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

[saprano]

Thanks for the reply penton.

i guess i read your original post wrong, i was reading it as what the filmmakers see on the final blu-ray that we take home, they were surprised at the look of it. but you were talking about the video master wich is something different correct?

anyway....you learn something ne-....ya'll know the rest.

[micks_address]

i was until 1.30 am irish time..man i need coffee this morning. was worth it though... HD broadcast was lovely... think golf is my favorite sport in HD at the moment... i just wish i could see more HD here in ireland... Fairplay to Harrington... would be nice to see himself and Tiger and Garcia in action together..

Originally Posted by horseflesh

Watching the golf Penton??
Harrington in with a shout again

[4K2K]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

Sometimes characteristics are revealed on some HD masters that were not intended by the filmmaker. Today’s full resolution consumer displays showing their Blu-ray movies running in their Blu-ray players are more "capable" of "mimicking" the video master than the film theatrical presentation, for one, due to the film out process for release prints and the inherent nature of theatrical presentation with its weave, optics and projector light output.

Bottom line, it’s all about the video masters.
The final outcome in optimal cases can be better or similar to the theatrical presentation (hypersensitivity disorders aside), so, in essence your "eyes are trained well enough" and I wouldn’t worry about your visual acuity or the format in general.

Could characteristics be revealed that weren't intended when displayed on LCD HDTVs because the colour resolution of the masters has been reduced to 8 bit 4:2:0 and because of poor black levels on some HDTVs (as well as limited colour range compared to cinemas)? As some players can now output increased colour resolution (like Deep Colour) and I'd imagine some HDTVs can receive it too, would it ever be possible to store full colour res on Blu-ray?

Are any consumer displays using Blu-ray better at displaying an uncompressed 4k master than what is shown at the première? What if it was a 4k digital cinema presentation? If so which consumer displays would be best? (projectors/Plasma/LED backlit LCD? - I'd assume projectors would be closest but would any LED LCDs get close?)

Are there any HDTVs that can show about the same colour/brightness range as a cinema? Is Plasma still better than LCD for this? What about locally dimming LED backlit LCDs?

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by 4K2K

Could characteristics be revealed that weren't intended when displayed on LCD HDTVs because the colour resolution of the masters has been reduced to 8 bit 4:2:0 and because of poor black levels on some HDTVs (as well as limited colour range compared to cinemas)? As some players can now output increased colour resolution (like Deep Colour) and I'd imagine some HDTVs can receive it too, would it ever be possible to store full colour res on Blu-ray?

Are any consumer displays using Blu-ray better at displaying an uncompressed 4k master than what is shown at the première? What if it was a 4k digital cinema presentation? If so which consumer displays would be best? (projectors/Plasma/LED backlit LCD? - I'd assume projectors would be closest but would any LED LCDs get close?)

Are there any HDTVs that can show about the same colour/brightness range as a cinema? Is Plasma still better than LCD for this? What about locally dimming LED backlit LCDs?

For Cripes-sakes 4K, I don’t get paid per answered question around here!
What is that ………..10 questions in one post !

Hey, I’ll respond to Rob Tomlin and try to allude to some of your astute observations all in one comment as my time is limited. We have other people here that are knowledgeable, who may be able to tackle each of your questions individually and elaborate over time……..Deci, JadedRaverLA, Bobby Henderson, etc.

I’ve got to put my nose to the grindstone for the next few weeks, as I also took vacation days after our European holiday and it’s now catch up time.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Rob Tomlin

Personally, I would go much further with this statement (I think you are being too generous to theaters).

I think the vast majority of movies that we are getting on Blu-ray look much better than what I can see at my local cineplex, for a variety of reasons.

You have to go to a very high quality theater (such as The Samuel Goldwyn Theater ) to get a top notch film presentation these days.....and even then, Blu-ray can still look better for technical reasons. I very much expect that this may be the case with OUATIA due to the nature of that film's restoration.

Hi Rob!
Did you survive the quake intact ?
Any damage to the babe magnet ?

The cases in which I appreciate the superiority of theatrical film presentation, is with its ability to handle grain and its colorspace.

