Very well said John.

Grazie

Here's a true story that I find sort of funny.

A friend of mine was over and I was showing off my PS3 (the one that was just stolen last week). Anyway, I showed him a little bit of HD Blood Diamond (which I think looks just stunning), and then a while later I showed him a bit of home movie stuff of my son Davin, shot with a consumer grade CX-7 and played off of an AVCHD disc. My friend looked at me and asked "why does the home video look so much better than the Movie?" It made me laugh because in spite of the vast superiority on so many levels of the movie (especially that movie), it isn't hard to see why he said that. There is a clarity to HD video that in the long run is going to put film away.

>>>Kinda realised it wasn't about screenplays. At some point it's really is the content NOT the format that swings it for many of us<<<

Gosh there, Grazie. You do take things most literally, while somehow missing the core. Possibly I wasn't clear. You should have read that while I agreed with you, I said we were talking about format.

Today I'm typically seeing Hollywood moves on Blu-ray taking up about 30 gigs or so. (give or take maybe 10 gigs)

How else will anybody widely distribute (movie) files that large?

Internet? I dunno. 30 gigs to download 1movie form a provider seems to be asking allot by today's standards. You could squeeze the crap out of it and cut it to 15 gigs....but even that is too much for millions of people (and ISPs) to handle.

I dont think that kind of bandwidth will even begin to be practical for at least 5 years for the "general" public.

Yeah....Blu-ray prices are stupid. At those prices, renting a title is far more cost effective than owning it.

DVD is still the way to deliver content to the masses. Blu-ray is doing very little to change that.

I also think that Blu-ray went way way WAY overboard with content protection. All of that crazy "handshaking" that HDMI does with devices and keys being "revoked". Horrible for format growth. (especially because the thing has been so solidly hacked!)

C'mon Blu-ray! Let the format out of it's cage while it still has a chance to grow in the wild.

Bureaucracy is very bad for a format like Blu ray.

CT

So tell us , what does BD give us apart from more pixels, exactly?

BD gives you a reasonable improvement in # pixels, in other words, detail. That in and of it self is not too bad. In addition to this, BD (or all HD) also has a slightly improved color representation, particularly if you live in Not Twice Same Color land (or so I thought). Finally, and I'll reserve a separate paragraph to that.

BD offers improved sound. Significantly so. This is more for enthusiasts though, and only with movies where that matters. I am looking forward to WALL*E on BD, I am quite sure it will be a significant improvement over the theatrical release. In movies like that, sound is a vital component of the total experience.

To me, the idea that downloads will compete on big screens with BD in the near future is absurd. It will not be able to. I have watched some of the HD stuff on TV today, and it is terrible. Anyone who wants to see the difference should go look for one of the 8m/s clips of the Shakira BD out there. There are several available. Then compare it to the BD. There is no comparison. Why the Shakira BD? Well, concert videos with lights and the accompanying banding can be hard on an encoder. And that is before the sound starts poring out of the speakers. The sound is incredible from a BD.

not " How much resolution" but "What does it do for you"

Absolutely. This is very important. My favorite movie of all times is, sigh, I know, it is kind of a cliche, but hey, then I am a cliche, Bladerunner. BR was released on BD a little while ago. Fully restored for the medium. I have watched it more since it was released than I have ever watched any of the DVD editions I have.

I never saw BR in the theater when it was released. Unsurprisingly perhaps, it more or less flopped, so not many people did. I have been able to catch it for re-runs in good theaters though. None of these, not a single one, comes close to the BD experience. Not in the same league. Not even the same game.

If you are a Bladerunner fan, getting a 50" TV, a good amp that handles uncompressed audio with good speakers and a Blu-Ray player for that movie alone is worth it. You should then buy Planet Earth to make your friends envious of your 100Hz 50" TV.

BR is flopping for a variety of reasons. The first is that the cost, is something that consumers can't afford at the moment (bad economy, etc.). The second is that downloads are cutting into BR disk sales & rentals. The third is that consumers are not convinced that BR has "won" the format war. Sure, HD DVD is "dead", but solid state storage stuff is creeping in on little cat feet.

