Hi-Res Download News (HDTracks, ProStudioMasters, Pono, etc.) & Software/Mastering Part 12**

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Gary, May 9, 2015.

  1. john morris

    john morris Everybody's Favorite Quadron

    Location:
    Toronto, Ontario
    What is the issue? Scan the negative at 4k. Clean up scratches and stuff and put it out. Why are they trying to get rid of the what makes film to be film? I saw predator in 35 mm when it came out and I don't remember thinking how horrible the film grain was. That is film. What is the matter with these people? A 16 mm copy of a 1966 Doctor Who episode needs a lot of DR to look good. But not a 35 mm negative for Christ sake!
     
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  2. moomoomoomoo

    moomoomoomoo WhoNeedsRealityWhenThere'sMoreSleepToLookForwardTo

    Funny, SD on cable TV looks similar to what you descirbe; I always assumed the problem was video compression! There were a number of articles when over the air went digital that analog video was compressing to cut back on bandwidth.
     
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  3. randian

    randian Forum Resident

    It's the fallacy of the modern. Either the executives personally want catalog releases to look like they were shot on modern digital cameras, or they (erroneously IMO) think their customer wants that, and they don't care about the side effects of making the movie look that way (waxworks and detail loss). You also see 4k releases getting a sharpening pass, because the executives think that artificial sharpness and consequent depth loss looks better than the organic detail provided by a high-res scan.

    Then you have geniuses like Christopher Nolan, who wants his films scanned from a print rather than the original camera negative. Apparently unnecessary generation loss is an artistic statement. He's also quite fond, you may have noticed, of adding fake grain to his films, an additional reason why they tend to look soft.
     
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  4. john morris

    john morris Everybody's Favorite Quadron

    Location:
    Toronto, Ontario
    You were kidding about just scanning a print and not the negative right? That was a joke right?!

    Huh?!??! But my understanding is that 35 mm negative can achieve anywhere between 3.2 and 3.8 k in resolution. Why the sharpening? Look I am not a videophile (John lies here...) but come on!!! $#*#*$&@@! In my day we would have killed just for 480....never mind 1080p or 2280!. A 35 mm negative doesn't need any sharpening. Anyway can't we do that on our televisions.

    They are really more than 3.8 k but apparently that is all they can get out of the thing. Whereas the 70 mm negative of Lawrence of Arabia was scanned at 12 k. I want my 12 k TV, player and disk now damn it. Now!
     
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  5. john morris

    john morris Everybody's Favorite Quadron

    Location:
    Toronto, Ontario
    Adding fake grain? Please tell me you are making this up just to upset me right? Kidding....Right?! Why?

    Funny some directors hate HD cameras. According to one of the directors of Stargate Atlantis the HD cameras (pro) have too much depth of field. For the indoor shots of Stargate Atlantis they would pump the sets with smoke to reduce the depth of field. Heard that right off the audio commentary. That's ok. As long as they don't do bizzare stuff in post production.
    Apparently they adjust the colour and everything so that the HD video looks like 35 mm film. Is that bad? I think my Blu-rays of Stargate Atlantis look great.

    I am not like you guys.
    I only have a 7 year old Sony Bravia 32 inch 1080 P monitor. You can adjust the white balance on this! Among other Pro user settings. And $80 Samsung Blu-Ray player. Hooked up with a plane old HDMI cable. I have adjusted my monitor with a professional calibration disk I got. And I watch all movies at 24 per/sec (or close to it!) In the dark as movies were meant to be seen. I don't widen my 4:3 releases. Maybe sometimes....Forgive me. The sharpness control is always off for movies. And the sound is sent to my stereo system to my almost full range Energy speakers (40 - 20 000 hz). O.k. the speakers are not spiked so sue me! But I don't have the fancy equipment you guys have. But I respect your ahhh....mmmmm....drive for video perfection.

    But I grew up with a 20 inch hybrid tube/transistor black and white T.V. A crappy analog 250 lines picture usually littered with ghost and snow. We didn't even have a colour television until 1980. No VCR until 1983. Back in my day if you wanted a high definition picture you had to go out and pay to see a movie. And only a 70 mm print could hold those 6 channel soundtracks.

    1080p is like a good film print and 4k is way better. Why does it need tweaking! I don't get it.
     