In regards to the former, with some films the theatrical presentation can be more pleasing because there is more of a seamless consistent look to the entire picture as viewers are seeing the digital intermediate over-layed with grain from the film out process and everything appears more homogenous from shot-to-shot and scene-to-scene compared to some Blu-rays that were produced with the intention of being as transparent as possible to the video master, which can resolve the inconsistent grainy structure as seen on the OCNs.

In regards to the later (colorspace), print film dynamic is superior to Blu-ray which is video. For me, this is most noticeable in the peak brights or whites which can appear clipped (or harsh) on Blu-ray as compared to theatrical film presentation. On the other hand, Blu-ray color is very good and I think that when hobbyists are truly honest and unbiased, the inherent superiority of print film dynamic really isn’t much an issue to them. It’s mostly only people that see film and video 5 days a week, 8 hours or more a day at work that readily recognize film’s *color* superiority.

And in regards to *color* and theatrical presentation and Director’s intent, someone remind me to comment about Sling Blade when I return……….interesting real world inside story.

Gotta run.
Later.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by horseflesh

Watching the golf Penton??
..............

Was………Yup.

[Bobby Henderson]

Originally Posted by 4K2K

As some players can now output increased colour resolution (like Deep Colour) and I'd imagine some HDTVs can receive it too, would it ever be possible to store full colour res on Blu-ray?

It's possible to do so, but not without a couple of drawbacks.

Some newer, higher end LCD and plasma based televisions are compatible with Deep Color. The numbers of these televisions compared to the entire install base of HDTV sets is probably a small percentage. The concern is not enough people would see a real benefit of a Deep Color encoded Blu-ray to devote a big part of the bit budget to that.

If you up the color depth in the video stream you dramatically increase file size. BD capacity is finite. The trade-off for deeper color is more severe levels of lossy video data compression to get that extra amount of data to fit into the same space.

Originally Posted by 4K2K

Are any consumer displays using Blu-ray better at displaying an uncompressed 4k master than what is shown at the première? What if it was a 4k digital cinema presentation?

No consumer electronics equipment has the ability to show an uncompressed 4K resolution d-cinema master. No HDTV sets have 4K native resolution either. 2K d-cinema has slightly better native resolution than 1080p HDTV. 3-chip DLP projectors, such as the Christie CP2000 series, have great capabilities. I like my Sony Bravia XBR4, but I'll be the first to admit it is no match for a professional series d-cinema projector.

D-cinema installations don't show uncompressed material either, although they do run their video at much higher bit rates than what is typically used on Blu-ray.

[4K2K]

Originally Posted by Bobby Henderson

It's possible to do so, but not without a couple of drawbacks.

Some newer, higher end LCD and plasma based televisions are compatible with Deep Color. The numbers of these televisions compared to the entire install base of HDTV sets is probably a small percentage. The concern is not enough people would see a real benefit of a Deep Color encoded Blu-ray to devote a big part of the bit budget to that.

If you up the color depth in the video stream you dramatically increase file size. BD capacity is finite. The trade-off for deeper color is more severe levels of lossy video data compression to get that extra amount of data to fit into the same space.

I read somewhere that it won't necessarily always increase the file size because you wouldn't need to add dithering like you do now. I suppose if it did increase the file size a bit you could just compress it a bit more.

So when you say "It's possible to do so" does that mean that studios could today put a 10 or 12 bit colour video or Deep Colour or other higher colour format on a Blu-ray disc and a number of Blu-ray players (like Panasonic DMPBD50?)/HDTVs would be able to play it back/display it (eg. all Blu-ray players and HDTVs that say that are fully HDMI 1.3 (Deep Colour) compatible? If it is possible on a few players/TVs, maybe they could add a few demo clips/trailers in Deep Colour or 10/12 bit colour on a Blu-ray disc, accessible only via compatible players.

So the percentage of players/TVs would be so low currently that it wouldn't currently make economic sense but it may do some time in the future (does it require more than HDMI 1.3 (Deep Colour) compatibility)?

