"Club Penton" - Ask questions to Hollywood insider "Penton-Man"

[Buddy Christ]

This is the first time I feel like I actually contributed something to this thread. I'm too tired to finish Avatar, I really liked the movie and how it looks and sounds is just a bonus for me.
On that note good night ya'll

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kleist

Who makes up they work at Focus Features? He's probably some tape monkey or off the shelf suit. Either way, I'm betting that by lunchtime someone is getting a talking to by their superior.

I see 3 possibilities –

1. His Daddy works at Focus.
2. It’s really Kram Sacul playing a trick on us...to get back at Vincent P.
3. He actually does work where he says he does and has been on the job for less than a month…
http://www.entertainmentcareers.net/id/?id=105998

[DenonCI]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kleist

Who makes up they work at Focus Features? He's probably some tape monkey or off the shelf suit. Either way, I'm betting that by lunchtime someone is getting a talking to by their superior.

I told him in that other thread to contact a mod so they can verify his employment. I think he won't be posting anymore under his current handle.

[Diesel]

4. He read the name somewhere and decided to use it in a sentence to sound smart



Which, said goal was not achieved

[Cinema Squid]

Originally Posted by Anthony P

you are right but at the same time you are completely wrong. Specs are specs but there ends up being a lot of "interpretation". What you need to realize is how compression works.

I have to agree with Xorp's fundamental point that software is not intrinsically inferior to hardware. You have to keep in mind that codecs almost always start their public life as a series of mathematical papers and a reference *software* implementation. The hardware is a subsequent cost- and performance-driven engineering exercise that implements this fundamental spec and there is nothing special or magic about that. Encoding for disc authoring is almost always done in software if I am not mistaken, so it's hardly reasonably to think the much simpler task of decoding in software (esp. offline or non-realtime decoding) is somehow necessarily flawed.

[Monkey]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

I see 3 possibilities –

1. His Daddy works at Focus.
2. It’s really Kram Sacul playing a trick on us...to get back at Vincent P.
3. He actually does work where he says he does and has been on the job for less than a month…
http://www.entertainmentcareers.net/id/?id=105998

LOL, the post was way too sophisticated to be Kram

[Jeff Kleist]

Software is not inherently inferior to hardware. That being said, I've never been particuarly impressed with PC playback software for Blu or DVD. Given that these programs are for the most part OEM excercises that make their money in volume not unit sales/feature upgrades, they probably don't spend huge sums on the development end of things, so who knows what's happening when Xylong pauses and makes his grab. I find it more LIKELY that a hardware device from a name manufacturer will do that sort of thing well.

[Vincent Pereira]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

Vincent, I hardly think that “Gangs” is a typical *caliber* Blu-ray in terms of technical transfer merit. It’s like instead of addressing the subject of nuclear energy you went straight to the victims of the Hiroshima bomb. ...

Penton-

I was responding to the point that Ken Brown made (https://forum.blu-ray.com/3178437-post13455.html), which I interpreted to mean something like, Regardless of what it looks like, if you like the film buy the Blu-ray 'cause only the movie itself matters!

...I'm sorry but I just don't buy that logic. If only the movie and not the quality of the presentation mattered, why upgrade to Blu-ray to begin with? Why even have this website? It's https://www.blu-ray.com/ , not www. welovemovies. com. If the quality of the image and sound is unimportant, why even bother having this place? It might as well be a simple film discussion board, and VHS "quality" should be enough. That's the point I was making and I stand by it. I don't care if my favorite movie of all time is released on Blu-ray- if the Blu-ray of said film is substandard*, I will not buy it, and would suggest that others avoid such Blu-rays as well.

Vincent

* Meaning, if it has been unnecessarily filtered, grain reduced, edge-enhanced or whatever- if there are legitimate film-source condition issues that prevent it from being "perfect' I'm not going to reject it (LOLA MONTES which was cobbled together from various film elements comes to mind), but if there are unnecessary digital 'enhancements' that in fact degrade the original film look, then yes, I will. Maybe this is just a 'drop in the bucket' that won't affect the studio's bottom line, but at least I will know that I am not supporting substandard product.

[Cinema Squid]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kleist

Software is not inherently inferior to hardware. That being said, I've never been particuarly impressed with PC playback software for Blu or DVD. Given that these programs are for the most part OEM excercises that make their money in volume not unit sales/feature upgrades, they probably don't spend huge sums on the development end of things, so who knows what's happening when Xylong pauses and makes his grab. I find it more LIKELY that a hardware device from a name manufacturer will do that sort of thing well.

Fair enough and I agree that the OEM software solutions for Blu-ray playback are sometimes suspect. However, I would guess from experience that the majority of direct screen captures on the internet are produced by a playback chain that includes ffmpeg's open source libavcodec AVC, VC-1 and MPEG-2 decoders as the anchor of the video chain. This is a piece of software that has been inspected worldwide by thousands of eyeballs and is constantly refined as issues are brought up as opposed to a piece of low-bid circuitry that has been thrown together in a Chinese factory.

