Ask questions to The Digital Bits team (Bill Hunt, Jeff Kleist et.al.)

[42041]

works (kind of) if I just go directly to the IP: http://69.7.187.170/

[NL197]

This is what happens every day for maybe a year or so, can't be sure of how long.

http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q...lbitserror.jpg

Never "connection timed out" or "taking too long to respond" or anything else, but I know it's there and I just have to reload a few times to get it.

[PeterTHX]

Originally Posted by NL197

This is what happens every day for maybe a year or so, can't be sure of how long.

http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q...lbitserror.jpg

Never "connection timed out" or "taking too long to respond" or anything else, but I know it's there and I just have to reload a few times to get it.

With Firefox I more often than not have to refresh the page to get the latest updates.

Not so with Internet Explorer 8.

Anyway, clear your cache & history, type in the address manually, and it should come up.

[Jeff Kleist]

High traffic has been the issue as I understand it. It/s working fine from my end

[Jeff Kleist]

I had a demo last night of Panasonic's 3D system under ideal cirumcstances with a lot of 3D HD porn style demo material and a few trailers. The undersea demo with the fish was incredibly impressive, with the illusion holding solid. The glasses, samsungs are much more comfortable for people wearing glasses, but with a non-objective analysis, and a lack of watching samsung in ideal conditions, I found merit toward 3D in the characteristics of the plasma presentation. Unfortunately there weren't any 3D movies ready to be shown yet. There will be a 3D anime demo this weekend at TAF, a custom experimental short that was pretty impressive.

[Jeff Kleist]

http://twitpic.com/1aemiv

Yuji Saito, CEO IMagine Music
Hiroki Kikuta- Composer best known for Secret of Mana
Jeff Lee, Myself and Akira Negi (our team)
Hiroaki Yura- Founder and Performer, Eminence Orchestra whose works appear on such games as Diablo 3, anime like Romeo x Juliet and the Hahrui movie.



Screening equipment at a major anime studio, the sign on the PS3 says that you have to use the controller as the remote

[MerrickG]

Jeff, reading the news on the Alien Anthology has me all excited about the fact that they have a new sound mix for the special edition (and far better) cut of Alien 3.

Im really having a hard time understanding how this set will be able to blow the Quad dvd set out of the water, but if anyone can do it its Charles.

You probably cant answer this, but any word if David Fincher was able to participate on this set?

[dcowboy7]

I just dont get reviewers:

Digitalbits gave LOTR about an 18 out of 20 rating for the video.
Yet hometheatreshack gave it 3 out of 5 (which would be like 12 out of 20 rating).

So a 12 rating vs. an 18 rating....are all u guys watchin the same flicks ?

Doesnt that seem a huge gap ?

[DaViD Boulet]

Originally Posted by dcowboy7

I just dont get reviewers:

Digitalbits gave LOTR about an 18 out of 20 rating for the video.
Yet hometheatreshack gave it 3 out of 5 (which would be like 12 out of 20 rating).

So a 12 rating vs. an 18 rating....are all u guys watchin the same flicks ?

Doesnt that seem a huge gap ?

Keep in mind it depends on one's point of reference. For instance, if someone had never seen or didn't have the HDTV recording to compare, how would they know what's missing in the BDs isn't just a result of the source material rather than DNR or filtering? Having the HDTV braodcast as proof positive that there is more detail in the film's native image than visible on the BD is a game-changer, but not everyone may be aware of it.

Depending on the type and degree of digital clean up tools that are applied, there may or may not be some of the obvious signs of typical DNR like waxy faxes etc... making it hard to know without having the original uncompressed master what lack of detail is merely the look of the film and what is specifically being filtered.

[Hep]

Originally Posted by dcowboy7

I just dont get reviewers:

Digitalbits gave LOTR about an 18 out of 20 rating for the video.
Yet hometheatreshack gave it 3 out of 5 (which would be like 12 out of 20 rating).

So a 12 rating vs. an 18 rating....are all u guys watchin the same flicks ?

Doesnt that seem a huge gap ?

The Digital Bits doesn't use a linear scale like you might expect. If I recall correctly they came up the rating out of 20 for BD, where the perfect DVD would be a 10/20, and BD scoring starts from there and goes to 20. So an 18/20 would be closer to an 8/10 than a 9/10.

[SpaceDog]

A 12 rating at Thedigitalbits.com would suggest "marginally better than the best DVD".

That said, I think holding out for Robert Harris to give some perspective would be good. I've been told that various production issues with LOTR Trilogy will result in what will be regarded as a soft image.

[Batman1980]

Originally Posted by SpaceDog

A 12 rating at Thedigitalbits.com would suggest "marginally better than the best DVD".

That said, I think holding out for Robert Harris to give some perspective would be good. I've been told that various production issues with LOTR Trilogy will result in what will be regarded as a soft image.

I think the first one will be marginally bad, the second one will be okay and the third one will be very good. Just what I think of course, wonder what Jeff and Bill think.

[Jeff Kleist]

Charlie has some suprises in store, I don't know if he got Fincher, but I'll say it's more likely than last time he'd participate, as reportedly he was not unhappy with the quad after the fact.

Digitalbits gave LOTR about an 18 out of 20 rating for the video.
Yet hometheatreshack gave it 3 out of 5 (which would be like 12 out of 20 rating).

So a 12 rating vs. an 18 rating....are all u guys watchin the same flicks ?

I would say that many sites, without seeing the sets or reading any reviews but ours, or looking at screenshots, have unrealistic expectations as to how good the movies can look in the first place. They were shot Super35 and very guerilla (over hill over dale, hauling cameras up mountains) with a pretty dreary pallete.

