the good the bad and the upconverted

[buckshot]

not sure if anyone has posted a question like this yet, so here we go.

I have bought about 12 bluray movies so far. most I have been happy with as far video quality goes. all have had amazing audio. but there are a few I have felt were far below my expectations for video quality. I want to know if anyone else has had these problems and if so with what titles, so I can avoid paying $20 or more for what looks like an upconverted dvd. the two I have disliked the most are:

sleepy hollow
and
house of flying daggers

are there any other titles to avoid?

[Amon37]

Well if you look at the Teir system for BD movie PQ's on AVS and I'm sure it's been posted on this site, you can decide which ones to stick with upconverting.

Edit: Here is a link.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=753726

[Deciazulado]

I don't like that list very much. For example X-Men looks much better than the 35mm theatrical presentation, a flawless or near flawless transfer, so to me it should be tops, but it's not. I think The Fifth Element looks for the most part better than Superman Returns which looks soft and has compression artifacts, but SR it's on the "a very sharp image that feels real" section while Fifth Element is on the softness/visible artifacting section. etc etc

As I mention often, watching Blu-ray on a 720p and/or the movies at more than 2 picture widths is not gonna let you see what's really there.




Sometimes I think that list should be renamed "The Blu-ray Pristine Computer Generated Image Quality list". Not very related to film quality. Kind of like that era when people only bought CDs that said DDD on the cover, because ADD/AAD ones didn't have all "D's"

[onyxx]

The one title I reacted to was Sleepy Hollow, it was so grainy and full of noise that I actually prefered to watch the DVD. I was also not impressed with Lord of War and Crash (but I personaly don't think Crash can look any better).

[DaveFi]

Originally Posted by onyxx

The one title I reacted to was Sleepy Hollow, it was so grainy and full of noise that I actually prefered to watch the DVD. I was also not impressed with Lord of War and Crash (but I personaly don't think Crash can look any better).

Well, if you don't like Sleepy Hollow I'll be more than happy to take it off your hands.

[KenThompson]

Sleepy Hollow just wasn't a very good looking movie. Alot of night time scenes and grain. It suffers the same problems on the HD DUD. High DEfDigest had this to say about the picture quality

As I noted in my review of the HD DVD version of 'Sleepy Hollow,' the film is hardly "picture perfect" source material. It's is a very grainy image, with the majority of the film veiled by a thin veneer of jumping, alive movement. Just check out the opening credits -- the film has been so drained of color as to almost be black and white, contrast flattened, and dark areas fall off into black like a steep flick. (All that fog doesn't help, either.) It looks very moody and atmospheric, but also rather dirty and gritty. Personally, I enjoyed the retro feel, but have to admit that it does not lend itself to the kind of truly three-dimensional picture that immediately springs to mind when you think of high-def.

That said, technically this 1.85:1 widescreen, 1080p/MPEG-2 transfer is on par with the HD DVD version. (Not necessarily a good thing, depending on your opinion). On the few colors that do appear vibrant and saturated, saturation is fairly stable (though there is some wavering) and occasionally fuzzy. Contrast also exhibits noticeable fluctuation in density and clarity. Detail overall is superior to the standard DVD release, and fine subtleties are more apparent, everything from textures on the film's lavish costumes to etchings in the bark of twisted trees. As for noise, which has been a problem on Blu-ray releases, it is hard to judge here. This picture looked just as busy as the HD DVD, but when you're dealing with source material as problematic as this, it is to be expected. Again, 'Sleepy Hollow' just doesn't have the sense of depth of some of the most revelatory high-def transfers I've seen, but given the source material it could have been far worse.

[buckshot]

i'm watching the departed right now. and remembering how sleepy hollow looked its like night and day. sleepy hollow was almost painful to watch. I recorded it off my hd digital cable and it looked amazing. by comparison the BD looks like crap. one would think that they'd look the same if not better on BD. any ideas why they don't?

[DaveFi]

I don't know what you guys are watching, but Robert Harris had Sleepy Hollow (both formats) make his list for The Best Modern HD Releases of 2006.

