What qualities do you value most?

[RBFC]

Blu-Ray has technological advances in both video and audio. When we personally "rate" the quality of a transfer to Blu-Ray, what qualities do you value, and in what order of importance to you?

Examples:

1. Video detail
2. Color representation/saturation
3. Lack of visual artifacts
4. Dialogue intelligibility
5. Surround panning
6. Low frequency effects
7. "Immersion"

These are just a few of the buzz words that describe some of the things by which we'll rate discs.

What do you folks think?

Lee

 

[Steve Williams]

For me it's simple...better video and better audio

 

[RBFC]

I was thinking that one's preferences might be influenced by their choice(s) of components and emphasis on either audio or video. No fair, Steve, when you have superb examples of equipment in both venues!

Lee

 

[rsbeck]

I am first and foremost a movie lover and movie collector, so if I am purchasing a movie on blu-ray, the first thing I want is for the video to be true to the original print. I don't like to see the excessive use of digital sharpening and filtering. I like film to look like film, so I am thankful if they reproduce the grain with an elegant hand rather than try to strip the grain away in an effort to make it look like HD digital video. When they strip the grain, usually precious visual detail goes with it and the picture will lose solidity during movement.

When they turn up the sharpening, you often see annoying halos around things. It's an intended optical illusion that will make the picture look sharper to those with an untrained eye, but if you are attuned to notice these things, it actually makes the picture look softer.

If they do the transfer right, using all of the capability available to the blu-ray format without trying to trick it up too much, usually you'll get all of the detail that was intended.

On these issues, I would call myself a moderate.

On the audio side, again, I want it true to the source and I not only look for a good involving natural sounding mix, but I also look for blu-ray to use its capability for high resolution to provide quality sonics like I would expect from any excellent recording. Sonics that are more highly resolved, make use of extended dynamic range, and -- to borrow an audiophile phrase -- allow me to hear deeper into the soundstage.

 

[RBFC]

I am first and foremost a movie lover and movie collector, so if I am purchasing a movie on blu-ray, the first thing I want is for the video to be true to the original print. I don't like to see the excessive use of digital sharpening and filtering. I like film to look like film, so I am thankful if they reproduce the grain with an elegant hand rather than try to strip the grain away in an effort to make it look like HD digital video. When they strip the grain, usually precious visual detail goes with it and the picture will lose solidity during movement.

When they turn up the sharpening, you often see annoying halos around things. It's an intended optical illusion that will make the picture look sharper to those with an untrained eye, but if you are attuned to notice these things, it actually makes the picture look softer.

If they do the transfer right, using all of the capability available to the blu-ray format without trying to trick it up too much, usually you'll get all of the detail that was intended.

On these issues, I would call myself a moderate.

On the audio side, again, I want it true to the source and I not only look for a good involving natural sounding mix, but I also look for blu-ray to use its capability for high resolution to provide quality sonics like I would expect from any excellent recording. Sonics that are more highly resolved, make use of extended dynamic range, and -- to borrow an audiophile phrase -- allow me to hear deeper into the soundstage.

I agree that purist values are extremely important. The eternal debate revolves around the "true to the source" mantra.... most of us consumer-level folks don't have access to master video prints or master soundtracks. It was even highly publicized that a new soundtrack for Avatar was mastered explicitly for the Blu-Ray home theater release. While I agree completely with your position, and admire your passion for the subject, a subjective cloud hangs over us when we bring the term "Master" into a discussion.

What do you all think?

Lee

 

[amirm]

For me priorities are:

1. Lack of compression artifacts (blocking, ringing, etc.)

2. Lack of banding.

3. Sharpness or lack thereof.

4. Defects in the print

5. Focus shifting. You didn't see this in DVD due to lower resolution but in HD, you can see when the camera is not in focus.

6. Lip sync especially the type and comes and goes.

7. Realism of the surround effects especially its timing. A jet going overhead needs to have its sound "move" from front to rear in unison.

8. Authoring. Difficulty in skipping into stuff, difficulty in finding things in disc menus, etc.

9. Extras. Can't stand the ones where the only guy they could find to narrate was the person who did their drycleaning.

10. There must be a tenth thing but I can't think of it right now .

 

[rsbeck]

I have passion, but I consider myself a moderate. Three of the most controversial titles on blu-ray from a purist's standpoint are Baraka, Dark Knight, and Pan's Labyrinth.

I see some signs of sharpening in Dark Knight if I look for them. I wouldn't use it to demo my theater for a hard core videophile, but I don't have too many of those coming over, so it is never an issue. I'm happy to use it for a real world demo for just about anyone else because it blows them away.

I'm not convinced Baraka was sharpened.

Pan's Labyrinth, I've watched the version that has been excoriated and I've watched the one that has the grain left intact -- the one with the grain intact is slightly better to my eye and I prefer to see the more natural look, but if you watch them back to back, you see the target of all of that vitriol is also pretty darn good looking -- it isn't a very big difference.

