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

[sharkshark]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

People PM’ed me for pics of our Pom. Here he is wearing his little cap to go with the fact that the bride and groom were Scots and the wedding had a Scottish theme to it. (Deci do your thing when you get a chance)

Having just watched Lebowski in HD again (it's been a while), I had forgotten that in addition to the marmot's bath scene, there's some lovely Pomeranian action in the form of Water's dog.

Frankly, I'd just call it a day and get a cat, they're much bee-atchier and much more amusing, but to each their own.

[sharkshark]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kleist

So along with copyright notices and such, it would probably help that methodologies be attacked as well (first and foremost- No ripping)

A screencap is, by nature, just a single frame rip, no? Do you mean that one shouldn't be basing it upon frames from a ripped MKV file, but from the physical disc.

I scanned some of the posts on A13 after seeing people discuss them here - having seen both discs, can you say that the BD is infact superior to the previous HD release? I was going to pick it up eventually for the lossless audio upgrade, but haven't yet.

Dennis, I know you've got both versions, any thoughts? Has anybody with both HD versions taken the time to see if the HD-DVD and BD look substantially different (let alone the BD being "better")?

NOT looking for a format pissing match, just curious if the format switch for PQ is worth taking the plunge (to repeat, I know the audio upgrade should, at least by spec, be worth it)

[Jeff Kleist]

A screencap is, by nature, just a single frame rip, no? Do you mean that one shouldn't be basing it upon frames from a ripped MKV file, but from the physical disc.

No, I mean that they should be snagging from decoded output. I'm going to hypothesize that Xylon is either using some really crappy software, or that he often pauses on the inbetween frames that for whatever reason aren't being properly resolved. The shots on BD.com look like what I see on my 56" calibrated set and 24" calibrated monitor. Xylon's do not.

I scanned some of the posts on A13 after seeing people discuss them here - having seen both discs, can you say that the BD is infact superior to the previous HD release? I was going to pick it up eventually for the lossless audio upgrade, but haven't yet.

I have both the HD DVD and the Blu of it. Running direct compare is hard, because they are 2 different masters with much different color timing and tighter framing as well. Overall the Blu-ray is brighter, and has superior resolution. Both discs have DNR issues, though the Blu-ray has less. Artificial sharpening has been applied and is partially responsible for the appearance of a resolution boost (on top of the actual boost), but also give some edge haloing. I found the first two reels look worse than the rest of the movie (starting around the time of the explosion), which is chalk up to something in production (any insight anyone?). The scratch remover did a bit of chewing on some of the optically printed titles (check the one around 15min right before Hanks talks to his son). In the end, the Blu-ray definitely benefits from being a modern film scan over a circa 2002-ish HD mastering, 1/3 more bandwidth on a modern AVC encode (24mbps-ish) over the HD DVD 16mbps-ish VC-1. In the end, the one that'll break you is the lossless sound (totally awesome), and the fact that if you use the facebook coupon and count in the movie cash against the price, it's $1.99 before tax at Best Buy this week

[sharkshark]

heh, if only our north-of-the-border BBs worked that way.

Great, that was a helpful review, cheers.

[PeterTHX]

Originally Posted by Xorp

I was actually curious about this myself, so I took some screenshots from my Blu-ray drive matched to Blu-ray.com's hardware screenshots of various movies and they look absolutely identical, minus some very slight color differences. I was impressed how perfect Blu-ray.com's capture method was. So your statement about hardware being better is completely wrong. Scaling and deinterlacing is where hardware wins, but for 1080p, both hardware and software decode the image exactly the same, strictly to H264 or VC1's official specifications.

You can't compare dedicated hardware to something that's basically an emulation. Dedicated hardware wins in decoding.

"slight differences" is not "absolutely identical"

[Xorp]

Originally Posted by PeterTHX

You can't compare dedicated hardware to something that's basically an emulation. Dedicated hardware wins in decoding.

"slight differences" is not "absolutely identical"

Emulation? Haha. Do you have any idea what you're talking about? There is a spec. Both hardware and software have specific instructions on how to decode to that spec. There isn't any room for interpretation.

[PeterTHX]

Originally Posted by Xorp

Emulation? Haha. Do you have any idea what you're talking about? There is a spec. Both hardware and software have specific instructions on how to decode to that spec. There isn't any room for interpretation.

You're right, I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about. Right guys?

You may also want to remind Penton that Bram Stoker's Dracula is "crap" and Jeff that he doesn't know what compression artifacts look like while you're at it.

[4K2K]

Originally Posted by PeterTHX

You can't compare dedicated hardware to something that's basically an emulation. Dedicated hardware wins in decoding.

