Fellowship of the Ring - HD vs DVD, amazing

[thunderhawk]

Fellowship of the Ring - HD vs DVD, amazing

Being amazed at how fantastic the HD transfer of Fellowship of the Ring looked, I decided to compare it to the transfer on the DVD. Now, the DVD transfer is among the best you can find on DVD, so this really is comparing the respective creams of the crops.

I used WinDVD 6 to capture files from the DVD, and Elecard Mpeg2 player to capture from the HD stream. Both were captured directly to BMP files and converted to JPG at very high quality so there should be almost no artifacting introduced (sorry, the BMP files were too large to use).

I used Photoshop to bicubically resample the DVD source images from 852x480 to match the 1920x1080 of the HD images. This page features the HD image sampled down to the DVD's resolution of 852x480. Surprisingly, even at DVD-resolution the HD source
features more detail.

Mouseover any of the images here to see the HD downsample. You can see the full-size comparisons by clicking on the images on this page. The difference is pretty amazing.

I tried to capture identical frames on both sources, but I missed by a frame or two on some of these.

Just check it out...
http://www.cornbread.org/FOTRCompare/index.html

Amazing quality

[Gorkab]

Not as impressive as I thought but nice ^^

[Knight-Errant]

The HD disc should look even better when its properly encoded. Am I right?
Still on the detailed shots the difference is pretty obvious and no doubt far more so in motion

[georgir]

if the HD version downsized to dvd size still looks better than dvd, obviously the dvd wasn't the best possible "cream of the crop" quality. or any quality differences we see there are results from the mpeg2 compression on the dvd, not from the resolution difference.

[Miller_guy]

Originally Posted by georgir

if the HD version downsized to dvd size still looks better than dvd, obviously the dvd wasn't the best possible "cream of the crop" quality. or any quality differences we see there are results from the mpeg2 compression on the dvd, not from the resolution difference.

That's exactly what I thought, it would have been better if he had zoomed into a specific section before downsizing.

[Rob]

Wouldn't it also be true that the dvd doesn't have sufficient bit rate to take advantage of standard definition pictures, so that the higher bit rate of HD-DVD downscaled still shows improvements. I don't believe that the dvd format gets the most out of a standard def resolution.

[Knight-Errant]

Originally Posted by Rob

Wouldn't it also be true that the dvd doesn't have sufficient bit rate to take advantage of standard definition pictures, so that the higher bit rate of HD-DVD downscaled still shows improvements. I don't believe that the dvd format gets the most out of a standard def resolution.

Good point.

I spoke to a Sony rep on an HD skills course here in the UK who actually said that for some reason SD pictures downconverted from an HD source still show some improvement.