No consumer electronics equipment has the ability to show an uncompressed 4K resolution d-cinema master. No HDTV sets have 4K native resolution either. 2K d-cinema has slightly better native resolution than 1080p HDTV. 3-chip DLP projectors, such as the Christie CP2000 series, have great capabilities. I like my Sony Bravia XBR4, but I'll be the first to admit it is no match for a professional series d-cinema projector.

D-cinema installations don't show uncompressed material either, although they do run their video at much higher bit rates than what is typically used on Blu-ray.

So I guess in some ways cinema still is better than consumer technology, like in colour space/resolution.

[saprano]

All this film talk is making blu-ray seem inferior

ha

blu-ray may not match the resolution or color of what we at the movies but to me it still looks better at home. its brighter,sharper, and more colorful....why is that? is it our smaller displays?

speaking of uncompressed video, doesn't that take up terabytes of space?

[Rob Tomlin]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

Hi Rob!
Did you survive the quake intact ?
Any damage to the babe magnet ?

..

The cases in which I appreciate the superiority of theatrical film presentation, is with its ability to handle grain and its colorspace.

In regards to the former, with some films the theatrical presentation can be more pleasing because there is more of a seamless consistent look to the entire picture as viewers are seeing the digital intermediate over-layed with grain from the film out process and everything appears more homogenous from shot-to-shot and scene-to-scene compared to some Blu-rays that were produced with the intention of being as transparent as possible to the video master, which can resolve the inconsistent grainy structure as seen on the OCNs.

In regards to the later (colorspace), print film dynamic is superior to Blu-ray which is video. For me, this is most noticeable in the peak brights or whites which can appear clipped (or harsh) on Blu-ray as compared to theatrical film presentation. On the other hand, Blu-ray color is very good and I think that when hobbyists are truly honest and unbiased, the inherent superiority of print film dynamic really isn’t much an issue to them. It’s mostly only people that see film and video 5 days a week, 8 hours or more a day at work that readily recognize film’s *color* superiority.

And in regards to *color* and theatrical presentation and Director’s intent, someone remind me to comment about Sling Blade when I return……….interesting real world inside story.

Gotta run.
Later.

..

[frank_t]

Originally Posted by saprano

All this film talk is making blu-ray seem inferior

ha

blu-ray may not match the resolution or color of what we at the movies but to me it still looks better at home. its brighter,sharper, and more colorful....why is that? is it our smaller displays?

speaking of uncompressed video, doesn't that take up terabytes of space?

always wondered what 2 hours of uncompressed video with pcm audio would consume in terms of physical space.

must be enormous!

[kjacobs03]

Originally Posted by frank_t

always wondered what 2 hours of uncompressed video with pcm audio would consume in terms of physical space.

must be enormous!

When I take screen captures at 1080p, they are 7.91MB per frame uncompressed BMP. That would be just shy of 1.4 Terrabites for a 2 hour movie.

[Bobby Henderson]

Standard 1080p HD content uncompressed consumes over 1.4 billion bits of data per second.

Originally Posted by 4K2K

I read somewhere that it won't necessarily always increase the file size because you wouldn't need to add dithering like you do now. I suppose if it did increase the file size a bit you could just compress it a bit more.

An uncompressed 2K or 4K master shouldn't have any dithering at all. Dithering implies a limited, indexed color palette -like a web-safe GIF from an old web page.

Higher bit depths per color channel increases file size more than just a bit. 8-bit color yields 24-bits per pixel. Multiply that by 2,037,600 pixels. Just going to 10-bit color adds over 4 million bits of data to each frame of video. It's a 150% bandwidth increase to do 12-bit color. You double the size of the master by going to 16-bit depth.

I think a lot of people have some strange illusion that video on Blu-ray is somehow very mildly compressed or even uncompressed. The truth is MPEG-4 AVC and VC-1 streams on Blu-ray have video compression ratios as severe or even moreso than what you typically see with a MPEG-2 based 480p DVD.

When Blu-ray is running at peak video bit rates (40Mb/s or more), the compression level is at least a good 35:1. Video bandwidth often dips well below that. Lots of movies have the bitrate stay under the 30Mb/s level much of the time. Adding in more bits of color depth will force BD authors to master discs at even more severe levels of data compression. At some point the increased levels of data compression will diminish any benefits of deepening the color depth.

