Fourth attempt to post here, so I hope it's good enough this time.
This release was supposed to be the great opportunity to show how important bit-rate is.
Only problem is – it doesn’t! There ARE differences between the formats, but even where they are visible at all, they are tiny and only readily seen when magnified. Don’t know about you, but I don’t watch films with a magnifying glass. This won’t be lost on any HD supporter, who ought to be chuffed that their format can do so well with so much lower bit-rate. The eager anticipation in this thread over a dual release that would really do justice to BD seems to have evaporated, and we now seem to have a liability on our hands. NJ seems to have proven HD’s assertion that it is “good enough” after all.
But perhaps there are reasons why NJ is not a great advertisement for BD after all. The pictures shown in the comparison links look very detailed, but pretty static to me, and the HD bit-rate is probably more than enough to capture everything. To me, when video compression falls short, it’s usually when there’s lots of motion and not so much detail or contrast. Then you can see noise and blocking, especially in shadows and areas with uniform colour and brightness. You can see it in most films, but it looks like NJ isn’t the sort of material to show it up.
Moreover, these artefacts are mostly visible with video, not stills. Subject detail seems to be retained at the expense of backgrounds with most codecs, and with these screenshots, we are generally looking for details. I think that’s probably the wrong place to look if you want to see differences.
The other thing that may affect the value of using NJ is that it’s interlaced video, rather than progressive. There are more and more players and displays that can handle 1080p24 without having any unnecessary video processing stages, like scaling, frame rate conversion and especially de-interlacing. These all tend to degrade the PQ in one way or another, and none more so than de-interlacing. Although many displays can handle 1080p24, or perform 3:2 pull-down on 1080i60, that is no use for NJ because it was interlaced at source rather than interlaced for distribution. That means you need really good motion-adaptive video processing to show it to maximum effect. Most displays don’t have that, and will consequently lose half the potential resolution, as they do with HDTV. That may explain why some people have said NJ looks soft. I haven’t seen it yet, and I’m sure it’s NOT soft, but if that’s what people see, then they will never see any benefit from higher bit-rates.
I suspect that the best way to make differences clear is to play two simultaneous videos. Beg, steal or borrow an HDDVD player (I know, I know…) and hook both up a top notch display and judge it by the seat of your pants.
David - what was the source and what were the settings? That can make all the difference.
Nick
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