Most likely, solid state memory devices will be the medium of choice both for movies, file portability and archiving. Optical disks will hang around like VHS tapes and vinyl did, but they will not be a big part of the future. Optical drives and mechanical hard disk drives ( and also tape-based camcorders) have too many moving parts. That's why you see so many bargains on mechanical HDDs these days.

If you really want to be gobsmacked by resolution then you need to see 4K on a BIG screen sitting up close. There's not much footage around though that does it justice.
The demo I saw made the early Star Wars 1080 look pathetic. The final footage was from a 4K scan of Baraka 65mm neg . The aerial shot of the faithful at Mecca was mind blowing. You could probably count the hairs on every one of those 100,000 pligrims heads.

What you gain with digital projection and BD is more resolution than a 35mm print can deliver, you loose the problems of crappy projectors. Unfortunately what we also loose is the dynamic range of a 35mm print. The digital projection systems give very solid blacks but a lot of the subtle detail in the blacks is also lost in the process. Not that a 35mm print is that good compared to the 35mm camera original either, 35mm prints are made using a cheap process that looses a lot compared to the original. That's one reason why a lot of titles on BD don't look much if any better than they did on SD DVD. To save money the BD is mastered from a print, yuck!

Bob.

"Bladerunner fan" --big fan, image 100" plasma" --- Almost won on the bidding on couple of the studio's future cars a few yrs back and my wife loves the movie too but was less than impress about acquiring more studio "junk" to be stored with the other toys. ;-)

The sad fact is more old pre-96 movies cheated on simple things like fine detail in scenes. BD, 1080p, simply shows too much detail cheating and degrades the viewing, especially when you can freeze frame or repeat the frames. This is why most movies on BD lack viewing details, a very conscious decision by studios to avoid lowering the film expectations and viewing history at the expense of BD's marketing image. Films like "Titanic", "Bladerunner", Planet Earth,.... really rock on the BD format because the details aid the story, like the big screen... ;-)

Here is a Blu-ray player that will REALLY help the format:

A quality $200 unit that will;

1.) play Blu-ray disks normaly
2.) have a simple "file browser" that will read files on ANY optical disk. (the unit wont care as long as the media can maintain file bitrate)
3.) plays and browses graphic files. (.jpgs, .bmp etc...)
4.) plays and browses audio files. (.mp3, .aac, wmv, etc..)
5.) plays and browses all common video files. (AVCHD, .m2ts, .wmv, vc1, DIVX, MPEG2, MPEG4, MPEG1,...etc)

If they make a player that has an open browser that doesnt care about the file format or the media it's on?....OMG,..THAT would sell like hotcakes!

Example,..the PlayStation 3 has the engine to do it, but the damn thing is so freakin locked down inside the firmware that it's only "allowed" to do HALF of what it really could do.

I guess what I'm asking for and an "open-format" optical media player. The key is having a simple media file browser. (plays top ten most common HD/SD file formats)

Simple right? The first company to make one will make billions!

CT

Cliff,
while I'm 100% with you on that but how many would really care and therefore who'd buy it, cost because of licencing the codecs would probably be fairly high unless it was made in China i.e. the IP didn't get paid for.
I used to have a "Pro" DVD player that'd play just about anything, even an AVI file off DVD.

If you look back at the early specs for BD you'll see how really daft Sony's thinking was, the units wouldn't even play a SD DVD. I've said this before, I'll likely buy a BD player when my current pretty good Sony SD player dies. I'll only buy a BD player if it does what the unit it replaces does, the ability to play BD I'll see as a bonus.
My current DVD player will play SACD, never really thought about getting into SACD but heck, didn't cost much more to buy this unit and it was the only player with SCART so now I'm SACD enabled.
BD will only take off when there's not a good reason not to buy it.
There's enough on Joe Average's plate as it is at the moment. Next year analogue transmission stops. That's going to catch a lot by surprise.

Bob.

Yeah,...licencing would be a nightmare.

However, would somebody run into the same problem in the download delivery of the same content?

Encoding, delivery and players is where the format camps make their royalties. So, (i'm guessing) that nobody will escape that mess no matter what devices are out there.

