HD AMVs

[Willen]

I'm all for it, but as Niotex mentioned, most people don't have the hardware capable of decoding 1920x1080p HD content smoothly.

For example, go here: http://www.apple.com/trailers/ and find your favorite movie trailer in 1080p HD and see how your machine does. Of course, this does mean that you need QuickTime 7 to playback these trailers or some alternative. If your software offers the option, download it to your hard drive and then play it, instead of streaming it.

On my machine, the Spider-man 3 HD trailer in 1080p (H.264 @ 10559 Kbps 23.976 fps, AAC LC @ 382 Kbps 6-channel 48 KHz) peaks at about 67% processor usage and averages about 50%. Mind you, this is an Athlon64 X2 Dual Core CPU with 2GB of RAM backed by a GeForce 6600 vidcard (with H.264 acceleration) and played off a SATA RAID-0 drive using QuickTime's filters for decoding.

[NeoQuixotic]

Not sure if people noticed this news last month, but I can't stop laughing.

DBZ in HD! ZOMG!

Trailer

A few problems to note that is stated in the trailer.
-Widescreen (Can anyone say cropping!)
-Presented on DVD (Oh wait, this might be a major problem for HD.)
-No compromises! (Hello! Cropping!)

And I thought Evangelion was being over re-released.

[Willen]

And I thought Evangelion was being over re-released.

NEVAR! If Star Wars and Lord of the Rings can have multiple "Special/Extended Edition" releases, then why not Eva or DBZ?

And cropping an original 4:3 movie/series for a widescreen re-release has been done before (the Kenshin OAVs, and most recently, Transformers (1986), although the TF movie was animated in 4:3, it was shown in theaters in 16:9 with the top and bottom cropped. The 20th anniversary DVD is the first time that the widescreen version has appeared on a home video release).

[Otohiko]

E-penis. In 1080p.


Seriously, what. No, people are allowed to do it by all means. But I also think it's overkill by all means. The only reason I see myself releasing an HDTV is to piss people off or boost my own ego. Downloading... give me a nice manageable version please.

I will be convinced when someone shows me an AMV that truly NEEDS that high a resolution. Otherwise I'll think of it as a bit of a gimmick. As distinct from my attitude toward h.264, since the latter offers huge compression benefits - this, meanwhile, will have to work hard to even make it onto my HD, let alone stay there.

[Qyot27]

For example, go here: http://www.apple.com/trailers/ and find your favorite movie trailer in 1080p HD and see how your machine does. Of course, this does mean that you need QuickTime 7 to playback these trailers or some alternative. If your software offers the option, download it to your hard drive and then play it, instead of streaming it.

A couple of things I thought to throw out here:
1) Haali's Media Splitter splits MOV files, so unless you're attempting to play it in MPC (in which case Quicktime is forced to do the decoding ), it'll play with the same amount of hitches as any other H.264-encoded MP4 or MKV with AAC audio, except at a much higher resolution, which means more needed resources for your standard filters but that's not nearly as much as QT7's filters require.

2) It's not too hard to figure out how to download the trailers through Firefox's or IE's address bar if you've got even a basic knowledge of HTML and the way Apple names their files. It's not hidden at all, really. Just make sure to set the browser up to save those files to disk rather than try to open them (I know FF can be set to do this; don't know about IE).

And since hd is suppose to be progressive(I think) you wont have to put deinterlacing scripts that slow down video playback.

720p and 1080p are the progressive formats (there are several framerates that can be used, though), but 1080i is currently the 1080 standard used for broadcasting. I'm not sure how interlacing is handled on HD stuff - it might be a lot more simplistic (or if not simplistic, well-documented) and easier to deal with, or maybe that's specifically interlacing with H264.

Not sure if people noticed this news last month, but I can't stop laughing.

DBZ in HD! ZOMG!

Trailer

A few problems to note that is stated in the trailer.
-Widescreen (Can anyone say cropping!)
-Presented on DVD (Oh wait, this might be a major problem for HD.)
-No compromises! (Hello! Cropping!)

