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

[WickyWoo]

Does that include the game "pixel counters"? There's a lot of controversy of that method being used to determine the non-scaled resolution of games, right?

Yes, but I believe it's very much different for films. Seriously, I'm not the expert, just repeating the gist of what I've been told

[BillCable]

Originally Posted by Woody

It will not be reencoded. None of the announced previous HD DVD exclusives will be.

Not even Matrix? Holy hell does that suck!

[WickyWoo]

Not even Matrix? Holy hell does that suck!

Not under current plans

Honestly Matrix and V were some of their better HD DVD efforts anyway. Never saw Constantine or Batman on HD DVD so can't say on those

[WickyWoo]

It is general knowledge that the HD DVD of batman begins is very soft. The same "team" did Prestige and that is sharp as a tack. We blame VC-1 + hd dvd specs + warner DNRing to death. A re-encode would go a long way.

I should also point out that while the same PRODUCTION team did it. They are very different films cinematically, and more importantly completely different people did every step of the production process (telecine, compression, authoring etc)

[PeterTHX]

Originally Posted by WickyWoo

I should also point out that while the same PRODUCTION team did it. They are very different films cinematically, and more importantly completely different people did every step of the production process (telecine, compression, authoring etc)

Yes, but the clip of Batman Begins on the Samsung Demo (in MPEG2 no less, with bitrates in the mid 30's) is MUCH sharper than the HD DVD. I did a direct comparison. Same transfer.

Over 2 hour movie + all extras from DVD 2 disc + TrueHD + IME on 30GB = Helluva compressed disc. Disappointed in Warner for this.

[lgans316]

There is no denying the fact that both Batman Begins and V for Vendetta looked soft on HD DVD and is definitely not going to please many of us if Warner is going to do a blind port from HD DVD. I used to have the 20 Mbps MPEG-2 broadcast copy of Batman Begins on my DVR and not even a single scene on the HD DVD looked sharper (not EE) than the broadcast copy. Lots of high frequency details was missing on the HD DVD. However V definitely looked superior on HD DVD than the HD broadcast but still won't be sufficient to please the BLU fans whose expectations are always sky high on big titles. Let's remember that both titles have an average video bit rate of just 12-13 Mbps. It would be great if someone out here can influence WB to mint a new encode for the Blu-ray release of these titles which is expected to sell like hot cakes. It makes no sense to port from a 30 GB HD DVD onto a 50 GB Blu-ray though the announcements from Warner indirectly indicate that both titles will be ported from the HD DVD.

[WickyWoo]

Yes, but the clip of Batman Begins on the Samsung Demo (in MPEG2 no less, with bitrates in the mid 30's) is MUCH sharper than the HD DVD. I did a direct comparison. Same transfer.

Not necessarily, Those scenes were on the reels sent out for promo use on the Tonight show or whatnot, before the "official" telecine was done.

Either way, we all know it can look better, if Warner wanted to make it happen

[Polyh3dron]

Warner really overdoes that DNR.. I was over at efilm a while back when they were working on The Valley of Elah (color timing and other post production crap) and they were intentionally putting extra grain on to it to give the movie a grainy look and I thought to myself how people would hate seeing all that grain on Blu-ray and sure enough, when I saw it on Blu-ray that grain that I saw them put onto the movie was all DNR'd to shit.

[Alan Gordon]

Originally Posted by WickyWoo

Not under current plans

Honestly Matrix and V were some of their better HD DVD efforts anyway. Never saw Constantine or Batman on HD DVD so can't say on those

I had all of those films on HD DVD (with the exception of "The Matrix" films) and BB looked pretty good in my opinion during the daylight scenes (Bruce fighting with Ducard on the ice, Bruce cleaning up near the end, etc...), but I felt the darker scenes (most of the film) lacked the "oomph" it could have had WB given it a better bit-rate.

While I'm still looking forward to BB on BD, I must admit that when Max said that WB "MAY" consider "optomizing" BB for Blu-ray, I was rather hopeful... not only for PQ reasons, but to see what was said about the release.

You see a few months before this title was released... and shortly before it was announced, Amir did a lot of crowing on AVSForum regarding upgrades to the VC-1 encoder that allowed them to encode at lower bitrates with the same result in PQ. He mentioned that the first title they used this on was an upcoming title (which he later stated was BB if I remember correctly). I also believe, if my memory isn't failing me, that he also stated that with future enhancements they could get bitrates down to below 10mbps average... part of me wants to say he mentioned 7-8mbps, but I could be wrong as I simply don't remember everything word for word... but I would have loved to have seen a BD optomized BB just to see what people said regarding the difference in PQ given how much crowing Amir did regarding the HD DVD release.

Originally Posted by Woody

It will not be reencoded. None of the announced previous HD DVD exclusives will be.

How about the unnanounced?! Just kidding!

Hey Penton, with you being the YouTube man that you are, what did you think of Bill Hunt's "Monkey On A Motorcycle" clip?!