My dream device actually exists for the TV. It's a "PC" with an HDMI video card and it's just to play all these media files I have in my library. And,..it will do everything I could ever want.

I simply wish there was a dedicated set-top peice of hardware out there for maybe $250 that would do it well.

Blu-ray will feel the heat from competition as time goes on. Even thier most industry ignorant accounts and lawyers will understand that they will need to loosen up on these regulations for the format to grow and make money.

I think the SMPTE and MPEG groups are almost a monoploy these days.

CT

"If you really want to be gobsmacked by resolution then you need to see 4K on a BIG screen sitting up close. There's not much footage around though that does it justice."

Bob you keep missing the forest with the ax here. No one denies that there are better resolutions, and qualities than blu ray. Why don't we just forget Blu Ray or even this rather feeble 4K stuff that you're raving about, after all it's nothing but trash when we have something like the Hubble space Telescope to compare it all against. Have you seen the images from that thing? Crystal clear shots of Galaxies 100's of 1000's of light-years away. Of course this kind of comparison sounds a little weird doesn't it?

The truth of the matter is that average soccer mom will most likely never get the chance snap off a shot of the kids with the Hubble scope.... OR.... a 4K big screen cam for that matter. What we're talking about here is good quality at the consumer level... 4K cams... Hubble scopes... even EX1's are a bit out of the average consumer's price range.

Hmm. BD image quality per-pixel vs. DVD?

DVD has a max of 8Mbps. It is generally accepted that with very good non-realtime multipass compression that AVCHD (H.264) is twice as efficient as MPEG-2. So in reality DVD in AVCHD terms has a max bitrate of about 4Mbps.

1080p has about 4.5 times more pixels than SD so that means it would require 4.5 x 4 = 18Mbps to achieve the same image quality per-pixel as SD. And keep in mind DVD's only hit this rate (8Mbps) on complex scenes. Most BD titles I've watched cruise along at 18-22Mbps. Already higher than the DVD max quality, assuming you buy the 2x encoding efficiency of AVCHD over MPEG-2.

But even if AVCHD doesn't have a 2x efficiency advantage over MPEG-2 the fact that many BD titles peak at 35+Mbps means that would be WAY more bitrate than required. In fact AVCHD doesn't even need an encoding efficiency is bitrates shoot to 35+Mbps since 4.5 x 8Mbps = 36Mbps. A number often hit by many BD's as I just mentioned.

Of course this is a simplistic analysis but the numbers are based on some generally accepted figures, or estimates if that is what you think they are.

Further supporting this is that I have still-framed quite a few well transcoded BD titles at difficult scenes (exposions, water waves and such) and have rarely seen a compression related artifact on my 52" Sony LCD. If I have seen anything it usually looks more like a transfer artifact than something related to bitrate starvation due to insufficient quantizing tables.

Don't get me wrong though. There are plenty of stumbling blocks for BD such as ever evolving copy protection schemes that foil many players and create long disc read times, subpar transfers, the downloads breathing down it's neck. But for me, for now, BD is giving me a superior HD experience.

I have long believed that SD images hold together pretty well up to about a 24" screen size. I'm talking about non-computer viewing here. On a computer you can get right up on the monitor and see resolution differences on a 20" monitor quite easily. But most people don't watch movies sitting 2 feet from a computer monitor. Using the 4.5x analogy for 1080p would mean that 1080p should be sufficient up to a display size of about 108". But since you are moving farther away from the larger screens this may even be able to be pushed a bit in practice.

I don't know about AVCHD as a shooting format (presently) due to the high encoding demands in relation to current in-camera cpu technology, but when utilized as a delivery format when time is not an issue I think it is a good evolution of the MPEG-2 format that will serve us well for quite some time.

- Mark

So let's all move to Blu-Code for burning our Blu-rays discs!

"I think it is a good evolution of the MPEG-2 format that will serve us well for quite some time."

Yes... PROVIDED we can rise to reasonable burning rates. At present you can only burn to just a bit more than 17. I don't think however that it will ever be too much of an editing format.

