Archived: Insiders Thread

[Knight-Errant]

Originally Posted by DaViD Boulet

BTW, wanted to let everyone know what a gorgeous disc the new BD release of The Patriot is. That and 7-years in Tibet are both REFERENCE BDs. The Patriot exhibits natural film grain just like the source, but looks very unprocessd and oh-so-detailed and naturally "film like". Stunning.

see my review at dvdfile.com

Oh lovely, this came in the post this morning

[milou6]

Originally Posted by Paul H

paidgeek:

Could you please ask your sources to confirm if Samsung's two new Blu-ray players, the BD-P1400 and BD-P2400 will play DTS-HD Master Audio, as stated on this Blu-ray.com page. All other sources I can find, refer only to "DTS-HD".

Thanks,

Paul

Yes please, someone answer this -- and please explain what spec to look for in hdmi to know if it will output bitstream ("hdmi 1.3b"? "hdmi 1.3 but actually does what 1.3 is supposed to do"?). Grr.

[BTBuck1]

Originally Posted by DaViD Boulet

BTW, wanted to let everyone know what a gorgeous disc the new BD release of The Patriot is. That and 7-years in Tibet are both REFERENCE BDs. The Patriot exhibits natural film grain just like the source, but looks very unprocessd and oh-so-detailed and naturally "film like". Stunning.

see my review at dvdfile.com

agreed, aside from that distracting verticle bar on the right side of the screen in a few of the shots. it was like the color was darker from top to bottom on a 3 inch strip. You can see it at the beginning of scene 4 where Mel is trying to keep his son from acting a fool. right after Mel says "be quiet" look to the right of the screen the kid turns his head almsot like he's looking at it, lol. This imperfection pops up several times in the flick, may be inherent in the Master, seems like it's something they could have fixed though. PaidGeek can you shed light on this?

This small blemish steals away an almost assured perfect score IMO.

[Blackraven]

People should be patient with Fox/Mgm as they seem to be undergoing final testing of the BD+ platform as well as testing the new AACS keys.

It may be frustrating but it is best that everyone remain as patient as possible

We should hopefully see a release from them before the year ends.

[paidgeek]

Originally Posted by Paul H

paidgeek:

Could you please ask your sources to confirm if Samsung's two new Blu-ray players, the BD-P1400 and BD-P2400 will play DTS-HD Master Audio, as stated on this Blu-ray.com page. All other sources I can find, refer only to "DTS-HD".

Thanks,

Paul

I'll see what I can find out..

[Member-9711]

Paidgeek,

I have a questions regarding catalogue releases. How come some of your recent titles like Cruel Intentions and The Patriot have subtitles in many languages like English, Spanish, Swedish, Danish etc and others don't? I very much appreciate those extra subtitles and would like to see these many on even more catalogue releases.

Other than that I would just like to say that the remastered version of the fifth element is a masterpiece. Keep up the good work

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Blackraven

People should be patient with Fox/Mgm as they seem to be undergoing final testing of the BD+ platform as well as testing the new AACS keys.

It may be frustrating but it is best that everyone remain as patient as possible

We should hopefully see a release from them before the year ends.

Sigurado.

[paidgeek]

Originally Posted by Dofflan

Paidgeek,

I have a questions regarding catalogue releases. How come some of your recent titles like Cruel Intentions and The Patriot have subtitles in many languages like English, Spanish, Swedish, Danish etc and others don't? I very much appreciate those extra subtitles and would like to see these many on even more catalogue releases.

Other than that I would just like to say that the remastered version of the fifth element is a masterpiece. Keep up the good work

Thanks for your encouraging comments.

The reason that some titles have many more subtitles that others is that we occasionally use just a few versions of a title to service many markets. With Blu-ray we have a video standard that works worldwide, we can theoretically make one version of a movie to service all markets. In practice this would not generally happen because of censorship issues, but at least we can more efficient than we are with DVD.

[thebluemax]

I would rather have FOX release superb BD'S with the best PQ and SQ possible, and with the proper safeguards for piracy. This way both Fox and BD supporters will be happy. Just look at the way Universal is churning out junk discs, both in quanitity and quality.

I LOVE BLU-RAY

[gand41f]

Originally Posted by DaViD Boulet

BTW, wanted to let everyone know what a gorgeous disc the new BD release of The Patriot is. That and 7-years in Tibet are both REFERENCE BDs. The Patriot exhibits natural film grain just like the source, but looks very unprocessd and oh-so-detailed and naturally "film like". Stunning.

Let me second this, I especially loved Seven Years in Tibet. SPHE has really raised the bar recently. (I'd comment on Disney too but Netflix refuses to send me any of their recent releases...grr.)

Keep up the good work!

thanks
gandalf

[patrick99]

Paidgeek,

Many thanks to everyone at Sony Pictures who was involved with the remastered Fifth Element. It looks wonderful.

[Weez_Dawg]

Paidgeek,

To add what one person said about subtitles, keep them coming. Sony is about the only studio that offers Korean in almost every BD. My wife is Korean and it helps her out when she can read the subtitles too. Many of my purchases have been based on this. I don't really understand why more subtitles are not offered on all BD but I am happy with Sony.