As for Director's Intent. It's not a very useful phrase for the reasons you state. But, film has certain properties and I like it to look like film -- if the grain is stripped away with excessive DNR and it doesn't look right to me, I don't like it.

If you see a blu-ray where there isn't egregious sharpening and filtering, you can deduce that it is pretty true to the intended print.

Sometimes a director's intent is unwelcome. Look what Storaro and Bertolucci did to Last Emporer. On purpose. What a shame. Look what Friedkin did to French Connection. It looks like an old Ted Turner style black and white that's been colorized. It's true to Friedkin's new intention, but I still don't like it -- it jars you out of the movie!

Talking to an industry insider the other night, I was told that another problem is that sometimes directors don't remember what their intentions were, especially if it is an older film.

The sharpening on Dark Knight was apparently done with Nolan's approval.

Sometimes a blu-ray feels right, sometimes it feels like it was jimmy'd with a little and you can overlook it, and other times it feels like it's been tricked up too much and I'm disappointed.

A good looking blu-ray is sort of like the old Supreme Court definition of obscenity.

I know it when I see it.

Main thing for me is that IMO movies should work like dreams and anything that takes you out of the story is generally bad.

If a film maker has made a great film and the transfer shakes you out of the story, that's a shame.

 

[Steve Williams]

1. Lack of compression artifacts (blocking, ringing, etc.)

2. Lack of banding.

OK Amir, for we newbies, please explain.

 

[RBFC]

OK Amir, for we newbies, please explain.

Amir,

The development of the discussion seems to beg for a thread which describes/defines the various anomalies possible on Blu-Ray discs. Would you please do the video honors, sir?

Lee

 

[rsbeck]

A thread explaining technical issues would be most welcome.

I will employ some gross generalizations in order to further this discussion.

In general, blu-ray entusiasts fall into a few different camps.

1) Purists. These guys will refuse to buy a blu-ray if they can spot any evidence of digital tampering. Might even start a letter writing campaign to the studio that produced what they consider an "abomination." They tend to like classic films, hate DNR and EE and enjoy seeing natural looking film grain reproduced on blu-ray.

2) The "Eye Candy" hedonists. These guys would love it if they never had to watch another blu-ray with film grain moving around on their screen. Heaven for them would be if every film was made by Pixar or was shot on digital like the HD Discovery Channel. They just want detail, pores, bumped up contrast, over-saturated colors and who cares if it is appropriate to the story.

3) Average Joe. These guys are happy that just about any blu-ray is an improvement over DVD and will look better on a larger screen. They're not trained to look for artifacts, don't tend to see them and would rather not learn how to spot them mostly because they've run across a few purists in their day and noticed how miserable they seem to be most of the time.

 

[Steve Williams]

A thread explaining technical issues would be most welcome.

I will employ some gross generalizations in order to further this discussion.

In general, blu-ray entusiasts fall into a few different camps.

1) Purists. These guys will refuse to buy a blu-ray if they can spot any evidence of digital tampering. Might even start a letter writing campaign to the studio that produced what they consider an "abomination." They tend to like classic films, hate DNR and EE and enjoy seeing natural looking film grain reproduced on blu-ray.

2) The "Eye Candy" hedonists. These guys would love it if they never had to watch another blu-ray with film grain moving around on their screen. Heaven for them would be if every film was made by Pixar or was shot on digital like the HD Discovery Channel. They just want detail, pores, bumped up contrast, over-saturated colors and who cares if it is appropriate to the story.

3) Average Joe. These guys are happy that just about any blu-ray is an improvement over DVD and will look better on a larger screen. They're not trained to look for artifacts, don't tend to see them and would rather not learn how to spot them mostly because they've run across a few purists in their day and noticed how miserable they seem to be most of the time.

Rob

you should add a poll to the top of this thread with those 3 options. It would be most interesting.I know I'm a 3. I have no idea what you, Lee and Amir are talking about but I am most interested in awaiting Amir's expert explanation.

 

[amirm]

Would be my pleasure .

The process usually starts with examining what shape the "master" is in. Believe it or not, even recent masters tend to have a lot of quality issues. Repair can be anything from re-digitizing to clean up/noise reduction. The master is then color corrected to comply with HD video standar (BT709).

The master is usually in higher resolution than Blu-ray. The video sample resolution can be 10 bits instead of 8. And video sampling rate 4:2:2 rather than 4:2:0. Downsamplign requires care: if you just truncate, you get banding as values jump from one to the other. A little example. Let's say we have a number system where you have two digits of resolution. Let's see what happens when we truncate to go to one digit of resolution:

Input value:  10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Output value:  1  1  1  1  1  2  2  2  2  2  2

You see what happened? Before conversion, we had a smooth ramp. After conversion, we have one value for a while, then all of a sudden jump to another value and stay there. The eye catches the sudden transition and you see that as banding edges/contouring. So contrary to popular belief, unless you know what you are doing, higher resolution mastering can be a bad thing, not good.