[Chad Varnadore]

Film doesn't look like HD video. And Sleepy Hollow, like Saving Private Ryan and many, many others intentionally has a very grainy, desaturated look. We shouldn't equate grain with compression artifacts. Grain is a natural part of film. Now if you subjectively can't appreciate the look of film, my best advice is to try to better understand it, before giving up or casting judgement. Most movies are shot on film. And when preserved well in HD that grain is going to be more apparent than it has been on the lossy formats that came before BD. Grain does vary from film to film. It can be very mild/hardly noticable, to very course. Grain to film is like brush strokes to a painting. As Spielberg has noted, it's what gives film its uniqueness and character. If you subjectively can't find appreciation for grain, my advice is to enable noise reduction in the player and/or sharpness filters in the player or display. This essentially should provide the same results as if the studio had filtered the video for you. But, don't expect to get the full range of high frequency detail if you go that route. Whether the studio filters or you do so in your home, the result will still be a softer image than is faithful to the intended resolve of the film.

As for the two films in question, I believe Sleepy Hollow is pretty faithful to the look of the film. I was very happy with improvements made to detail over the DVD. In particular, the DVD doesn't give you any idea as to just how elaborate the effect of the Horseman's head growing back is.

House of Flying Daggers was one of Sony's first discs that we're still not sure what exactly happened. Underworld was the only title from that batch that really separated itself from SD. That said, House, may have been the result of Sony not having very good elements to draw from for the domestic release. They didn't produce the film themselves. The audio on House though, is worth the upgrade from DVD alone IMO.

[buckshot]

I have a great appreciation for film and the grain of each film. I am a photographer with my own dark room because I prefer film to digital. there is a difference between the natural grain of the film and the apparent low resolution it is scanned at. filtering does have the ability to take grain away, but I do prefer the look of film. what we see with sleepy hollow is not simply grain. it appears to be poor quality scanning, compression, and grain. it gives it an almost out of focus look. I didn't want to argue the semantics of film and digital. I was just curios about the movies and the tier system. and the audio for HOFD is amazing and well worth the upgrade.

I have a ps3, monster cable hdmi, samsung 56'' 1080P DLP, and 1000W onkyo surround system. I keep seeing KOH as a great buy. is it as amazing as BHD?

[Chad Varnadore]

True, grain can be exaggerated by compression or, potentially, other aspects of encoding. But grain is very diverse in film. Sometimes it's intentionally amplified for artistic effect. Some films take measures to limit it's intensity. It looks different with different films and is as varied as the types of stock used, the lighting in which the film was shot, and post-production manipulation to achieve a given look. My point is that it can be very difficult to discern intention from aggravation caused by compression or encoding. And many people vilify grain, simply because they're either not used to seeing it fully preserved on DVD, or they just recently upgraded to a larger, more revealing display than they are accustomed. Even some HD digital cameras will produce a grain-like artifact, adverse to the smooth transparency that most would expect.

Of course components can aggravate grain as well. User level sharpness settings can amplify grain. Many displays come from the manufacturer with artificial sharpness applied via the service menus as well. Video processing can impact how you percieve grain. 8bit in particular will often generate noise that you won't see at 10bit and higher. And then their are excessively long cable runs, interference from varying cause, like look cable connections, duplicate processing (feeding a 1080p display a 1080p signal, when the display will not map the 1080p signal without needlessly deinterlacing again), inferior processing (most consumer displays do not use optimal deinterlacing or scaling, even among those that do a pretty good job overall, it's common for such to add noise to the video, particularly with films that are naturally noisy, as well as lose high frequency information at the same time).

At 92" 1.2x seating width, and a 1080p SXRD, I was very pleased with Sleepy Hollow. But, I was familiar with the intended look of the film prior to viewing. KOH is a nice disc, great movie and very worthwhile audio and video presentations. But, I still preferred BHD for pic and sound.

[HDTV1080P]

Chad I just checked out your website. Thanks for the excellent detailed articles on video and sound quality for movies released in BLU-RAY and HD-DVD. I am glad you are reviewing these movies on a 92” SXRD front projector.
If the grain is visible in the original source material since the director intended the film stock to have a little grain then yes I also want to see the film at home the way it suppose to be seen. Your posts are very interesting to read and full of useful accurate information.

Thanks again for the Home Theater Spot Website.

[Dave Mack]

Sleepy Hollow looks exactly the way it did in the theaters and exactly the way Tim Burton wanted it to look...

