This puzzles me .....
 

I have just bought a SONY BluRay Player ...... it upscales normal DVD's too.

Now, I've been to town looking for a BluRay Disc - to test it out ....... but, something puzzles me.

How long have Films been shown in High Definition? 20 years maybe?

So, let's assume I buy a BluRay Film which is 25 years old ....... how the hell can it be HD? And am I wasting my money buying an old film on BluRay? Should I simply buy a SD DVD as the Player will UpScale it anyway?

And why are BluRays more expensive than normal DVD's - is it a rip-off?

Thanks for listening :D

The image 'resolution' available on 35mm film stock compares very favourably with even 1080p - so yes, an old film can still easily be HD.

What will make more of a difference is how good the lenses/lighting/film stock was for the original shoot - if it was cheaply shot onto poor quality film then not much can be done, but if it was well shot onto good film then it will look good on BD.

I believe it's to do with the fact that anything filmed on celluloid holds more information than HD can. This means it can be upscaled to digital HD because the information is there in the first place. It's something along those lines anyway.

Thanks for the replies ..... what you are saying, effectively, is that the 'old' celluloid films were Higher Definition than a new DVD of today?

Makes sense, actually, now that I think about it .... we've been conned for years then with standard DVD's?

It's good to know that a 40 year old film can be HD on BluRay and I'm not wasting my money :thumb:

Yes - but there was no 'con' per-se with DVD, it just lacked the storage capacity to accommodate a higher resolution than it had. For its time it was very good indeed, and still looks acceptable even today.

You've always had the ability to watch 'HD quality' films in your own home, it's simply the cost to do so has shrunk - a cinema-class projector is a pricey item to buy, let alone run...

To make the most out of the picture quality it helps if you're tv is capable of 1080p and not 1080i like most tv out there which makes you belive it's full hd when it's not, although it's good quality but not 100% full hd.
Regards

Its the information stored on the disk and the audio track, a dvd is no way big enough to support a film in 1080p with 7.1 audio so you have to get a blueray disk. I don't understand why people still buy dvd's as its like buying a vhs for quality as compared to a blueray film and the blueray has 7.1 audio. For me the audio is just as important as the quality of the film.

Try watching the Sean Connery Bond films in Blu Ray. They are stunning, even better than the later Roger More stuff.

If a TV has 1080 lines, and can refresh at 50/60hz or higher, then it can always do 1080p. The difference is whether all 1080 lines are refreshed 50x a second, or every other line alternating 25x a second, but there is still 1080 lines, so still HD. The reduced amount of data makes it preferable to transmit in 1080i, and the only real issue is the quality of motion due to de-interlacing. The choice of whether to use 1080p or 1080i is usually down to the broadcast or media device the content is being played from, not the TV.

Very technical info thanks, but some tvs are not 1080p but instead 1080i as I was told to get a 'p' for best performance :thumb:

9/10 you wouldnt notice a difference between a I and P picture

but yes 1080p is the better one

I think my TV is 720p ..... is this limiting the quality I can get from the BluRay Player?

I have a 20 year old SONY Dolby Pro-Logic set-up .... I'm thinking that I may need to renew some stuff? But it's so good still ....

My TV is 768 pixels, so 'HD Ready', but not 'Full HD' as they name them. I tell most of my devices to output to it at 720p, giving it all the resolution it needs, and no interpolation.

So?

I won't notice any difference if I had 1080i?

Pete,I'm surprised if you could make out the difference tween 1080p and a blank wall :thumb:

Well, yes, the cataracts do cloud the issue rather!

Some people say they cant tell the difference between 720p and 1080p. Well they must have bad eyesight because the difference to me is night and day. But to my parents they dont see any difference in watching say ITV and ITV HD.

I shoot a lot of video at work (product tutorial shoots, or launch promo vids etc)

We use DSLR cameras to film them, we have a pro Sony video camera but it just doesn't look as sharp.

Anyway, lets say we've shot 20 mins of footage. That will easily be over 10GB in size. So when we render out a clip for youtube thats 5-10 mins in length, that could be 5GB ish. But to reduce the file size we render out the movie in a compressed format. This reduces the file size, but also degrades the quality. For youtube (where our promo and tutorial videos are uploaded to) we use a compression setting that results in the video being about 200mb in size, and the loss in quality is huge.

When movies are shot, they will have a similar work flow. The data for a full move will be well over 1000gb when in raw, uncompressed form, so this is compressed down. A dvd can hold just under 1GB so the compression and quality reduction will be very large. A blu-ray can hold much more data, so the compression of the video will be much less degrading to the quality.

With old movies, when they re master them, they will convert the film to digital, and this will be a raw footage file type, and it is then compressed. The fact it is compressed a lot less for blu ray already means that it will be a far better quality than a dvd.

If you think of the old video cameras that were literally a load of pictures being rolled through a reel to give that illusion of 'movement', a HD camera will shoot each individual picture in a much higher quality than a standard camera. So yes they may not have been shot with HD cameras back in the day, but when converted to digital and then compressed down, the blu ray format will be much more 'lossless' in quality when compared to that of a DVD. This is how it can be 'HD'

Oh and the 'i' and 'p' thing means interlaced and progressive. It's basically the difference between how the pixels on the screen refresh with new images. very slight differences that you will probably only notice if watching bruce lee on ecstasy!

And just for the record, 1080 and 720 is the resolution of pixels in the screen. The more pixels - the better the image

That's a comprehensive answer - thanks for that ......... I'm sure that most people genuinely wouldn't notice a huge difference between 720 and 1080.

I think it's very much the same as AudioPhiles ..... about 25 years ago they conducted an experiment at a Hi-Fi Show somewhere.

They wired up an Amplifier with a simple Volume Control and a simple Base/Treble Control - there was a Graphic Equaliser (but this wasn't wired up at all) ....... the AudioPhiles came and fiddled with the Equaliser, discussing amongst themselves about the effect of the differing positions of the sliders.

Even when shown that the Graphic Equalizer wasn't wired to anything, in fact it was an empty box! They still argued that they heard a difference!!

I got jaws on blu ray and its fooking awesome!

No problem - I started my job as an intern about 8 months ago, learnt a huge amount so thought i'd share some :)

Ha, i love those tests. And i love those people even more. No doubt i'd fall in to that trap but to sit on my ivory tower and laugh makes me feel good.

On a similar topic, my old lecturer (studying audio engineering) once conducted a test with a cable he had his mother solder together using cheap copper and connectors etc, and a £300 per meter cable. He was a trained audio engineer with his own studio.

Using high end equipment, the differences were negligible and only at extreme volumes :lol1:

That would be a CD, they're around 768MB aren't they? DVD's tend to be more like 4Gb if they're single layer, or 8 if DL.. :thumb:

My bad. The rest was all true though!! :lol1:

For some reason I had CD's in my head when saying DVD's

A DVD is actually about 4.3GB and thats a DVD+/-
a "proper" dvd that you would say, rent or buy hold about 9GB.

A bluray, hold approx 25GB on single layer, the dual-layer format will hold 50 Gigs of data.

i put a vcr on the other day to watch, lasted 5 mins befoire gave up cos of how bad the picture was, so compare that to HD and holy cow you have a difference.