why 1920x1080?

ushere wrote on 4/12/2009, 9:36 PM
forgive my ignorance....

i keep reading about people wanting to render to 1920x1080 from 1440X1080 material, but in all honesty why?

i did a few test (admittedly rather casually), and for the life of me couldn't see any noticable difference on either my bravia (720), or pc (full hd).

i'm not saying there isn't a difference, i just want to know why, give all the facts, why people do?

leslie (who once believed high band was a perfectly good enough format to last at least a decade or so)

Comments

farss wrote on 4/12/2009, 10:07 PM
"leslie (who once believed high band was a perfectly good enough format to last at least a decade or so) "

There's still some bits of oxide left on it, amongst the fungus.

"i keep reading about people wanting to render to 1920x1080 from 1440X1080 material, but in all honesty why?"

I cannot see anything to be gained by this either.

Shooting 1920x1080 compared to 1440x1080 yes, something to be gained there, even if you only deliver 1440x1080. Depends what you're going to do with it of course. For CK and compositing square pixies are the way to go.

Bob.
GlennChan wrote on 4/12/2009, 10:15 PM
You can use a zone plate test pattern to exaggerate differences and see which is the 'best':
http://www.sci.utah.edu/~cscheid/spr05/imageprocessing/project3/imgs/zone_plate.png

*The zone plate is highly abnormal compared to real world scenes. So sometimes things that may be unacceptable with a zone plate might be ok with real world imagery.
e.g. take any image into Photoshop. Scale it to half size using "bicubic sharper', then blow it back up again. On real world images this actually looks ok (the resulting image looks SHARPER)... but not when you use a zone plate.

2- Generally speaking, resizing/rescaling results in a form of 'generation loss'. Avoiding unnecessary generation loss from rescaling is ideal. Try rescaling that zone plate I linked to... you'll never get that looking good.

e.g. if the display is 1920x1080, then you want to shoot to a 1920x1080 format, do post in 1920x1080, and then put it on a DVD as 1920x1080.

In practice, a lot of stuff in broadcast is delivered on HDCAM (1440x1080)... so I suppose some generation loss is 'acceptable'.
farss wrote on 4/12/2009, 10:57 PM
Some interesting examples here.

Bob.
ushere wrote on 4/13/2009, 2:42 AM
thanks glenn / bob,

at least i now know what i should be looking for ;-) though why, considering the general level of audience awareness, one would bother jumping through so many hoops is still beyond me whilst the de facto distribution format is sd dvd.

maybe by the time it matters, my thoughts wont matter.....

leslie
blink3times wrote on 4/13/2009, 3:01 AM
"i keep reading about people wanting to render to 1920x1080 from 1440X1080 material, but in all honesty why?"

There is a need for this if you plan on rendering as uncompressed avi. 1440x1080, PAR1.333 does not work as uncompressed and it gets seen by many other programs as 4:3 instead of 16:9. Other than that it's a waste of time.
bsuratt wrote on 4/13/2009, 3:42 AM
Interestingly, when you render HDV 1440x1080 to Blu-ray using 8c and the Blu-ray templates you will get a 1920x1080 output file. Apparently Blu-ray spec does not support 1440x1080!
blink3times wrote on 4/13/2009, 4:50 AM
"Interestingly, when you render HDV 1440x1080 to Blu-ray using 8c and the Blu-ray templates you will get a 1920x1080 output file. Apparently Blu-ray spec does not support 1440x1080!"

Absolutely incorrect. You must have done something wrong.

I produce 1440x1080 to Blu Ray all the time.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 4/13/2009, 6:34 AM
maybe someone prefers the 1.0 PAR of 1920 vs the 1.333 of 1440? All I can think of.
Xander wrote on 4/13/2009, 7:19 AM
I always work in 1920X1080, not so much because of the HDV footage, but because by the time you add text, titles, overlays, photos, etc. the increased resolution makes those look better.
mdopp wrote on 4/13/2009, 7:20 AM
When you render out to WMV-HD (aka VC1) some players do not understand the anamorphic video format 1440x1080 (1.33 aspect ratio). That is probably the only reason why you would render out HDV-material in 1920x1080 (1.0 aspect ratio).
In blu-ray (mp4) such limitations do not exist to the best of my knowledge.
Since I am using a Sony PS3 for playback I render out 1440x1080 m2ts files (mp4) all the time.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 4/13/2009, 7:43 AM
the increased resolution makes those look better

You can manually change all generated media to up to ~2048x2048 res in Vegas on 32-bit, I think someone said 4096x4096 in Vegas 8.1.

But it shouldn't look any better... at least not unless you have a HUGE TV. Even my parent's 5-some inch 1920x1080 HDTV had HDV (hdmi hookup) look great. Can't' see a resolution difference between that & anything else.
farss wrote on 4/13/2009, 1:39 PM
"Can't' see a resolution difference between that & anything else."

That's a big trap to fall into. What you can see and what happens to something as it's processed are two different things. Read Glenn's post above to get an idea of where I'm coming from.

Bob.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 4/13/2009, 2:47 PM
I did, I know EXACTLY where you're coming from. Rescaling is very evident @ other resolutions, and 1440 vs 1920 even is slightly off when you change the PAR & stretch 1440 to fit. But like glen said:
"*The zone plate is highly abnormal compared to real world scenes. So sometimes things that may be unacceptable with a zone plate might be ok with real world imagery."

But in the case of 1440 to 1920 you're not even really stretching anything that won't be stretched: the HDTV will already take a 1440x1080 & fill up the 1920x1080 pixels. It's just that the TV is doing the stretching vs Vegas. If generation loss is an issue then either a) don't change the resultion until final render, b) render to uncompressed or c) don't bother because they will both fill up all 52"'s of a 52" 1920x1080 HDTV anyway.
Lyris wrote on 4/14/2009, 9:50 AM
1920x1080 is more common, I guess, so people will want to use it. It's mainly a psychological thing, I guess.

One real-world advantage though: Blu-ray Disc DOES support 1440x1080, but you cannot overlay Popup Menus when using this resolution. This is made possible at 1920x1080.

Of course, DVD Architect doesn't currently support PopUp Menus on any resolution, so it's not a big deal here.
AtomicGreymon wrote on 4/15/2009, 10:19 AM
I prefer 1920x1080 mostly for the square pixels... and when creating content for the video in Photoshop, I don't have the view it in the slightly fuzzy PAR-corrected view.