This is one reason why I ridicule the "HD quality" movie product from AppleTV and other vendors. The video is so severely compressed that a great deal of the spatial detail and color handling has been killed in the effort of squeezing the data to such an extreme degree.

Movie studios can create a "deep color" Blu-ray disc whenever they feel like doing so. They just have to deal with the fact not much equipment can currently handle wide gamut video.

Originally Posted by saprano

blu-ray may not match the resolution or color of what we at the movies but to me it still looks better at home. its brighter,sharper, and more colorful....why is that? is it our smaller displays?

That's a major part of it. It's easy to make video look good on a tiny screen. It's a much harder challenge to make film or video look good on a large, commercial movie theater screen. The task demands powerful, high quality projection with excellent quality lenses. The auditorium has to be properly designed. I've been to more than a few theaters with really screwy projection port placements and other odd design flaws. The equipment has to be well maintained.

When the theatrical projection and sound system is properly designed, setup and maintained it beats the crap out of all but the most high end of home installations. I feel sorry for people who have access only to poor quality movie theaters. It's great to be able to see a movie in a well run movie theater. I like my home theater system, but I prefer to watch movies in good quality movie theaters. And that's how it should be.

If we want to get into a simple comparison of digital media, digital cinema beats Blu-ray hands down. Given the opportunity I absolutely would choose a 2K JPEG2000 d-cinema file over any Blu-ray file 100% of the time.

[Anthony P]

All this film talk is making blu-ray seem inferior
ha

don't forget this is film talk and not cinema talk. What I mean is that the "perfect" film is much better, but in the movie theatre you have copies, like VHS with every playback there is some deterioration to the film, "bulb" could be old (colour change), focus could be slightly off.... so chances are that the BD could version could actualy be better then what you saw at the cinema depending hen you saw it.

blu-ray may not match the resolution or color of what we at the movies but to me it still looks better at home. its brighter,sharper, and more colorful....why is that? is it our smaller displays?

could be, but like I pointed before it can also be the presentation, if you have yoour set-up at home perfectly calibrated and at the theatre you watched it in a bad cinema (where neither the owner, manager nor projectionist care) it could actualy have more detail and better colour.

speaking of uncompressed video, doesn't that take up terabytes of space?

the math is easy but you need to know what you want. For example, 1080 or 720? 24p or 60i or 30p? 8-bit, 10bit or 12 bit? for example it could be
108x1920=2M pixels *8*3=49M bits per image *24= 1,194Mb/s= .54 TB/h so a 2h movie would need more then a TB for video (on the other hand if you chage the specs so will the number you get.

[Anthony P]

I think a lot of people have some strange illusion that video on Blu-ray is somehow very mildly compressed or even uncompressed. The truth is MPEG-4 AVC and VC-1 streams on Blu-ray have video compression ratios as severe or even moreso than what you typically see with a MPEG-2 based 480p DVD.

even though it is true, you have the flip side, the reality is that the world is formed of big things. If, for an extreme example, your screen is completely black for a few seconds then 1 pixel or 1 billion pixels, uncompressed or way overly compressed will give the exact same result.
The reality is that as the number of pixels increaces the more you should be able to group them together and so the easier to compress without losing quality, an extreme example of this would be assuming a particular film stock has a resolution of 2K if you scan it at 16k you won't get more information just that for every 8x8 pixels in the 16 representing one in the 2k will be more or less the same so they could be grouped together and no data is lost.

Adding in more bits of color depth will force BD authors to master discs at even more severe levels of data compression.

true, plus, unlike resolution, bit depth makes compression harder (i.e. more destructive) , what I mean is that imagine you have a block the pixels are all blue and a) if 4:2:0 they are all the same but if b) 4:4:4 they are slightly different. If in a) they are compressed to a block then no data is lost, but if the same is done with b) then data is lost.

