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Zero1
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Post by Zero1 » Wed Dec 27, 2006 9:39 pm

llia Sadri wrote: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.
Is it just me, or do I have this the wrong way round? IMO cel anime has more detail than CG, and cel would benefit more from an increased resolution if mastered correctly, for example you preserve things like film grain and fine details, just two of the things missing from CG these days. CG is of course sharper, or cleaner, but these are not to be confused with detail.
Willen wrote:Oh, and if you do release 1080p and 720p material, I hope it plays on my PS3. I've seen 1080p and 720p (even upconverted 720p stuff) on my HDTV and I like what I see.
Bad news is that PS3 doesn't support high profile H.264, which is like, 80% of all encodes (a total shot in the dark, don't quote me on that by any means, but there are a lot of HP encodes; I know all of mine are). Trust Sony to half implement something, just like the half assed playback they gave the PSP. There is another company famed for half assed implementations, oh yeah, DivX and their famous DivX players which didn't play ASP in AVI regardless of the fact it was about as spec as ASP in AVI gets (in that XviD did nothing illegal specs wise, aside from storing it in AVI). This is unfortunate, and I thought High Profile was mandatory for HD-DVD and/or Bluray. Well hopefully Sony will remedy this with a firmware upgrade, but obviously it's something they will only fix if you Playstation users make enough noise about it, so make yourself heard!
Willen wrote:It also helped drive acceptance of the VC1 codec by the movie studios in their releases due to the capacity limits of HD-DVD which nearly requires advanced codec encoding to fit a movie and extras on the same disc.
I wouldn't call H.264 advanced anymore, merely current gen. A year or so ago it was advanced, but dual core, decoders and encoders have indeed come a long way in that year, so much so that H.264 is becoming the norm.

However, there are aspects of H.264 that continue to astound and amaze people, partially because the true potential of MPEG-4 Visual (MPEG-4 ASP aka DivX and XviD only covers like 1/10th of what MPEG-4 Visual is all about) was never reached (such as object based coding, more than 3 warp GMC) and some design "flaws" such as lack of an inloop filter or defined IDCT.

In relative terms MPEG-2 is archaic and shouldn't be used (it's around 13 years old), so forget that; there are better alternatives which are just as practicable given the availability of CPUs and technology today.

Now if we focus on codecs in the same class as ASP (eg. WMV/VC-1), 15 or 30GB is plenty. Throw H.264 into the equation and you now have bloody long movies or extreme quality. Sony more or less commented that MPEG-2 would be the defacto for Bluray because the quality "wasn't significantly better" (not the exact quote, but words to that effect). Now if they end up putting 1080p H.264 movies and filling 50GB discs then I'll probably change sides, but I can't see that happening. Also don't get your hopes up for whole series on a single disc, they want to milk the consumers by selling units rather than everything on one disc.
Willen wrote:If given the choice between HD (BD) or SD (DVD), I'd pick HD any day of the week. Once you've seen enough HD, it's hard to go back to SD. On-air and off.
I have my doubts about HD broadcasts here in England if SD is anything to go by... 576i, 2-3mbps MPEG-2. Also 1080i (pure interlaced), is a fucking step backwards. You would be better off with 576p.

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Post by Vlad G Pohnert » Thu Dec 28, 2006 2:26 am

DJ_Izumi wrote:My problem is, my editing tactic for years has been to take my source into VirtualDubMod then export out 1-20 second long clips in Lagarith (Used to be HuffYUV) and bring those clips into Premiere. I've done this for a few years. 1) Very disk space efficent. 2) I find seeking threw entire episodes easier in Vdub than in Premiere 3) I find shorter clips easier in Premere when I can just dump my clip in and quickly trim it.

This process I don't think can adapt to bait and switch. :/ Unless there's some neat way to make VirtualDubMod generate an AVISynth script at the same time, so when I make whatever.avi in Lagarith ar 640x360, it make whatever.avs which has the exact same in and out points but doesn't resize down from 1280x720... O.o

I think I might have to relearn to edit...
I don't know... that's the way I edit and it works fine for me.. Of course I use a real time editing card and work in DV as I hate rendering and love real time previewing.. Just bought the Matrox RTX2 which is both an SD and HD capable card.. I going to find out how good it's HD capabilities really are, but so far I'm quite impressed...