"Of course this kind of comparison sounds a little weird doesn't it?"

What does seem truly wierd is you bringing soccer mums into a discussion in this forum. They're utterly irrelevant. Half of them make me put the tape in the camera for them and don't get me started about them and tripods. Putting any of what they shoot onto a DVD is a big enough waste, the thought of it on a big screen off BD is too horrible to think about.

Bob.

"They're utterly irrelevant. Half of them make me put the tape in the camera for them and don't get me started about them and tripods." ;-) At least their trying..... ;-) Here in the US, their too busy trying to be in front of the lens :-)

To be honest some of them are great.
I've sent the odd one out with a PD170 and an XLR lead and they've even managed to get the DJ to give them a clean feed AND use a tripod. When people WANT to learn it's a joy to work with them. If I know they'll make an effort I put myself on call for them.

On the other hand there's the ones who don't want to know, can't blame them. Then the worst, the ones who think they know, like the one who worked for an agency and thought she knew it all....

Bob.

But Bob,
Soccer Moms are not irrelevant at all.

"Half of them make me put the tape in the camera for them and don't get me started about them and tripods"

This is precisely why I use them as an example. Can you see these people using a EX1??? And the term "Soccer Mom" BTW describes a lot more than just the women you see out in the field. It describes pretty much 1/2 the population. They don't want a EX1.... they want an "easy button" at an affordable price

HDV (and Blu Ray) has given the average soccer Mom the ability to shoot great video (1080i) without really knowing how. There is nothing easier than say for example... the HC3 with the "easy button" set to the on position. And Blu Ray has made it as easy to deliver that video as it is on normal dvd. It's all a relatively simple process.

Now... does the EX1 deliver a better quality? Sure it does... but in this context... THE EX1 AND 4K BIG SCREEN is what's actually irrelevant here.

"HDV (and Blu Ray) has given the average soccer Mom the ability to shoot great video (1080i) without really knowing how"

Wrong again, HDV makes it HARDER for people who are clueless. I get to deal with the mess created by people who even know how to use a camera and get tripped up by HDV. Clearly you don't know much about HDV and it's problems and how they impact Joe Average.

"They don't want a EX1.... they want an "easy button" at an affordable price"

Wrong again. They don't want anything, they're not interested and couldn't be bothered. Half the population is not interested in shooting video of anything, not even 1% of the population is. On any weekend there's more Red cameras rolling in this city than soccer mums or whoever you think they are. Amongst the people who just "want a camera" we do far more business renting EX1/3s than HC7s. There's zero interest in AVCHD cameras, they just died in the bum. We've had "one button easy" for a year, never used, not once, can't give it away.

The soccer and ballet mums are interested in BD, we're starting to get demand for it. We'll be shooting it for them and with much better cameras than the EX1s. We're looking at an investment of over $100K to service their business. Even if they wanted to, which they don't, they cannot bring a camera onto the field or into the theatre, they signed that right away.

The EX1 and 4K is totally relevant, the people who have home cinemas want good big images, the indie film makers have bought Red cameras like nothing in the history of this business. I'll say it again, there's 20 Reds in this city, around 5 SI-2Ks, over 20 EX1s and a lot of 35mm cameras that are rolling constantly. All that creates millions of dollars a day in work and you think this is irrelevant? You think this industry gives a rats about someone with a $500 camera that spends $20 per year on tapes, if that?

Bob.

Bob, I give up. I don't even know what your argument is anymore. HDV is harder!?.... The EX1 beats up Blu ray... or was it HDV... or maybe both, I don't know.... People that don't know or want to shoot video.... I am now clueless as to the direction you are taking this.

From my point of view after watching a Blu Ray video of my kids.... I walk away feeling TOTALLY satisfied with the picture and quality.... relative to what we had available to us just 2 or 3 years ago at this level. That was NOT the case the dvd and DV cams. I also know that most others that have had the opportunity to check themselves out on Blu Ray and HDV.... feel much the same way.

I have lost TOTAL sight on exactly what your complaint is but if it has to do with Blu Ray not handing out a better quality than what we had before... you will undoubtedly be the minority believer in that field.