    Last edited: Jul 1, 2020
    oneway23 likes this.
  6. randian

    randian Forum Resident

    Technically, Nolan scans his films from the interpositive, which is a first generation copy of the original camera negative, not a work print, which is an even later generation copy. Still, he doesn't scan from the OCN, which I think is nuts.

    Fake film grain was heavily used in Man of Steel, for example. That's a Zack Snyder film though. It is also common to scrub the grain with DNR because it's easier to get clean mattes, then digitally add back the grain to "restore" the look of film. The last two Lucas Star Wars films have fake film grain, probably because it helps hide low quality effects.
     
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  7. john morris

    john morris Everybody's Favorite Quadron

    Location:
    Toronto, Ontario
    Wow! Learn something new all the time on here. Question. Those HD Little House On The Prairie Blu-rays - Were they scanned from the negatives, a work print or what? The DVDs look fantastic. I purchased the 9th season on HD and was expecting something fantastic. It was better than the DVDs, not not much better.
     
  8. john morris

    john morris Everybody's Favorite Quadron

    Location:
    Toronto, Ontario
    Those Technicolor Blu-ray/4k disk are good. Right? Gone With The Wind, Singing In The Rain, The Unsinkable Molly Brown (Disk arriving by Sunday!), Robin Hood and Meet Me In St Louis.
    The restoration team was to give customers what the film maker intended. That is what they say on the bonus feature of Gone With The Wind. I could see these guys were going to great lengths to give us what the film should look like.. Is this rare?
     
  9. john morris

    john morris Everybody's Favorite Quadron

    Location:
    Toronto, Ontario
    The Alien Blu-ray series released a few years back were left as is; grain and all. And the Kodak stock back in 1985/1986 was pretty grainy. Even James Cameron noticed it. And the Alien Blu-ray Anthology I got (used $19!) looked great. They left the grain alone. Is the 4k Aliens series the same?
     
  10. moomoomoomoo

    moomoomoomoo WhoNeedsRealityWhenThere'sMoreSleepToLookForwardTo

    Video wise, if you want to get really disgusted watch almost any film/concert film Neil Young has ever released: Talk About Grain!
     
  11. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    I recorded a bunch of stuff off digital SD cable to DVD back around 2007-2008. Everybody looks like a wax figure. They heavily noise reduced the signal prior to transmission because it dramatically cuts down on the amount of bandwidth required to transmit. Compression algorithms don't handle noise well at all.

    I've been busily ripping my DVDs and Blu-rays to my hard drive, and converting everything to the latest compression standard, H.265, partly to save space but also to make the library easier to backup and manage. Depending on the compression settings used I can squeeze the program material down by 1/3rd to 1/2 without any noticeable degradation, which is fairly impressive. But I noticed that some old VHS tapes I'd converted to DVD and then ripped weren't compressing well at all - an hour of an old VHS tape at fairly low resolution would take more space than an hour of a ripped, mastered DVD. I finally realized that the VHS rips - often of old over the air broadcasts - were noisy as heck and driving the compression nuts. I applied some very light noise reduction and not only did the file sizes drop by an additional 1/3rd to 1/2, but the resulting image looked better when blown up on my 34" 4K computer monitor. So a little noise reduction is a good thing. Crank it to max and you can make the files even smaller, but at the expense of losing a lot of detail. 10-15 years ago it was an easy hack to cram more stuff onto cable, or onto a disc, but in the era of Blu-ray and broadband it really isn't necessary anymore.

    I will say, some TV series had ridiculous amounts of film grain, presumably for the effect. Sex And The City is crazy grainy, especially the first season or two, probably because they were going for a faux cinéma vérité effect. I applied the lightest noise reduction settings and the file sizes of each episode dropped by something like 1/3rd. I thought the end product looked better when blown up to 4K. I suspect modern scaling algorithms are also negatively impacted by excessive noise... It's important to note there was still plenty of grain visible - the image didn't look all that different - but the impact to the compression was dramatic.

    Possibly, but it might also have been an attempt to make them more visually consistent with the first trilogy. And audiences generally reacted poorly to images without grain - it actually looked cheaper to them, more like television. Go figure!
     