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Post by Willen » Thu Dec 28, 2006 3:23 am

Zero1 wrote:
llia Sadri wrote: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.
Is it just me, or do I have this the wrong way round? IMO cel anime has more detail than CG, and cel would benefit more from an increased resolution if mastered correctly, for example you preserve things like film grain and fine details, just two of the things missing from CG these days. CG is of course sharper, or cleaner, but these are not to be confused with detail.
Actually, IMO, HD is too detailed for older material. With HD, the film grain and (gasp!) cel imperfections (dust, ripples, brush strokes?) would stand out (more). I watched The Fifth Element on Blu-ray and immediately noticed the film grain (good), dirt, scratches, and other issues that could be resolved by a digital re-mastering (ala Star Wars) that aren't as evident on the DVD version. I think the expectation of most people of HD sources is 'sharper and cleaner' instead of 'see every detail of the film stock'.
Zero1 wrote:
Willen wrote:Oh, and if you do release 1080p and 720p material, I hope it plays on my PS3. I've seen 1080p and 720p (even upconverted 720p stuff) on my HDTV and I like what I see.
Bad news is that PS3 doesn't support high profile H.264, which is like, 80% of all encodes (a total shot in the dark, don't quote me on that by any means, but there are a lot of HP encodes; I know all of mine are). Trust Sony to half implement something, just like the half assed playback they gave the PSP. There is another company famed for half assed implementations, oh yeah, DivX and their famous DivX players which didn't play ASP in AVI regardless of the fact it was about as spec as ASP in AVI gets (in that XviD did nothing illegal specs wise, aside from storing it in AVI). This is unfortunate, and I thought High Profile was mandatory for HD-DVD and/or Bluray. Well hopefully Sony will remedy this with a firmware upgrade, but obviously it's something they will only fix if you Playstation users make enough noise about it, so make yourself heard!
I haven't had the time to play with the H.264 capabilities of my PS3 due to the Holidays. Some H.264/MPEG-4 AVC Main Profile (AAC LC) videos play without much issue, but with others I haven't figured out why the PS3 thinks they are corrupted. More research is needed. Obviously, it can handle High Profile for BD movies and hopefully they add High Profile for non-BD playback later, possibly when more mainstream video encoders add it to the encoding options (most support only up to Main Profile).
Zero1 wrote:
Willen wrote:It also helped drive acceptance of the VC1 codec by the movie studios in their releases due to the capacity limits of HD-DVD which nearly requires advanced codec encoding to fit a movie and extras on the same disc.
I wouldn't call H.264 advanced anymore, merely current gen. A year or so ago it was advanced, but dual core, decoders and encoders have indeed come a long way in that year, so much so that H.264 is becoming the norm.

However, there are aspects of H.264 that continue to astound and amaze people, partially because the true potential of MPEG-4 Visual (MPEG-4 ASP aka DivX and XviD only covers like 1/10th of what MPEG-4 Visual is all about) was never reached (such as object based coding, more than 3 warp GMC) and some design "flaws" such as lack of an inloop filter or defined IDCT.

In relative terms MPEG-2 is archaic and shouldn't be used (it's around 13 years old), so forget that; there are better alternatives which are just as practicable given the availability of CPUs and technology today.