"slight differences" is not "absolutely identical"

What differences will there be between a frame (for a frame capture) that was decoded using hardware and one that was decoded using software? And why couldn't software be made to decode a frame in the same way as a piece of hardware?

[Blaumann]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

I meant to get back to you this a.m. but, I was rushed.

Hopefully the new screenshot policy for the German site will be a wake-up call to all forums that allow the misuse of screenshots by their posting membership and hold the ownership of such websites accountable.

In the case of the LOTR screenshots, WB legal is certainly not stupid. I think that they were just misinformed by some ‘little mind’ in their publicity/marketing Dept. as to the root cause (AVS) of the situation.

If they are truly worried about repeated screenshot abuse with their Blu-ray movies directly causing consumer confusion or dilution of intellectual property rights then all it would take would be a warning letter to the ownership or their legal representatives. I think some action like this should be ‘across the board’ and just not applicable to well-read and well respected forums like Blu-ray.com.

If the ownership refused to comply with the request, it would be pretty easy for a GDMX (WB’s in-house authoring facility) compressionist or even an outside expert to give testimony about how misleading and abusive this screenshot *science* is and directly attack its validity. I mean, in the past, WB legal has pursued a website poster who happened to be a 15 year-old fan of Harry Potter for far less egregious behavior, at least as far as I'm concerned.

Hi Penton,
what, you mean you have more important stuff to do than posting on the interwebz? (/jk)

I don't know what exactly caused their change in policy regarding screenshots. I pm'ed one of their staff about it and also invited them to comment on it here, if they like. Have yet to hear back from them.

[RobertKuhlmann]

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:



In short, they say any screenshots posted must meet three requirements to be acceptable:

1. There has to be a "copyright by" overlay as part of the screenshot.
2. Screenshots have to be posted in context with a written message, as to illustrate a point [e.g. "you can clearly see the sepia tone of the movie"]
3. Screenshots may only be posted in their original size and without any further processing [like Photoshop etc.]

It also states, that they will delete any screenshots/posts that don't meet these requirements.

I am not aware, what led them to restrict posting screenshots this way.

As a moderator of bluray-disc.de and author of the thread mentioned, I can answer this question:

Some days ago we were informed of a new court decision (in germany, though) in which the grounds for the judgment explained the correct use of screenshots according to the german copyright law.

Since another court decision implies, that the owner of an internet portal can be accused for the contents it's members have posted, we have to be very careful and take a critical look after what our members are doing.

Some lawyers in germany tend to send "cease-and-desist orders" for even for the smallest irregularities. As soon as a rights owner agrees to mandate that lawyer, he can cash fees from the recipient of the order, even without going to court. If the recipient denies to pay, a law-suit is established - with high costs, unknown and unpredictable results.

So we've decided to avoid this risc for bluray-disc.de

Greetings
Robert

[RobertKuhlmann]

Addendum: We've changed our screenshot-policy without any contact or pressure by any film studio or other holders of rights.

Greetings
Robert

[iceman]

Thanks for the clarification

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kleist

You know it's interesting

A friend of mine who writes for a high end enthusiast magazine and is a gigantic space nerd told me he wasn't buying Apollo 13. I asked him why and he pointed me to Xylon's screenshots...

I fear that has happened far too often with casual passers-by into *science* Blu-ray software boards because many times the end result of such *analysis* is that it leaves the impression something is pretty wrong with this or that title; otherwise, these guys wouldn’t be talking about it so much and defending their beliefs with pictures.

It’s sad really when you think about potentially how many folks entirely avoided a motion picture on Blu-ray due to that sort of scenario. I’m glad you intervened in this one case. I know of no professor teaching an undergraduate course in Cinema 101 or Cinema Appreciation who would dissuade any of his students from watching a particular Blu-ray (or even HD DVD for that matter)based upon some real or perceived technical transfer flaws.

I’ll remind everyone again of a YouTube clip which I posted awhile back by the Cinematographer who shot The Natural, The Black Stallion, etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSYHMeyK8xI

Some Blu-ray transfers are fantastic…some are *ok* but they’re always interesting to see if you truly love movies.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kleist

I was actually watching the disc and the time, and the uber softness (there is overuse of scratch removal which eats some of the shakey optical titles a bit, and there is some DNR), it looked about 3x worse on his screenshots. So I looked at the screenshots here, which are taken in a diffferent fashion of many of the same scenes, and the edge haloing is much less pronounced and the clarity levels are higher.

