Article on animation on high definition

[Deciazulado]

Hi-def animates toon makers

Originally Posted by George Miller, director of Happy Feet

When you go to (standard-def) DVD, where theoretically it will be watched by more people than would be watching it in a cinema, not only is the image smaller, you don't get all the detail we've been so used to seeing during the production of the movie.

Jill Culton, director of "Open Season" for Sony, has likewise been frustrated about seeing so much detail lost in the transfer to standard-def disc.

"We have two-hour meetings on the texture of a shirt," she says. "So for us, it's really great, because all this great artistic work we've done gets to be shown off in the best light."

To work around this more stringent scrutiny, Culton and the Sony team had to study and quality-check every nuance of every frame, blown up large on a full-resolution monitor, checking for subtle problems.

"(Hi-def) shows the work off in the best light, but at the same time you have to be incredibly careful, and it takes a little more time than it did to be that precise with every single frame of film," she says.

Culton says to her eye, there was no difference between the Blu-Ray images of "Open Season" and the images she saw in dailies.