Now if we focus on codecs in the same class as ASP (eg. WMV/VC-1), 15 or 30GB is plenty. Throw H.264 into the equation and you now have bloody long movies or extreme quality. Sony more or less commented that MPEG-2 would be the defacto for Bluray because the quality "wasn't significantly better" (not the exact quote, but words to that effect). Now if they end up putting 1080p H.264 movies and filling 50GB discs then I'll probably change sides, but I can't see that happening. Also don't get your hopes up for whole series on a single disc, they want to milk the consumers by selling units rather than everything on one disc.
I suppose that a case can be made for H.264/MPEG-4 AVC being current gen, but until more hardware stand-alone players can handle the videos and HD broadcasters get off their asses and do true H.264 support, I'm still calling it 'advanced'. :P

As for MPEG-2 still being used, although I'd like to see quicker adoption of newer codecs, you did state in this thread:
Zero1 wrote:What makes H.264 so great is that it can exploit spatial and temporal redundancy in more ways than ASP (eg DivX/XviD), but if there is barely any spatial or temporal redundancy to begin with, you greatly reduce the effectiveness of the codec. The gap between MPEG-2, ASP and H.264 closes up (the bigger (more advanced) they are, the harder they fall (more features are rendered useless)).
But considering the issues that Sony and the Blu-ray camp had in producing the 50GB dual layer discs initially, in hindsight it would have been better for them to redo those releases with VC-1 or H.264 and include the missing extra features or add other things to compete with HD-DVD. But seeing as how Sony was mastering every movie in HD with MPEG-2 during DVD production, I assume it was easier to use those same masters than re-encode another from the originals.
Zero1 wrote:
Willen wrote:If given the choice between HD (BD) or SD (DVD), I'd pick HD any day of the week. Once you've seen enough HD, it's hard to go back to SD. On-air and off.
I have my doubts about HD broadcasts here in England if SD is anything to go by... 576i, 2-3mbps MPEG-2. Also 1080i (pure interlaced), is a fucking step backwards. You would be better off with 576p.
Ugh, 2-3mbps MPEG-2? That's around SVCD specs. :(

Done correctly (which most broadcasters seem to care not to do), 1080i with a decent video data rate is very much an improvement over SD at 480p/576p. Although since PAL has an almost 100 line advantage over NTSC, the difference isn't as big. But 1080i resolution is still almost a 2.8x improvement over 576i broadcasts.

Now, if these broadcasters would switch to MPEG-4...
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Post by Vlad G Pohnert » Thu Dec 28, 2006 3:27 am

Willen wrote: Now, if these broadcasters would switch to MPEG-4...
Haha... Broadcasters were crying for years of all the equipment they had to spend money on just to go HD, don't expect too many changes at that... Originally it was mandated that everything was to be in HD only by 2008 or so... doubt that will happen

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Post by Qyot27 » Thu Dec 28, 2006 5:15 pm

I don't know why I feel like I have to point this out, but some BD releases are already in H.264. X-Men 3, for example, has AVC clearly printed on the back in the info box. Whether it's 1080p is another matter entirely, though. I can't really remember if it indicated that or not.

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Post by Willen » Fri Dec 29, 2006 10:31 am

Qyot27 wrote:I don't know why I feel like I have to point this out, but some BD releases are already in H.264. X-Men 3, for example, has AVC clearly printed on the back in the info box. Whether it's 1080p is another matter entirely, though. I can't really remember if it indicated that or not.
Every Blu-ray Disc released so far has been (and probably will be for every film-based release) 1080p. The video description box text will usually indicate 1080p High Definition along with the Aspect Ratio (2.40:1) or something similar. There may be some video productions that will have 1080i or 720p resolutions being released natively on BD but I see this happening more for older HD video productions done on older equipment. It is possible that some of these videos may be upconverted (or deinterlaced in the case of 1080i) to 1080p, but it seems to me a waste of storage and of dubious advantage. Film, if you didn't know is progressive by nature, and depending on the film used, at least at 1080p resolutions or above (next up: 4K).
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Post by Zero1 » Fri Dec 29, 2006 11:33 pm