And I thought Evangelion was being over re-released.

I wonder how much money Funimation wasted on that. There was already a remastered Japanese DVD set of the series being sold on CDJapan. I doubt it was cropped to 16:9, though.

[x_rex30]

And since hd is suppose to be progressive(I think) you wont have to put deinterlacing scripts that slow down video playback.

720p and 1080p are the progressive formats (there are several framerates that can be used, though), but 1080i is currently the 1080 standard used for broadcasting. I'm not sure how interlacing is handled on HD stuff - it might be a lot more simplistic (or if not simplistic, well-documented) and easier to deal with, or maybe that's specifically interlacing with H264.

I guess I made it sound like I don't understand this. I'm so use to the option to turn a game that has a 1080i option to 720p. I guess things wont display as well if they don't match the right specs. If you have a tv that is a 720p, and you try playing a 1080i then you'll run into issues with the quality. I even hear some people prefer 720p over 1080i or that they are about the same or at least hard to tell the difference. Both are hd. 1080p seemed like very pointless to jump for joy over for a while because the displays that handled them were so damn expensive. They've jumped down in price a great deal. My TV is 50' 720p and I got if for a little over 2000 now I'm seeing TVs for around the same price that are 1080p and even larger than 50'. I don't think I've actually downloaded any 1080 videos before, all the hd videos I download are 720 and I don't mind the file sizes and the length for the file sizes. When I find the ability to put hddvd footage in premiere or vegas, I can't wait to mess with it. Are there anyways to rip hddvd footage yet and edit with it? or is it a buggy process, if it's still incredibly buggy to rip and edit with, then nvmnd, I most likely wont bother messing with it untill it gets easier to do so.

[Illia Sadri]

I can't wait for hd amvs to come out. I download hd 720p videos all the time.

HD is quite useless for about every anime show released until now.
The demand on the PC performance for editing/encoding/playback(!) just does not justify with the slight image quality improvement. Anime is just not detailed enough to need those high resolutions.
What kinda makes sense to me is to use HD RAWs instead of SD RAWs and scale them down to SD for release.

I highly disagree. That is like arguing DVD vs VHS. There is a lot of noticeable killed detail in a lot of anime, and that's a fact. When DVD first came out people would say there isn't much of a difference between VHS and DVD. But you mainly heard that when it first came out. Just wait till some good releases come out, that would shut people up. And I don't see a reason why they can't make it easy to edit with. The files are not as huge as uncompressed files, and those files work perfectly for editing with. And since hd is suppose to be progressive(I think) you wont have to put deinterlacing scripts that slow down video playback. I can see it working out someway. I'm addicted to hd especially with my gears of war on my hdtv. We need more damnit! And I must say hddvd and blue ray really sucked at marketing it. There is a clear victory for hd dvd. There is a lot that could be done to increase sales, like more software, hacks etc for hd dvd. Everyone nowadays seem to have 720p or higher hdtvs so I'm sure people are looking for a better movie experience. I think that qualifies as them being ready.

http://www.dvdtown.com/news/opticalhdba ... dwins/4211
http://www.dvdtown.com/news/playstation ... luray/4206

There was detail lost in a few shows on vhs that was greatly improved on dvd, but from dvd to HD is basically just upscaling. Now, animation tends to upscale better than most live action so it will be nice, but there are a limited number of shows where 1080p is really going to make a jump in quality.

So while say.... Air or the new Kanon might benefit from HD with some of the detailing in scenes, you get to your Tenchi, your Captain Tylor, Macross, Urusai Yatsura, Project A-ko, Evangelion and all that, you really don't get a lot of the returns.

Where we will see it is in films which tend to have more detail and was actually done in a decent resolution. Most TV shows just won't be that big of a difference. I've already seen anime upscaled via a dvd on a 1080p television. Considering a lot of these HD formats are going to basically upscale from dvd footage as it is then I think it is safe to say that no it's nice but not OMG great.