If there is some suspicion of flaws in a given decoding chain based on results, then concrete examples of this would very constructive to the potential benefit of many. Otherwise, vague accusations of inaccuracy have little merit since one cannot prove a negative in defense.

[Ken Brown]

Originally Posted by Vincent Pereira

Penton-

I was responding to the point that Ken Brown made (https://forum.blu-ray.com/3178437-post13455.html), which I interpreted to mean something like, Regardless of what it looks like, if you like the film buy the Blu-ray 'cause only the movie itself matters!

I don't think the movie itself is the only thing that matters when it comes to a Blu-ray release, but it should be the primary reason for purchasing a disc. There are people who buy movies they hate simply because the PQ and AQ are amazing. The 'Avatar' thread is swarming with people who despised the film, but say they're going to buy the disc anyway. Likewise, there are people who avoid their favorite movies because minor to moderate issues render their AV presentations imperfect. Both scenarios are baffling to me

I was making a generalization - there can always be exceptions

[sharkshark]

Be it resolved that the fact that the VOD release of the highest grossing film of all time has more content in the form of value-added extras than the shiny-disc, physical release is a travesty, forthcoming release or no:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/22/v...s-with-avatar/

Discuss.

[Jeff Kleist]

If there is some suspicion of flaws in a given decoding chain based on results, then concrete examples of this would very constructive to the potential benefit of many. Otherwise, vague accusations of inaccuracy have little merit since one cannot prove a negative in defense.

Well, the only claim I make in this case is the the screengrabs he made do not match my end user experience, and that the grabs from a known chain of quality components much more accurately represent my end user experience on Apollo 13.

Don't forget that the crappiness of Chinese stuff also comes from low end bids on the DESIGN as well. At least at this point, as long as you buy a quality name like Sony, Panasonic, or Pioneer, you're not getting low bid designs, just assembly It's when the design phase is outsourced to some hack firm (NOT Sigma KJack ) who will put something on your plate as cheaply as possible that you start to run into issues.

Be it resolved that the fact that the VOD release of the highest grossing film of all time has more content in the form of value-added extras than the shiny-disc, physical release is a travesty, forthcoming release or no:

All that stuff is supposed to show up on the BD LIve end. Yes I think it's a fool's errand too. BDLive on the players is simply a waste. There's just not enough memory to handle it (a lot of the super long load times is swapping data in and out of memory). The future of BDLive IMO is using the disc as a key to shuffle data that can interact with the playback to a laptop or smartphone. Anyone who cares about BDLive type stuff will have one or the other.

[madmaxmedia]

Originally Posted by Ken Brown

I don't think the movie itself is the only thing that matters when it comes to a Blu-ray release, but it should be the primary reason for purchasing a disc. There are people who buy movies they hate simply because the PQ and AQ are amazing. The 'Avatar' thread is swarming with people who despised the film, but say they're going to buy the disc anyway. Likewise, there are people who avoid their favorite movies because minor to moderate issues render their AV presentations imperfect. Both scenarios are baffling to me

I was making a generalization - there can always be exceptions

If it's a movie I really like, then I will opt for the Blu-Ray as along as it is actually better in PQ than the DVD. That's not a really high bar (and I hope for better especially from my favorites), but seems to be a logical one.

[Cinema Squid]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kleist

Well, the only claim I make in this case is the the screengrabs he made do not match my end user experience, and that the grabs from a known chain of quality components much more accurately represent my end user experience on Apollo 13.

The complete end user experience is certainly the most important aspect of the whole kaboodle, but as far as shots go there is a hard difference between correct and incorrect at the lowest level - although there are varying degrees of incorrect. If shots exists (which they do and hopefully always will) then the most correct shots are preferred, so striving to improve everyone's accuracy seems to me a better approach than anything else.

Don't forget that the crappiness of Chinese stuff also comes from low end bids on the DESIGN as well. At least at this point, as long as you buy a quality name like Sony, Panasonic, or Pioneer, you're not getting low bid designs, just assembly It's when the design phase is outsourced to some hack firm (NOT Sigma KJack ) who will put something on your plate as cheaply as possible that you start to run into issues.

Indeed!

All this talking about capture chains does make me curious about the mysterious blu-ray.com hardware capture device.

Is it this (or is it a trade secret)?

[Jeff Kleist]

The only thing I can say is that they're not ripping discs

[Blaumann]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kleist

Well, the only claim I make in this case is the the screengrabs he made do not match my end user experience, and that the grabs from a known chain of quality components much more accurately represent my end user experience on Apollo 13.
....

A long time ago, when i still believed screenshots were objective, i had a bit of a mind opening experience at AVS. It was around the time, when the Simpsons movie came out on Blu-ray. There was "ringing" on the Simpsons movie, that looked like "EE". So i was howling with the pack and cried "How could they do that" etc, you know the phrases.