I'm sorry if I come across as offhand to anyone, this isn't directed to you guys personally. A lot of the time the comments I will make will refer to the average user, or general public.
Willen wrote:Actually, IMO, HD is too detailed for older material. With HD, the film grain and (gasp!) cel imperfections (dust, ripples, brush strokes?) would stand out (more). I watched The Fifth Element on Blu-ray and immediately noticed the film grain (good), dirt, scratches, and other issues that could be resolved by a digital re-mastering (ala Star Wars) that aren't as evident on the DVD version. I think the expectation of most people of HD sources is 'sharper and cleaner' instead of 'see every detail of the film stock'.
In that case, most people need to get a clue. You can of course make SD sources sharper and cleaner, which is frequently done in fansubs. It also looks crap, you get banding, halos and gibbs effect when using old codecs such as MPEG-2 or ASP. I'm also not overstruck on "digital" remastering (at which point does a high quality remaster become an excercise in industry equivalents of photoshop or AVISynth?). I suppose there are cases where it can be a genuine improvement, but for the most part I think carefully handled re-mastering would look good providing the original film was good quality.

Part of the appeal for anime to me was the art style, but ever since it went CG, it seemed lifeless and dull, a part of my interest died too, which is why I'm so unmotivated to encode recent fansubs. Here are some decent examples, Tenchi Muyo in HD would rock.
http://www.fortunecity.com/lavender/rid ... chitv1.jpg
http://www.fortunecity.com/lavender/rid ... ammer2.jpg

Originating page:
http://www.fortunecity.com/lavender/rid ... /cels.html

Personally I want to see films the way they were intended, or the way technology permitted at the time, not something that has been messed around with, cleaned or whatever. This is why given the choice I would always buy the DVD than use a high quality DVD rip. This was also supposedly Sony's "reason" for choosing MPEG-2; so that they can preserve the movie; "But by and large, in terms of making transparent pictures that are true to the original master, MPEG-2 is working the best right now." However, I will come to this later, why I think this statement is bullshit.

Maybe my expectations are simply different from others, but all I want is the most accurate representation of a given film or TV program possible.

This whole farce reminds me of the CRT vs LCD "war". People will go for LCD because it's new and shoved in peoples faces. Great, it's flat and the screen is clear. The thing with that is they don't appreciate the character flaws like response times, dead pixels, washed out colours, bad black levels, limited viewing angles and native resolution. As it happens my mother was pestering me about HDTV today, and naturally she was going on about LCD (and like most women, wanted one because it's thin, lol). She was adamant that she didn't wan't a bigass CRT; until I hooked up my laptop to my CRT. I played a 1080p trailer, and even she saw the difference. The colours were much more vibrant on the CRT, the black levels were more true to life (even though I have a complaint with this CRT that the black levels aren't dark enough), and you could watch it at any angle without the image looking washed out.

At this moment in time, we only get 576i broadcasts (perhaps there are some 576p on DVB) and we do not have a HD-DVD or Bluray player, so at this moment in time, we have no need for HD; so native resolutions are a big deal to me at the moment, since all our stuff is SD, it would look shitty on LCD. So I lowered the resolution on the laptop, and true to form it went blurry from the shitty rescaler the panel has; the CRT was still sharp as a razor.

Unfortunately hype plays a big part in this. People still believe CD audio is perfect; now I'm not really an audiophile, but even I recognise it's not.

Get this; I remember the selling point for DVD at the time was "Video that looks as good as a CD sounds". Can you really compare and old lossy video codec to a "lossless" CD? I see blatant blocking and limitations of DVD, as I'm sure most of you have also, but have any of you heard such blatant artifacts in CDs? Didn't think so.

It's bullshit my friends, the same bullshit which is used to push LCD in my opinion.
Willen wrote:I haven't had the time to play with the H.264 capabilities of my PS3 due to the Holidays. Some H.264/MPEG-4 AVC Main Profile (AAC LC) videos play without much issue, but with others I haven't figured out why the PS3 thinks they are corrupted. More research is needed. Obviously, it can handle High Profile for BD movies and hopefully they add High Profile for non-BD playback later, possibly when more mainstream video encoders add it to the encoding options (most support only up to Main Profile).
Grabbing at straws here, but it could be the old multithreaded encoding mode of x264. If I remember rightly, slices is decoder dependant, so if the PS3 only has a partial implementation to begin with, I wouldn't outrule the possibility of this. Recent revisions of x264 have a new threading method, and that shouldn't require any additional decoder functionality.