[Deciazulado]

Chad makes excellent points. Blu-ray is so sharp, you can see the variance in flim stock, and even focus errors/depth of field differences, from shot to shot. Some people have said, for example than X-Men looks very grainy, that it doesn't look top notch. Forgive me but these people are mistaken, X-Men is so sharp on Blu-ray that it's sharper, much sharper than the slightly softened look that a 35mm projector gives you on a theater screen. It's as if the projectionist kept turning the focusing knob up up till it super focused it. And of course, it brought all the image forming grain into pinpoint focus. You're seeing all there is in razor sharp clarity. I repeat: The X-Men Blu-ray looks better and has a SUPERIOR image quality than what you got on screen from a 35mm print. What more do you want? If you'd like it to look any different, you would have to (as Chad pointed out), either filter out the high frequencies (If you have a projector, you could try making it slightly out of focus). or use digital noise reduction to remove artificially the grain. So if you want X-Men to look "different", less grainy, you have to degrade the superior sharpness the original image actually has, or effectively, alter the image structure. Could you digitally go and alter the grain without degrading the image sharpness or details? Maybe. But that wouldn't be the original image anymore. That would be ALTERING the film to suit your taste. You could as well say, I'd like the colors to be really punched up like it was a 4-color comic book, or desaturate them down, to make it look like Sin City, or the contrasts to look different, or to make it look like a CGI/HDTV videotaped movie, etc. To me, the X-Men Blu-ray is the best version of the movie I've ever seen. Some shots look as sharp as any Imax/70mm film I've seen, but this was shot in Super-35, the smallest negative used currently in Hollywood. Basicaly what you'd want is to tell Brett Ratner, hey Brett, you shot X-Men in the wrong format and film stock, you should have used 70mm and the finest grained slowest Kodak film for all shots. Or given me a softer transfer.
Do yourself an experiment. If you have a 1080p HDMI display that uprezes 480p, force the Blu-ray player's output into 480p HDMI if you can and let the display upconvert it. See where did all the grain go? It almost makes the image look as a 35mm megaplex's softer projected image now. Watch a while, look at all the wrinkles and hair strand details gone. Then switch back to 1080p.

As Chad mentioned, also make sure your sharpness setting is correctly set. Most Blu-ray transfers, if displayed 1:1 on a direct view should look best w/o any sharpness boost. (Unless you sit farther away than 1 to 1.5 picture widths (1.5 to 2.25 Picture Heights). Then your eye might start to lose details)

[buckshot]

I didn't consider that the heavy grain may have been part of the artistry of the film. control of grain in still photography is very important, whether to let more grain come through to give it a gritty harsh look, or let minimal grain show giving it a smoother more realistic look. maybe in this case since I find the particular grain so distracting I should adjust my normal settings and change them back for the other movies. in light of this; what are some other movies where I may have to adjust my setting because of the low resolution, harsh grain, etc etc.

I liked the way x-3 looked.

[Knight-Errant]

James Cameron says on the DVD commentary for Aliens that there were a lot of grainy films about at the time because of the film stock being used - specifically new emulsions being tried out so that's a few films which SHOULD look grainy when displayed at optimum resolution.

[Deciazulado]

Originally Posted by buckshot

in light of this; what are some other movies where I may have to adjust my setting because of the low resolution, harsh grain, etc etc.

U2: Rattle and Hum is the first one came into my mind.

[Dave Mack]

also, 1/2 of Rattle and Hum was shot on 16mm which was then blown up to 35 and cropped.
Even the 35mm concert sequences had to use a VERY fast film stock so you could see details in the dark scenes. Very fast film stock = much more grain.

[Chad Varnadore]

Funny you mention U2. Paramount used AVC for the HD DVD, because VC1 didn't support the degree of noise reduction they wanted for the title.

Probably the worst example I've yet seen of a grain-like artifact that is a result of compression rather than random noise native to the source, is the VC1 encoded Smallville Season 5. Warner really pushed HD DVD on this set, encoding 5, 45 min episodes on several discs. The DD+ audio appears to have paid the price too. It sounds about like 384kbps most of the time and the video is very inconsistent.

The inconsistency of noise is a good indicator that it's not innate. Scenes shot in low light naturally tend to be more grainy than brighter scenes, or dark scenes that where shot lighted, and darkened during post-production to better preserve detail, enhance contrast, and reduce grain. But when grain is inconsistent in a bright sequence, especially inconsistent within the same frame, that's a good indicator that what you're seeing isn't natural. In portions of episode 14 of Smallville Season 5, you can clearly make out a dense, crawling noise in highlights. Looking at Lana and Cloe's eyes, infected with noise (not in their faces or anywhere else, just the whites of their eyes), reminded me of the Goaulds in Stargate SG-1.