Hep is correct on our scale. I usually bump up or down a point-ish on whether the Blu-ray reached the potential of the film. So if a film looks a bit crappy on the negative, I might give it a 17 or a 16.5 instead of the 16 because it's hitting the source material wall

[captveg]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kleist

I would say that many sites, without seeing the sets or reading any reviews but ours, or looking at screenshots, have unrealistic expectations as to how good the movies can look in the first place. They were shot Super35 and very guerilla (over hill over dale, hauling cameras up mountains) with a pretty dreary pallete.

Exactly. I've tried to put this perspective into the massive LOTR thread, but said it much less diplomatically, at least in technical terms. Generally I went for the law of diminishing returns / approved by producers and Jackson / unrealistic expectations angle and got drowned out by the horrified crowds that demand a 10/10 on these releases, even though they have little or no information on the processes taken to bring about the Blu-ray....

[captveg]

Originally Posted by SpaceDog

That said, I think holding out for Robert Harris to give some perspective would be good.

I predict him recommending the set, albeit with some *slight* reservations about the *slight* DNR. However, if anything, he'll be able to provide some insight to the process to bring the films to Blu, especially as he usually has good information along those lines with Warner releases.

[Q?]

Hello Jeff, there's something I have a hard time understanding here, in Bill's review of LotR BD's he says something to the effect of that Fellowship will probably never look as good as the later two movies, but how can the flashbacks from Fellowship that are in the later two movies look better?
Any sort of clarification would be most welcomed
thanks.

[aygie]

I've not really been following the LOTR stuff but Empire magazine has a nice review of the BD this month, a few notable comments;

While the texture of Gollum's body was a grey smear on DVD, its now possible to see every Mordor-inflicted lash mark on his back (in several scenes with Frodo and Sam, he actually seems more textured than the Shirelings)

The Balrog is no longer blurrily obscured by haze - you can virtually see the fire-bastards scorched nose-hairs when it snorts.

To the popping colours (Hobbiton's lawns look impossibly green), add a thundering soundtrack. The DTS-HD 6.1 mix (not inferior Dolby TrueHD 5.1 which was originally announced) creates and immersive 360-degree soundfield which, assuming you've invested in surround speakers, pings arrows past your ears, plonks roaring trolls behind you and will quite literally traumatise your cat.

Its pretty much all praise, but they do note at the start of the review about the backlash from the fans about this not being the EE versions.

Also some interesting things about the Alien Anthology were said;

Charles de Lauzirika, one of the high-def-nicians working on the set, can't contain his excitement; "We've done a whole new sound mix for Alien3, bringing back some of the actors to reloop their dialogue. Aliens has never looked better and the extras are endless. As someone who looked at the Quadriolgy as pretty comprehensive, this frankly blows it out of the water."

[Vincent Pereira]

Originally Posted by Q!

Hello Jeff, there's something I have a hard time understanding here, in Bill's review of LotR BD's he says something to the effect of that Fellowship will probably never look as good as the later two movies, but how can the flashbacks from Fellowship that are in the later two movies look better?
Any sort of clarification would be most welcomed
thanks.

FELLOWSHIP is the only one of the three films that didn't go through a complete DI process. In a DI stage, the entire film is scanned (in this case at 2K), all the post work is done, and the 2K file is then recorded back out to film and converted to anamorphic digitally. With FELLOWSHIP, only 70% of the film was scanned/manipulated, then it that footage was recorded back out as Super-35 negative and intercut with the 30% of footage that wasn't ever scanned, then the movie went through a traditional photochemical finish and optical Super-35 to anamorphic conversion. The BDs of the later two will always look better because they're starting from those 2K DI files and just doing a conversion- they don't go back to the film output- whereas FELLOWSHIP has to be rescanned from the film, so you're essentially rescanning an output of a scan for 70% of the film.

As to why the flashbacks in the later films look better, my guess is they kept those 2K files of the 70% of FELLOWSHIP that was scanned/manipulated on a hard-drive, then simply imported those original 2K files of the flashbacks into the DIs of the latter two films. If this is the case- and that 70% of FELLOWSHIP that was 2K scanned is still in a computer somewhere- then theoretically you COULD make FELLOWSHIP look better, if one where to scan just the 30% of footage that's original camera negative anew and recombine it with those 2K scans that were originally created for all the manipulated footage. This, of course, would be very costly and time-consuming, though. Maybe when they put together the "Extended Edition" Blu-rays they can do this, who knows, but it would take time and money putting the film back together in a 2K environment.

Vincent

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Vincent Pereira

As to why the flashbacks in the later films look better, my guess is they kept those 2K files of the 70% of FELLOWSHIP

You “ guess” correct …….specifically in 10bit log Cineon colour space.
Q, think of it in simple terms as I mentioned a couple days ago on my thread that FOTR was a hybrid post. This necessitated an extra step(s) which obviously resulted in a slight generational loss in clarity or sharpness of the overall product FOTR compared to TTT or ROTK.

The real fly in the ointment here is (if the screenshots can indeed be trusted as accurate), why does the broadcast version of FOTR ‘look better’ than the Blu-ray edition of FOTR. I would really like Robert Harris to ask the guys at MPI on the WB lot to run the broadcast HD master side-by-side with the HD master used for the recent Blu-ray movie. Shouldn’t be difficult.

If the new HD master used for the Blu-ray edition is indeed better or at least on par with the old broadcast master, well, I think you can “guess” what happened further on down the pipeline during the encoding process………….if the screenshots are to be trusted and the broadcast encode wasn't sharpened.

[Doctorossi]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

I would really like Robert Harris to ask the guys at MPI on the WB lot to run the broadcast HD master side-by-side with the HD master used for the recent Blu-ray movie.

With or without a pony keg?