Also, are they bona fide MP4 files, or something you transmuxed from MKV? If it originated from an MKV, then there is also the possibility of whoever encoded it, encoding it using the VfW codec in Virtualdubmod and outputting to MKV (which could give you a non spec file).
Willen wrote:But considering the issues that Sony and the Blu-ray camp had in producing the 50GB dual layer discs initially, in hindsight it would have been better for them to redo those releases with VC-1 or H.264 and include the missing extra features or add other things to compete with HD-DVD. But seeing as how Sony was mastering every movie in HD with MPEG-2 during DVD production, I assume it was easier to use those same masters than re-encode another from the originals.
Although I did say it reduces the efficiency, it doesn't completely knock it for six, as I went on to mention CABAC. Even when you do remove a lot of the temporal redundancy, you still have extra block sizes, reference frames and more consecutive B-frames to reduce the hit (or rather to maximise what redundancy there is).

What I don't understand is this statement.
"Advanced formats don't necessarily improve picture quality," said Eklund. "Our goal is to present the best picture quality for Blu-ray. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, that's with MPEG-2." He added, "We're really trying to set this apart from DVD... Sony Pictures' belief is that in order to launch the HD format, it should be done without compromises."

Sure, and H.264 isn't better than Cinepak (your sarcasm meter should be off the scale by now).

Well actually, what he says is partially correct, just he doesn't know exactly what he is talking about. What he should have said would have been something along the lines of what I will explain now.

Aside from new or different transforms, entropy coders or anything else that can give you a lossless saving in bitrate, or genuine quality improvement, new standards aren't purely "higher quality". The areas most frequently tuned, improved and expanded are as you may have guessed, are those pertaining to reducing temporal and spatial redundancy.

At the bottom of the pile you will have an intra frame only encoder, for example MJPEG. Every frame is an original frame (as the name suggests, a series of JPG images), and as far as lossy codecs go, you can obtain excellent quality, at the expense of huge filesizes.

MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 improve on this in a number of ways, most notably by adding P-frames and B-frames. P-frames constain the residual between two frames; a gross simplification is that the encoder takes frame 2, compares it to frame 1, and codes the difference (residual) between the two as the P-frame, the difference is then "applied" during playback. This is why editing with such codecs is not ideal because it requires information from the previous frame to decode that P-frame, also in a long GOP (group of pictures), the I-frame could be quite a number of frames away in some codecs, which means it has to "apply" all the other frames inbetween before it can "apply" the P-frame you have selected. This lag can build up.

There is much more to the (residual coding) process than just this; there are other methods involved for reducing the energy of the residual which adds to the inaccuracy I am leading up to.

Now as far as encoding to a certain bitrate goes, the MPEG-1 would look better since you save a lot of information by only coding the difference, but let's for arguments sake pretend that a said MJPEG and MPEG-1 had the same quality setting of 90%. The MJPEG encode would be more accurate to the original, because both frames are encoded independantly of each other, the MPEG-1 however, effectively recycles parts of frame 1, and applies a difference to it to generate frame 2. If you had a computer generated image where the previous frame has parts that are 100% identical, then you may get away with this (there are still other factors in generating the residual which still make it innacurate), but in a live action movie, it's unlikely that a previous frame will have parts that are 100% the same in the next frame. This could be dust in the filming environment, scratches, film grain, telecine judder, etc. What you see is reconstructed and recycled, it isnt true to the source, but the tradeoff is more than favourable when bitrate is an issue.

Enter B-frames. These are great for saving bitrate, but they are even less accurate than P-frames. Again you get the same issues of approximations and recycled frames.

Now with H.264, not only do we have all these awesome bitrate saving features (which when encoding to a specific bitrate improves perceived quality at the expense of accuracy), we also have new blocksizes, so now we can exploit redundancy even more, and recycle even more of the frame. Sounds bad, huh? Yes it is, but it's what makes H.264 (and previous standards) so great.