  12. moomoomoomoo

    moomoomoomoo WhoNeedsRealityWhenThere'sMoreSleepToLookForwardTo

    My Oppo 95 won't play H265, but (possibly with my mediocre eyesite) heavily compressed H264 looks awesome. I never understood why bit rate compressed audio (including 24 bit MQA) sounds so bad, where as heavily compressed video can look much better than SD. I can see a difference between H264 & a full blu; but H264 often looks better on my video system (Oppo 95 to Vizio 55") than an upampled DVD (& my Oppo does an excellent job of upsampling).
     
    john morris likes this.
  13. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    Eyes are easier to trick than ears, especially with moving images.
     
  14. jmacvols

    jmacvols Forum Resident

    Location:
    Tennessee
    THIS WEEK on HDtracks...

    David Gilmour - Yes I Have Ghosts
    Mike Shinoda - Open Door
    Katy Perry - Daisies (Acoustic)
    Willie Nelson - First Rose of Spring

    plus much much more...
     
  15. john morris

    john morris Everybody's Favorite Quadron

    Location:
    Toronto, Ontario
    55 inches is too big. Too much to see. Stick to a 32 inches. Things look better on a smaller screen. An old friend of mine has a professional 105 inch Sony OLED upconverting 4k monitor. Always complaining that his 4k disks don't look right. Too much of a good thing. Get a 1970 black and white TV. Everything will look good on that. :laughup:
     
  16. john morris

    john morris Everybody's Favorite Quadron

    Location:
    Toronto, Ontario
    All my PAL DVDs have to be recorded on the data hoarding MPEG1. I got 25 PAL 567 line, 25f/ps 52 minute shows on one 64 GB USB Flash drive. (Actually it is only 57.7 GB) . So instead of going through 10 disks of Tenko on my PC at 720 lines I can watch the first 25 episodes on on flash drive through my Blu-ray player unconverted to 1080p.
     
  17. moomoomoomoo

    moomoomoomoo WhoNeedsRealityWhenThere'sMoreSleepToLookForwardTo

    32 is too small for my eyes. Though some things truly did look better on my now deceased SD 42" Sony. Others look better is hi-def.
     
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  18. moomoomoomoo

    moomoomoomoo WhoNeedsRealityWhenThere'sMoreSleepToLookForwardTo

    That's how I watch H264: USB Flash->Oppo blu-ray-> Vizio TV. My eyes can only see a small difference between a moderately compressed 1080 mkv & a real blu-ray.
     
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  19. moomoomoomoo

    moomoomoomoo WhoNeedsRealityWhenThere'sMoreSleepToLookForwardTo

    Neil Young - Greendale (studio album in 192/24) is the only new release on HDT & PSM at the time of writing that's of interest to me this week. If I remember right, both the live dvd's are 24 bit, but I believe the studio edition has only been released previously on cd (I have both 2 disc sets, but I'm too lazy to check. ForNYA subscribers, it's cheaper there.
     
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  20. dtuck90

    dtuck90 Forum Resident

    Location:
    UK
    Correct this is the first Hi Res release of the album
     
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  21. Joint Attention

    Joint Attention Forum Resident

    Location:
    Gig Harbor, WA
    Greendale was released on DVD-A in 2003. The stereo and 5.1 mixes are both 24/96 on the DVD-A.
     
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  22. Mickactual

    Mickactual Humble indie rock musician

    Stones update - somewhat good news: The 24/44.1 of Emotional Rescue released last week is a DR9, whereas the 24/44.1 download of it that came with the vinyl box set was a DR8. So far, this appears to be the only one that differs from what came with the download card. Really not sure what is going on with these releases...
     
    eric777 likes this.
  23. Steve Martin

    Steve Martin Wild & Crazy Guy

    Location:
    Plano, TX
    Could y'all start another thread to talk about movies? This is the Hi-Res Download News thread.
     
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  24. moomoomoomoo

    moomoomoomoo WhoNeedsRealityWhenThere'sMoreSleepToLookForwardTo

    Thanks, you're right. I have all 3 versions. My collection is too large. I wonder if this is a new master?
     
  25. dtuck90

    dtuck90 Forum Resident

    Location:
    UK
    It’s now streaming on NYA not just a download so you can compare
     
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