Then Alan Gouger, one of the admins of AVS, posted actual photographies from his screen, iirc using a Sony VPL-VW200, can't remember the playback chain. The ringing, that was on every pc screenshot from different sources, wasn't there. He posted several closeups with the same scenes as the pc screenshots.

There was much discussing about why it didn't show up. Alan even complained, that it can't be that pc screenshots would be considered the "gold standard" for pq evaluation, when some of these things don't even show up on his screen. I don't know, if that was ever resolved. But it pretty much turned my opinion about screenshots upside down. And i do know, that "screenshot science" is now considered pretty much an unfailable way to evaluate pq over at AVS. Which has led me to stop reading that forum btw.

So yeah, i agree that it is possible that some screenshots, even if they are produced with the greatest care, can show something else than what one experiences on another playback chain. Imo it's just not as cut and dry, as the believers in screenshots want us (and maybe themselves) to believe in.

[Oliver K]

Originally Posted by Blaumann

Hi,
they've recently updated their forum policy about posting screenshots, i guess this is what Penton meant. They sent a pm to every member about it. This is the message, it's also posted publicly in a sticky thread:

Thanks, I am not a member over there so I did not know.
Although the way it is implemted does not seem to be that much of a problem.

[Torsten Kaiser TLE]

Originally Posted by QuasidodoJr

It came from the stickied Avatar Blu-ray Release thread. He also followed it with this post...
https://forum.blu-ray.com/3180199-post2976.html

Originally Posted by spookmag
There are some like our movie Burn after Reading which was an upscale and had poor quality for Blu-ray.

Originally Posted by sharkshark

Hrm, why wouldn't they bother having at least a 1080p master for Burn to work with? I know nothing of the Avatar thread, but the whole thing smells weird.

A late April Fool's Day post. Almost funny. The HDCAMSR I held in my hand some months ago with a clearly native status must have been an illusion than. Probably courtesy of Terry Gilliam . Somebody apparently likes to read his name and loves the chatter.

[Oliver K]

Originally Posted by Vincent Pereira

Penton-

I was responding to the point that Ken Brown made (https://forum.blu-ray.com/3178437-post13455.html), which I interpreted to mean something like, Regardless of what it looks like, if you like the film buy the Blu-ray 'cause only the movie itself matters!

...I'm sorry but I just don't buy that logic. If only the movie and not the quality of the presentation mattered, why upgrade to Blu-ray to begin with? Why even have this website? It's https://www.blu-ray.com/ , not www. welovemovies. com. If the quality of the image and sound is unimportant, why even bother having this place? It might as well be a simple film discussion board, and VHS "quality" should be enough. That's the point I was making and I stand by it. I don't care if my favorite movie of all time is released on Blu-ray- if the Blu-ray of said film is substandard*, I will not buy it, and would suggest that others avoid such Blu-rays as well.

Vincent

* Meaning, if it has been unnecessarily filtered, grain reduced, edge-enhanced or whatever- if there are legitimate film-source condition issues that prevent it from being "perfect' I'm not going to reject it (LOLA MONTES which was cobbled together from various film elements comes to mind), but if there are unnecessary digital 'enhancements' that in fact degrade the original film look, then yes, I will. Maybe this is just a 'drop in the bucket' that won't affect the studio's bottom line, but at least I will know that I am not supporting substandard product.

Amen to that - we are all kidding ourselves when on one side we want a movie on Blu-Ray (as opposed to TV, VHS, LD, DVD, D-Theater, you name it) and on the other hand when the Blu-Ray is far from being as good as it could it is suddenly all about the movie. That does not help the advancement of the format in the least and negates the fact that we are NOT buying a Blu-Ray because it is all about the movie but mainly because it looks better on Blu-Ray and to a lesser degree also because it sounds better and to probably an even lesser degree because it has some gizmos like BDlive, animated menus, downloadable content etc.

And may I remind everybody regarding a catchy slogan that tries to put into very few words what Blu-Ray is all about that by the way I found on the website of a company named Sony DADC :

Blu-ray Disc - Beyond High Definition

It is not:

Blu-Ray disc - it is all about the movie

nor is it:

purchasing a title on Blu-Ray should always be about the film

or something like it

[Oliver K]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kleist

The only thing I can say is that they're not ripping discs

If there is really interest for screencaps to look a certain way for the good of the format and in order to not mislead people who view screncaps why not release the necessary information and therefore allow other sites how to grab them the same way?

As it is one could get the impression that this is more about looking down on other sites and accusing them of incorrct procedures while knowing exactly that they do not have the means nor the information to do better

Or to go one step further it could even make sense if the studios would acknowledge the fact that screencaps are accepted by now, if only for illustrative purposes, and therefore they could outline the necessary hardware and procedures needed to do them correctly.