All things being equal as possible, if we had MJPEG, MPEG-2 and H.264 encoder set to the same or equivalent quality/quantisation level; the MJPEG encode would be the nearest to the master, followed by MPEG-2 and then H.264. The MJPEG would have the most original content, but also the largest by far. At the other end of the scale, the H.264 would be a very reasonable quality and filesize, but just not quite as good as the MJPEG.

The flipside to this though, is that with the huge disparity in filesize, the savings made by H.264 can be used to encode at a higher overall quality and still be smaller than the MJPEG. Lets say that instead of encoding to equivalent quality settings, that we now encode to equivalent bitrates. Lets say we have an SD source (720x480), and we allocate 3mpbs to it. The H.264 will look incredible, no doubt; the MPEG-2 would be very good, but not good enough, and the MJPEG.... Let's not even go there.

So it's pretty obvious that despite what I've mentioned, when working with a limited storage capacity, H.264 offers better quality. You can attain true DVD quality (assuming 8-10mbps) with H.264 at around 2-3mbps. Now although that doesn't sound as impressive as some of the videos you've seen, or numbers you've heard quoted, this is for a true like for like comparison; the inloop filter was disabled to help preserve grain. So if H.264 is reaching DVD quality at 2 or 3mbps; what could it be like at the DVD data rate at 8-10mbps? A damn sight better than MPEG-2 at 8-10mbps would be my guess.

So why did Sony plump primarily for MPEG-2 for their movies? Surely if you are going to spend 25GB worth of disc on a 1080p movie, 25GB worth of H.264 would be better than 25GB of MPEG-2, right?

You'd have thought so. Now I mentioned a loop filter earlier on, and that I disabled it. The loop filter is another great trade off for your typical encodes in the sub 1mbps region, and I'd rarely suggest you disable it (simply lower it); but it can and does cause smoothing of the image a little. So as not to destroy the grain, I disabled it completely. Now it might be that in Sony's so called tests, they encoded with the inloop filter on; suboptimal settings or something. They may have used a custom matrix for their MPEG-2 encode but not for the H.264; there are many factors. Even if all these features were so destructive (as I have talked about before with recycling parts of image, which is particularly bad for grainy material); then you can simply disable them.

I haven't encoded using x264 with intentionally crippled settings, because the idea has always been to make the most of the codec; but if you disabled as many of these features as possible to get a near MPEG-2 class encode, you would still win out over MPEG-2 because of how the bitstream is compressed with CABAC. CABAC is a lossless entropy coder; so I don't see how H.264 can be deemed inferior to MPEG-2; high bitrates or not. I say simply disable the features that you claim affects the quality, this way it compensates less, but leave the free quality upgrades such as CABAC, enabled. You can gain as much as 10-15% savings with CABAC, and well into the 20's on high bitrate stuff. Really, I think Sony is talking a load of bull. I don't claim to know everything about encoding, far from it; and I don't want to do a disservice to those that do know about encoding; but given Sony's recent track record and a bit of common sense, this certainly does smell like bullshit to me.
Don Eklund, Executive Vice President of Advanced Technologies, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment wrote:First thing, is, what is the target use for the codec? Blu-ray is supposed to be the all-singing, all-dancing, no compromises picture representing the way the film was originally intended to look. Broadcast, for example, has certain constraints. Satellite and over the air transmissions -- they are bandwidth-limited.
He obviously didn't get the memo about Bluray having finite storage... Even though they are big discs, they still have boundaries to keep to. Why do you think some DVDs look great and some look crap? It can be the mastering process, but often it's because DVD plays on the margin, and some titles can be demanding, however having not had any first hand experience with Bluray, I won't outright say that some titles will look crap; just that it's a possibility, and by using H.264, that possibility is reduced three fold. And no compromises? I seem to remember this comment:
Jordi Ribas, Windows Digital Media Division Director, Microsoft wrote:By using MPEG-2, content owners will either have to sacrifice quality in order to include the extra features that will make these discs compelling, and/or they will have to include few features to retain the same quality provided by advanced codecs. HD DVD Studios are targeting ~12 Mbit/sec video encoding using modern codecs such as VC-1. VC-1 can be 2 to 3 times more efficient than MPEG-2. To achieve similar quality to a HD DVD encoded using VC-1, these BD discs would need to be encoded at an equivalent data rate of 24-36 Mbit/sec, so many movies wouldn’t fit in a BD disc and there’d be little or no room for extra features for the others, particularly considering BD’s lack of capacity.
Well now I know it's not just me. And if I am wrong, I'll locate this guy. And we will eat our hats. Simultaneously.
Don Eklund, Executive Vice President of Advanced Technologies, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment wrote:"The third issue is production efficiency. To encode in AVC/MPEG-4 or VC-1 – can take two weeks for a single title, because they are highly asymmetrical encoding process. That is not so good for us. Because if you find a mistake, you may have to go back and it may take you another week to re-encode it. And you want to avoid that. So obviously, the encoding tools have to be solid."
So it looks like the real reason they don't want to use H.264 is the encoding times. I suppose I can't fault their logic too much here; it doesn't cost anymore to press a disc with 25GB on or 1GB, so may as well save production time and use MPEG-2. It's a shame it doesn't work like that in the real world (or AMV/fansub world at least).