~Alan

[mhafner]

Originally Posted by Polyh3dron

Warner really overdoes that DNR.. I was over at efilm a while back when they were working on The Valley of Elah (color timing and other post production crap) and they were intentionally putting extra grain on to it to give the movie a grainy look and I thought to myself how people would hate seeing all that grain on Blu-ray and sure enough, when I saw it on Blu-ray that grain that I saw them put onto the movie was all DNR'd to shit.

Does it get any dumber and schizophrenic than this?

[frank_t]

Originally Posted by WickyWoo

Not necessarily, Those scenes were on the reels sent out for promo use on the Tonight show or whatnot, before the "official" telecine was done.

Either way, we all know it can look better, if Warner wanted to make it happen

Right. So do we "reward" warner with our hard earned cash or stick it to them and demand better?

[WickyWoo]

Right. So do we "reward" warner with our hard earned cash or stick it to them and demand better?

I'll say that they (correctly) assume that the sales it will cost them do not equal the cost, and more importantly expenditure of time and resources to do so, especially since they're going to do another dip on it when the third one hits and can use it as a selling point

Unfortunate as that may be

[neo_reloaded]

Batman Begins has a gorgeous transfer. There is very little to be dissatisfied with when actually watching it, and not performing dubious Photoshop resizes to try to prove effective resolution or some such nonsense. Could it look better? Most likely. But could the same be said for just about any Blu-ray release? Absolutely.

It seems ridiculous to be making such a big fuss about the beautiful transfers for BB, The Matrix, etc. just because they were also used for HD DVD, when there are plenty of lower-quality "Blu-ray exclusive" transfers floating around out there.

[AlexanderG]

It wouldn't cost that much to re encode on Blu. There was talk of this after Warner's switch to Blu. One of the deciding factors (among other things, such as sales of course) was the cost effectiveness to encode on Blu Ray. Due to the higher storage space and bandwidth, it's possible to just crank up the average bitrate and let 'er rip, similar to FOX's methods of encoding for Blu. This method allows for much more hands OFF encoding, and thus is far cheaper to encode since there's far less tweaking to be done. This was indeed one of the selling points of Blu.

With that being said, Batman Begins on HD-DVD was a whopping 12 mbps abr encode. Pretty damn low, even for HD-DVD standards. Considering also that the BD version is going to use Bonus View, we're not dealing with a second encode of the same movie on the disc. We're also lucky enough to get a slew of bonus features entirely in SD. So we're going to be left with half of the BD-50 disc unused since the only exclusive bonus feature we get is the Dark Knight Prologue, which is 6 minutes long.

Sigh, what a disgrace if the movie isn't Blu Ray optimized. The HD-DVD encode is a classic example of an encode being dumbed down for HD-DVD's low bandwidth to accomodate for lossless audio AND PIP. The result is a picture that has been smoothed and softened to hell in order prevent major artifacting. I'm not one that is usually gung-ho about bitrate, but no 1080p HD film should EVER have a bitrate of 12 mbps. At least we can hope for the Dark Knight Prologue to be Blu optimized, right?

[BillCable]

So the plan is to wait for the optimized encode in 2011.

I'm much more upset about the Matrix, because nobody's ever going back to the well on that franchise, so there won't be an opportunity down the line to hock an optimized encode. What we get now is the best we'll ever get.

[savage1984]

Originally Posted by BillCable

So the plan is to wait for the optimized encode in 2011.

I'm much more upset about the Matrix, because nobody's ever going back to the well on that franchise, so there won't be an opportunity down the line to hock an optimized encode. What we get now is the best we'll ever get.

HA, yeah right. And not to clutter Penton's thread, but to the studio's, there's always room for a double dip.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by blitz6speed

It is general knowledge that the HD DVD of batman begins is very soft. The same "team" did Prestige and that is sharp as a tack. We blame VC-1 + hd dvd specs + warner DNRing to death. A re-encode would go a long way.

Gawd, wait till patrick99 reads that ^ .

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by lgans316

There is no denying the fact that both Batman Begins and V for Vendetta looked soft on HD DVD and is definitely not going to please many of us if Warner is going to do a blind port from HD DVD. I used to have the 20 Mbps MPEG-2 broadcast copy of Batman Begins on my DVR and not even a single scene on the HD DVD looked sharper (not EE) than the broadcast copy.

Here comes patrick for sure.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Alan Gordon

Hey Penton, with you being the YouTube man that you are, what did you think of Bill Hunt's "Monkey On A Motorcycle" clip?!

~Alan

I don't follow.
PM me a link.
I haven't seen it.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Polyh3dron

Warner really overdoes that DNR.. I was over at efilm a while back when they were working on The Valley of Elah (color timing and other post production crap) and they were intentionally putting extra grain on to it to give the movie a grainy look and I thought to myself how people would hate seeing all that grain on Blu-ray and sure enough, when I saw it on Blu-ray that grain that I saw them put onto the movie was all DNR'd to shit.

Careful, talk like that will get michel perturbed !