[onyxx]

Paidgeek,

I think that you and your colleagues at Sony Pictures have done a fantastic job in the video/audio department lately. It has gotten to be so good that I don't have to wait for a review before a purchase of a Sony title, I know that it will be top notch! With that said I would also want to give you some negative feedback, why do you offer so little or no extras on many of your titles (lately on Flatliners, The Patriot, Wild Things, Fifth Element, Perfect Stranger, etc.)? It would be nice to at least see some SD extras on your releases, is it hard to port SD extras to BD?

In the future I would love to see all the extras to be in HD, would that also be possible with catalog titles? Would it be a big deal for the studios and take up lots of your time? In the mean time, giving a BD release lots of SD extras would give the discs more value!

[cjamescook]

Originally Posted by paidgeek

...

Animation can be very tough as today's titles have gradients that aggrevate contouring artifacts.

As a rule, the cleaner the master is, the easier it is to get a very good picture without having to use extraordinary bit rates.

Hi Paidgeek,

Excuse the newbie question, but when you say "contouring artifacts", are you saying "posterization"? I thought the bit-depth was high enough to avoid this.

As for "extraordinary bit rates", this really begs the question: If a very high bit rate would always solve all problems, then why not use that rate by default? I admire doing things "the right way" as much as the next engineer, but I have to believe that there are a lot of managers that would go with this solution as the proverbial silver bullet, making life simpler and the job go faster.

Thanks for your time,
-Jim

[DaViD Boulet]

Just an off-the-wall guess by a non-insider...

but I'd assume that there might be times when being able to trim down the bit-rate would be an advantage: such as when you have a very long feature of a feature plus plenty of HD extras you'd like to fit on the same disc.

Naturally you can use a high bit-rate when it's available (as Disney and Sony are now doing on many of their encodes), but there will certainly be times when a more carefully compressed encode, at a lower average bit-rate, might be desireable.

[PeterTHX]

It would be nice to at least see some SD extras on your releases, is it hard to port SD extras to BD?

Add this to my request as well.

I just want to replace my SD discs!

[richteer]

Originally Posted by onyxx

Paidgeek,

I think that you and your colleagues at Sony Pictures have done a fantastic job in the video/audio department lately. It has gotten to be so good that I don't have to wait for a review before a purchase of a Sony title, I know that it will be top notch! With that said I would also want to give you some negative feedback, why do you offer so little or no extras on many of your titles (lately on Flatliners, The Patriot, Wild Things, Fifth Element, Perfect Stranger, etc.)? It would be nice to at least see some SD extras on your releases, is it hard to port SD extras to BD?

In the future I would love to see all the extras to be in HD, would that also be possible with catalog titles? Would it be a big deal for the studios and take up lots of your time? In the mean time, giving a BD release lots of SD extras would give the discs more value!

I second everything that Onyxx said, but I'd add one caveat: please add the extras, provided they don't compromise the space required for top-notch picture and audio encodes. And if they do, there's always the dual-disc approach! (In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see studios double-dipping their early BD release with "Collectors Series" of extras-laden dual-disc releases.)

[paidgeek]

Originally Posted by patrick99

Paidgeek,

Many thanks to everyone at Sony Pictures who was involved with the remastered Fifth Element. It looks wonderful.

Thanks for your comment. As always, I appreciate the messages, but there are countless people that get the work done behind the scenes.

[paidgeek]

Originally Posted by onyxx

Paidgeek,

I think that you and your colleagues at Sony Pictures have done a fantastic job in the video/audio department lately. It has gotten to be so good that I don't have to wait for a review before a purchase of a Sony title, I know that it will be top notch! With that said I would also want to give you some negative feedback, why do you offer so little or no extras on many of your titles (lately on Flatliners, The Patriot, Wild Things, Fifth Element, Perfect Stranger, etc.)? It would be nice to at least see some SD extras on your releases, is it hard to port SD extras to BD?

In the future I would love to see all the extras to be in HD, would that also be possible with catalog titles? Would it be a big deal for the studios and take up lots of your time? In the mean time, giving a BD release lots of SD extras would give the discs more value!

This has been one of those tough issues that tend to generate conflicting viewpoints. It is certainly possible to use the SD added value, and while it is not my decision, I am not in favor of the SD content from the DVD versions because I don't think it presents well on an HD disc. I would welcome a poll on this subject if you care to start one.

[paidgeek]

Originally Posted by cjamescook

Hi Paidgeek,

Excuse the newbie question, but when you say "contouring artifacts", are you saying "posterization"? I thought the bit-depth was high enough to avoid this.

As for "extraordinary bit rates", this really begs the question: If a very high bit rate would always solve all problems, then why not use that rate by default? I admire doing things "the right way" as much as the next engineer, but I have to believe that there are a lot of managers that would go with this solution as the proverbial silver bullet, making life simpler and the job go faster.

Thanks for your time,
-Jim

Good questions..

Even our masters will show contouring on some animation when converted to 8bit from native 10bit. BD and HD-DVD support only 8bit, so this is a necessary evil. There has been some good work done on reduction algorithms (think dither) that can improve on this, but it is still early days for these techniques.

There is really no such thing as a high enough bit reate when the material is sufficiently difficult. We (and most other studios) use HD-CAM SR masters these days, because D5 (at over 200 Mbps, I frame encoding) can show compression artifacts when a master has high entropy (noise or filmgrain).

At least with BD we have a higher max bit rate (48Mbps vs HD-DVD, 30Mbps) and when we are dealing with a tough master, this gives us more room to deal with it.