As it happens, high bitrate MJPEG is used in digital cinemas (however they are talking 4k x 2k resolutions). H.264 may not be practicable for such large resolutions, it would require some pretty mean CPU power, and here I have a dual core Athlon64 which is only just capable of decoding 20mbps 1080i H.264 transport streams (curiosly enough, Nero's greatest game 1080p trailer doesn't really break a sweat on this CPU; probably all that CABAC time with the huge bitrate).

End of rant.
Willen wrote:Done correctly (which most broadcasters seem to care not to do), 1080i with a decent video data rate is very much an improvement over SD at 480p/576p. Although since PAL has an almost 100 line advantage over NTSC, the difference isn't as big. But 1080i resolution is still almost a 2.8x improvement over 576i broadcasts.
Perhaps, I was more getting at the simple fact that pure interlaced stuff looks like ass at whatever bitrate (rather than hybrid stuff you can IVTC to return progressive frames), compared to progressive 576 lines. I'd rather have 576 pure progressive than 1080 pure interlaced. Obviously if faced with 1080i vs 576i; I'd choose 720p anytime :p (well 1080i then, beggars can't be choosy).
Qyot27 wrote:I don't know why I feel like I have to point this out, but some BD releases are already in H.264. X-Men 3, for example, has AVC clearly printed on the back in the info box. Whether it's 1080p is another matter entirely, though. I can't really remember if it indicated that or not.
If this is the case, then I may sit it out a while longer to see where industry is headed. At this moment in time Sony's credability has hit rock bottom (lol rootkits, betamax, ps3, atrac3, batteries, lik-sang ad infinitum), and I don't fancy putting my money on a rootkitted, exploding beta max player this early in the game :p If it offers a genuine advantage, then I may give it a go, but for the time being, my money's on HD-DVD, being similar to DVD meaning reduced production costs.

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DJ_Izumi
Joined: Wed Oct 03, 2001 8:29 am
Location: Canada
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Post by DJ_Izumi » Sat Dec 30, 2006 12:31 am

I dunno about any of you but even if I had my hands on 1080p footage, I'd scale it down to 720p for the project and keep it that way. I just find 1080p too unwieldy for AMV or fansub deployment.
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Willen
Now in Hi-Def!
Joined: Sun Jul 10, 2005 1:50 am
Status: Melancholy
Location: SOS-Dan HQ
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Post by Willen » Sat Dec 30, 2006 9:09 am

My Long Post™ in response to Zero1 got lost. :(
Having trouble playing back videos? I recommend: Image

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Zero1
Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2004 12:51 pm
Location: Sheffield, United Kingdom
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Post by Zero1 » Sat Dec 30, 2006 2:00 pm

I've had that happen before. It's such a bastard... That's why I now type longposts in notepad and save every now and then.

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