How shocking, you mean watching a Blu-ray in real-time didn’t look like xylon’s screenshots?
That must be a first!
Well, there is no love lost between any content provider whom “xylon” has contacted in the past for accurate inside information regarding the Blu-ray of this or that particular movie.

So, give me a minute and I’ll call an outside facility to get his e-mail (or at least one of probably many which he uses) and you can e-mail the screenshot king one-on-one regarding this discrepancy which you’ve brought up. Like I said, he has no friends among anyone in the business who actually knows him and to use their words..."he's pretty much a goof ball".

[Dennis M]

Originally Posted by sharkshark

Dennis, I know you've got both versions, any thoughts? Has anybody with both HD versions taken the time to see if the HD-DVD and BD look substantially different (let alone the BD being "better")?

Hey Shark,

Unfortunately I have not had the opportunity to compare the two. Gotten swamped since we've finish principle shooting and gone into post. It's crunch time as we're facing the April 30th deadline for submitting the film to TIFF.

But let's look at getting together this weekend. We can screen the two and make a judgment. I suspect it's going to be a case of give and take.

On a positive note Michael from THX Video Cal was over last night tweaking my RS35. Whenever he's in town he drops in and makes sure my PJ is up to snuff. Usually about twice a year. He just got the ISF interface software from JVC. Nice interface that allows you connect to the PJ via the Rs232 port and adjust the Gain/Offsets, CMS, and Gamma curve. The 16 point gamma curve adjustment was nice as it flatten out the DE numbers. What adjustments you do make gets added to 2 new unadjustable memory items, isf-Night and isf-Day.
As good as the PJ looked before, it's looking better now.
So it's a perfect time to do some screenings.

If any of you guys here have the current JVC models, and can take advantage of this option, I suggest you do. The results are well worth the effort.


Added Note:
If you are waiting for the THX interface, as I was, it won't be made available in the current models. Michael informed me that the JVC Engineers will not be able to retrofit it, and that it will be released with the next models.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by Jeff Kleist

Artificial sharpening has been applied and is partially responsible for the appearance of a resolution boost (on top of the actual boost), but also give some edge haloing.

Dang it. I wish I had known that last night. If memory serves, about two years ago, one of the owners of AVS assured everyone on AVS that EE would no longer be a problem with future titles from Universal because Joe Kane had a sit-down session including a demo showing the Universal executives how excessive sharpening applied at, or to be perfectly accurate, just prior to the encoding itself leads to a less than optimal appearance.

And Joe was somewhere in attendance at the meeting last night. I could have *held his feet to the fire* or, maybe in the end, some Uni studio folks just ignored his presentation so grilling him a little wouldn’t have helped anyway.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by PeterTHX

I'm talking about software vs. hardware in general. Xylon scales his DVD screenshots BTW.

These *screenshot* analyses (which are considered no more than toys by professionals) no matter how you capture them, often fail to indicate to the screenshot reading audiences that the whole process is so dynamic that it is difficult to make overall generalizations for the entire movie, unless they post a whole slew of samples and/or the ‘deficiencies' are pretty gross.

First, of all, it is not uncommon for the appearance of grain to change from scene to scene or even shot to shot, as we see this quite often during the HD mastering process. Secondly, although there are basic encoding presets that can be ‘punched in’, good encoding software also has a timeline-based function which allows a compressionist to scrub through an encoded file and make fine adjustments to parameters like bit-rate, noise reduction, and I/B/P frame placement on a shot-by-shot or even a frame-by-frame basis. The system then re-encodes only the segments of the footage that have been flagged for special attention.

So, which screenshots are showing an encoding customization as I noted above ^ for a particular scene or scenes. Which are demonstrable of variances in the principal photography? Bottom line, showing a few cherry picked samples is not always indicative of the overall appearance of a 2hr. movie, no matter how well they’re captured and displayed.

[Blu Titan]

Xylon has been unable to post any screnshots for Avatar (as far as I know). Maybe that is due to the new encryption? I wonder what they are doing for fun now?

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by RobertKuhlmann

As a moderator of bluray-disc.de and author of the thread mentioned,...
So we've decided to avoid this risc for bluray-disc.de

Greetings
Robert

Probably a good idea.
Welcome to the forum, I continue to be amazed by how well you guys write English!

[Jeff Kleist]

And Joe was somewhere in attendance at the meeting last night. I could have *held his feet to the fire* or, maybe in the end, some Uni studio folks just ignored his presentation so grilling him a little wouldn’t have helped anyway.

I know Joe, I can just call him I'll see what he saye

The haloing isn't horrible, but definately noticeable. The whole presentation smacks of a lot if set it and forget it