[Anthony P]

When I take screen captures at 1080p, they are 7.91MB per frame uncompressed BMP. That would be just shy of 1.4 Terrabites for a 2 hour movie.

don't forget that a computer would most likely be set up with 12 bit colour (i.e. 32) while BD is at 8 bit (i.e. 24)

[Deciazulado]

1080 x 1920 pixels = 2,073,600 pixels
2,073,600 x 24bit color = 49,766,400 bits
49,766,400 x 24 frames per second = 1,194,393,600 bits per second (1194 million bits per second)

Compressing a still frame in these formats with an image editing app gave this results:

Original File = 49,766,400 = 5.9 MB = 1:1
PNG = 21,596,384 = 2.6 MB = 2:1
JPEG-2000 lossless = 16,350,408 = 1.95 MB = 3:1
JPEG best = 15,754,504 = 1.9 MB = 3:1
JPEG-2000 -1 setting = 9,380,136 = 1.1 MB = 5:1
JPEG -1 setting = 5,440,544 = 664 KB = 9:1

video has also compression redundancy between frames that stills don't have

Here's figures for different bitrates

BD 1194 Mb/s @ 40 Mb/s is 30 to 1
BD 1194 Mb/s @ 30 Mb/s is 40 to 1
BD 119/ Mb/s @ 20 Mb/s is 60 to 1
BD 1194 Mb/s @ 15 Mb/s is 80 to 1
BD 1194 Mb/s @ 10 Mb/s is 120 to 1


(Now as video color systems reduces the color bandwidth so the full signal is half, you could alternatively say in sense that

BD 1194 Mb/s @ 40 Mb/s with color space/2 is 15:1
BD 1194 Mb/s @ 30 Mb/s with color space/2 is 20:1
BD 1194 Mb/s @ 20 Mb/s with color space/2 is 30:1
BD 1194 Mb/s @ 15 Mb/s with color space/2 is 40:1
BD 1194 Mb/s @ 10 Mb/s with color space/2 is 60:1

from the video master)

[4K2K]

Originally Posted by Bobby Henderson

Standard 1080p HD content uncompressed consumes over 1.4 billion bits of data per second.



An uncompressed 2K or 4K master shouldn't have any dithering at all. Dithering implies a limited, indexed color palette -like a web-safe GIF from an old web page.

I wasn't talking about 8 bit in total per pixel like GIF.

What I meant was, in the previous posts it's been mentioned that film has a greater colour range than 8 bit per colour channel. When they scan the film in the digital intermediate stage, they scan at a higher colour depth than 8 bit per colour channel. They might scan at something like 16 bit per colour channel (maybe using log colour, but for the purposes of this post I'll assume linear 16 bit per colour channel - though it might be something like 10 or 12 bit pcc I don't really know).

To create the Blu-ray, first they need to change that higher colour depth to 8 bit per colour channel. They can either divide the 16 bit pcc value to get an 8 bit pcc value (and round to the nearest 8 bit whole number), and that is probably what they do for some titles, but in some scenes, doing it this way I've read, can introduce banding.

Another way of converting the higher colour depth (16 bit pcc?) original to 8 bit pcc is to use dithering. This will prevent banding, but it will have the disadvantage of introducing random noise into the picture, it will also have the disadvantage of needing a higher bitrate to store because the picture content is more random. This is why, instead of using dithering (to prevent banding) to get from the higher bitdepth per colour channel to 8 bit per colour channel for use on Blu-ray, which I assumed was used for a number of titles, they could store something like 10 or 12 bit per channel colour in the encoded video file instead and it might need less bandwidth as undithered 10/12 bit might be easier to encode than dithered 8 bit pcc.

[milou6]

Technically, could current players read a file with deep 12 bit color, discarding/translating the additional color space? Does the BD spec cover anything beyond 8 bit color?

[NutsAboutPS3]

Originally Posted by Anthony P

don't forget that a computer would most likely be set up with 12 bit colour (i.e. 32) while BD is at 8 bit (i.e. 24)

No, I wonder if this is where people get the idea from that Blu-ray is somehow limited. PCs with 32 bit colour actually only have 24 bit colour, i.e. 8 bits per channel, just the same as Blu-ray. The extra 8 bits are just for alpha (transparency). Current 32 bit display cards would gain zero benefit from a move to greater video colour depth, they simply can't render it. Current monitors are typically even more limited, not being able to display 256 distinct levels per colour channel.