The right solution calls for adding noise in the form of "dithering." That noise blurs the boundaries so the eye can't detect the edge. Unfortunately noise is harder to compress but is still better than not doing it.

The next step is compression. Here the process is as follows: the video is automatically encoded in two passes. In the first pass, the encoder scans the movie looking for difficult and easy parts. It then starts to encode the movie, saving bits in the easy parts and applying them to the hard parts. This works 80 to 90% of the time. But in other times, the encoder misjudges what is easy and assigns too few bits to it. An operator then, sitting in front of a workstation, tweaks the data rate and other encoder parameters as available to dial out artifacts.

As you can imagine, labor is expensive for a skilled compressionist and schedules always tight. So mistakes and shortcuts can occur in above. When that happens, you get blocking artifacts. The codec divides the screen into squares and compresses them separately. If it overcompresses a block, the edges show up. And since there are four edges, they look like artificial blocks and hence the name.

Another manifestation especially in some codecs like MPEG-4 is over softening of the video. In order to mitigate the above artifact, the codec attempts to soften the block edges and in doing so, the video resolution is reduced for that region.

In extreme cases, you get both of the above artifacts.

 

[Steve Williams]

amir would you mind if we moved this to its own thread to give it the exposure it is due.

 

[amirm]

Sure, let's move it.

 

[rsbeck]

Steve, what's interesting is that some of these issues are very similar to audio.

I'll keep these short and we can look for Amir's explanations in its own thread, but here's my analogy.

Edge Enhancement, Sharpening or EE. You can produce this yourself by turning your sharpness all the way up. You'll end up with what look like halos around various objects which creates the optical illusion that you're getting a sharper picture, but to a trained eye, the halo artifacts are excruciating. This is sort of like speakers that are exaggerated at the high frequencies creating etched harsh detail that doesn't sound natural and creates the psychoacoustic illusion that to the untrained ear sounds like more detail when in fact it's just pronounced detail.

DNR -- Digital Noise Reduction. Dirt on the film print is basically "noise." When the studio goes to clean up the transfer, if they turn the Noise Reduction filter too high either on accident or on purpose and if it is done clumsily, it will also remove the film grain and precious detail along with it, leaving faces looking waxy, textures indistinct, etc. This is sort of like those first Dolby noise Reducers that were intended to remove hiss from tranfers made from vinyl records or tape. It reduced the hiss, but it reduced the air and dynamics, too -- didn't sound natural. Purists would rather leave the hiss and hear the detail, dynamics and air.

 

[Johnny Vinyl]

A thread explaining technical issues would be most welcome.

I will employ some gross generalizations in order to further this discussion.

In general, blu-ray entusiasts fall into a few different camps.

1) Purists. These guys will refuse to buy a blu-ray if they can spot any evidence of digital tampering. Might even start a letter writing campaign to the studio that produced what they consider an "abomination." They tend to like classic films, hate DNR and EE and enjoy seeing natural looking film grain reproduced on blu-ray.

2) The "Eye Candy" hedonists. These guys would love it if they never had to watch another blu-ray with film grain moving around on their screen. Heaven for them would be if every film was made by Pixar or was shot on digital like the HD Discovery Channel. They just want detail, pores, bumped up contrast, over-saturated colors and who cares if it is appropriate to the story.

3) Average Joe. These guys are happy that just about any blu-ray is an improvement over DVD and will look better on a larger screen. They're not trained to look for artifacts, don't tend to see them and would rather not learn how to spot them mostly because they've run across a few purists in their day and noticed how miserable they seem to be most of the time.

To the purists, add as well the fact they will only buy discs with Dolby TrueHD 5.1 and/or DTS-HD MA 5.1. Although this is becoming less of an issue with movies, there are still many concerts BD's with DD only tracks and a PCM 2.0 track.

John

 

[JackD201]

I'm an "Average Joe"

 

[Phelonious Ponk]

I guess I would be an average Joe -- I don't mind grain in my film, enjoy the purity of digital video/animation, and am not particularly obsessed with artifacts. The thing that keeps me from being an "average Joe" is that I'm exposed to the TOL TVs and BRs from all the major manufacturers every day, so eventually, whether you really want to or not, you start seeing the differences. One thing, though - I remain absolutely unconvinced that you can tell the difference between 720p and 1080p on a 50" TV from the average viewing distance (usually greater than 10' with that size). Blu Ray is important for big TVs, can make a real difference in projectors, but the average TV...not so much. Color depth and temp, black levels, detail in shadow, pixel speed...all these things are much more visible, and for that reason, I'd take a good 720p plasma over most 1080p LCD/LEDs any day. YMMV, of course.

Tim

 

[Johnny Vinyl]

I'm an "Average Joe"

I am as well. I'm a very "give and take" kind of person and that holds true in the world of A/V as well. I truly beleive that "purists" miss out at times.

John

 

[niklasthedolphin]

OT:
Is everyone here either Site Founders or Moderators???

"dolph"