[Koopiskeva]

Hey, it's not a big deal. I'd rather have something 'too high quality' that I can compress myself if my computer can't handle it, over crappy wmvs/youtube crap.

So, in conclusion,

[DJ_Izumi]

I think the internet is ready for 720p. I do not think it is entirely ready for 1080p. I mean, we have fansubs that -arn't- upscales being relased in HD and they do indeed look very nice, but they are still a minority amongst fansubs. (Though we still have a few too many freakin' upscales).

However there are some things to considder.

First of all, our most advanced compression option is h.264 and there are serious problems in that. H.264 itself doesn't have problems, it just causes problems for other things. The only widly, freely available decoder for h.264 is in libavcodec which is highly inefficent, doesn't support multiple CPU/cores and in general isn't all that great. But it's in EVERYTHING. Just about every open source video project from CCCP to Mplayer uses Libavcodec and when it comes to decoding h.264 it's slow as snot. Most computers with libavcodec would need about 2.0+ GHZ to decode h.264

This isn't so much an issue with MPEG-2 and VC-1, other standardized codecs for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, because they arn't nearly as demanding as h.264. Even my Celeron M 1.3ghz laptop can decode 1080p VC1. But of course, you pay a cost in disk space if you want quality. Especially with MPEG-2.

Secondly, decoding 1080p instead of 720p is like apples to oranges. 1080p has 2.25 more pixels than 720p which means it's more or less 2.25 times more demanding. For the sake of example, my 1.3ghz Celery M Laptop using libavcodec can't decode 720p without burrying the needle. My Athlon XP 3000+ Desktop decodes 720p with libavcodec but scrapes the ceiling a little. The only other viable free software decoder is CoreAVC. You have to pay for it but that little demon gives you a hell of a lot for $9.99 (It's dropped to $7.95 even). With CoreAVC 1.2, 720p on my 1.3ghz laptop drops from 'Unplayable' to 70% CPU usage. On my 3000+ desktop the demand is about 60%. Obviously making it entirely playable on either. But that's only 720p. 1080p in h.264 is still a whole different animal. On either machine 1080p is too heavy for the CPU. The laptop basicly shits itself and the desktop is struggling to keep up and isn't, though it -almost- can keep up. But that's with CoreAVC, with libavcodec... Uhh. Forget about it.

So with my computers, which are in the 'mid range' of what's a 'decent' computer these days 1080p is pretty much not doable unless it's in Mpeg-2 or VC-1. As we've moved farther into faster and faster the computers the gap beween a 'good enough' computer and a 'top of the line' computer has gotten wider and wider. Machines from 1.2ghz Intel/AMDs to the newest CoreDuos and Athlon 64's all fit within this range of what people commonly own in their homes these days and within that range you have computers that could play h.264/1080p without breaking a sweat and others that don't have a chance in hell.

Thirdly, while the majority of people have displays that can do 1280x720 without scaling down, the same can not be said for a resolution of 1920 × 1080. Only extreamly large displays can even do 1080p resolution without it being scaled down and making it a waste. Most LCD displays capable of 1080p start at about 24 inches. Even if LCDs are smaller and lighter these days, most people don't want anything larger than 17-19 inch displays on their desks. Which are great for 720p but 1080p will be scaled down. 1080p displays start at 24 inches and the price tags start around $800usd.

With all this considdered, while I strongly believe 720p is pretty good and fairly accessable to most computers and users on the internet, 1080p is going need several YEARS for the 'par' for computers to come high enough to make it highly accessable. And as for the display resolution issue, I don't even know if that will change at all.

[Orwell]

Just look at the screenshots.... and tell me you DON'T want to see this in high def.

I don't want to it at all. As far as I'm concerned, anything with HD slapped on it is license to rape the consumer. Somehow feeling like our donkey friend here isn't very appealing.