

Greg
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post #10 of 10
12/3/12 at 5:50pm
Some of these issues can be mismatches of "video versus computer" video levels, HDMI black-level settings, and similar items, too.
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