Movie Blurays: Pros and Cons

Don't mind me... I'm lost.

 

So noted (although, dude? really? that's soooo not me, but hey-ho! )

Re the posted jpegs; if these are part of the basis of Cheapjack's argument, and he's spent a year analysing these, then I'd humbly suggest that he may find this website extremely useful.....

 

BTW, Love the Avatar.

 

In case it ever comes up, you guys can use my first name whenever you like. In fact, I wish I had utilized my name years ago when I created my screen ID. Maybe I'll change it...

Just to play devil's advocate; the screen shots you posted were from Khan, correct? That was the one film which was unquestionably and publicly announced as having been struck from a brand new master. I think even Cheapjack acknowledged that, but I don't want to swim through 7 pages of this thread to find back up of that. The other films are those in question.

I think the confusion seems to be that the other films have been sourced from the same master as the DVDs. Not the DVDs themselves, but the same film print they used to make the original DVDs. Now this doesn't account for TMP, since the theatrical version never had a DVD release. Neither did TUC. And, just so I know, do the prints have the credits and subtitles for alien languages printed on the films or are those always added in post to allow for format and aspect ratio changes? I ask this for two reasons: 1) the Blu-Rays don't have the original subtitles, which all had distinctive and different fonts. 2) The opening credits for Star Trek III were nearly always "wrong" in look and timing. The DVDs have "bad" opening credits, but the Blu-Ray print has the corrected credits.

I'm not an expert, just a fan who likes nice, clean images on his 42 inch HDTV. On my set, the Blu-Rays look great and a big step up from the DVDs (it's been mentioned that the excessive DNR isn't that noticeable on screens smaller than 50 inches, and I'll buy that). This, to me, puts to rest any notion the original DVDs were the source of any of them. The Blu-Rays look sharper and more vibrant than the DVDs, and if you blow up a picture, you don't gain clarity. If you watch a standard DVD on an HDTV set, you will see more imperfections in the image quality than if you watched it on a regular tube TV set. Slight grain will become heavy grain, faint artifacting will become strong artifacting. Watching a standard def DVD on an upscaling HD DVD or Blu-Ray player will improve the image somewhat from 480 to 720, but that's still far from 1080. The difference on actual 42 inch screen is obvious, primarily during the credits which have sharper edges. Upscaling does not provide information that was not there to begin with, so for the Blu-Rays to look sharper than the DVDs, they would have had to have been remastered from at least the source the DVDs were taken from. Sure, some programs can fill in missing pixels, but only by duplicating what is there, not recreating the information out of thin air. I can't imagine that would look good at all.

So, unless someone wants to give a verifiable quote from someone who actually worked on the Blu-Rays, I'm inclined to believe that most of the films were mastered from the film prints used to make the DVDs, not the DVDs themselves. The Blu-Rays would look the same, if not worse.

Scott

 

Yes, this is almost certainly the case. But Cheapjack is quite explicit and insistent the BD's are literally upscaled SD DVD's.

 

WTF?

 

The screenshot in question that I posted was from Star Trek 4. Immediately after the opening credits had ended. I used my own copies of the DVD and Blu-Ray to show the differences.

The other screenshots that I linked to a few posts ago are also from Star Trek 4. They are screencaps from Trekcore.

 

Oh man, I thought that was Reliant in the nebula. Wow, maybe it is I who need the vision checked. The image was so large it ran off the screen, so I didn't linger.

Sorry about that, and thanks for clearing that up.

I stand by my other comments, though.

 

If the prints were mastered at 1080i, why would the blu-ray of such master look worse than the DVD? They had to take the 1080i prints and downscale them to 480i (for DVD release), thus they would have to lose at least 50% of the information in the original digital print.

 

They don't, which is what I was saying, unless I screwed it up (always possible). Besides, aren't film prints sharper than HD? So they made the DVDs from the film master. The DVD was scaled to 480. Then when they did the Blu-Rays, they went to the same film rather than going to the trouble of making new restorations other than TWOK, and scaling them to 1080 for the format. The image from the same film would look sharper because the format provides more lines of resolution. It has nothing to do with the film master itself, which they judged to be in good enough condition to stand up to the HD scrutiny. This is how I grasp it, anyway.

 

Pretty much. Unless they are "fully remastering" the movie for a new release they wouldn't go back to the film itself. They would use the master that they had made for previous releases. A "master" is one level below the actual film or negative. They create the master in the best possible quality they can (time/money etc). They can use this master for all future releases in whatever format they desire. (even formats that don't exist at the time the master was made). The current Blu-Ray movies (except for WoK) have been "digitally remastered" They used the current masters of the film but cleaned them up a bit on a computer (not upscaling CheapJack, so don't even try). Changed the color timing, added noise reduction and edge enhancement etc, and created a new master from those changes.

 

Hi BillJ,

The screencaps we take on TrekCore are nowhere near as compressed as your post indicates. Every image is processed through Photoshop and saved in JPEG's 'Maximum Quality' standard.

Granted the caps we take are not lossless images after processing - if they were then any web publication would quickly become infeasible. With a lossy format like JPEG there will undoubtedly be artefacts in the processed image. However, we have a strong quality control ethos with the procedures we use to capture and process the shots. All shots are taken at source resolution and JPEG compression doesn't really become an issue until you start zooming in past that resolution.

Indeed, when we first started taking BluRay caps, the substantial blocking and waxy appearance you see in some of the movie caps made me call for an audit on the procedures to check something hadn't gone awry on our end. A nice comparison can be made by looking at our TOS Remastered Blu Ray caps where the natural film noise is captured beautifully in our caps and isn't affected by JPEG compression. Sadly, the same can't be said for the movies - the waxy and sometimes blocky nature of the source they used is also captures by our caps, and isn't a product of our processing.

 

Yup, that's what I thought. Cool, thanks!

 

Indeed. To my old eyes, the caps at TrekCore are very high quality, and I refer to your site often.

Thanks,
Doug

 

Oh my god! What have I done by creating this thread?
If anybody is interested, I have purchased the superb looking TNG blurays weeks ago and will hold out on the TOS ones for now.
Not because I believe that they are just upscaled DVDs, mind you. But because I prefer the Director's Editions of TMP and Undiscovered Country (which is a matter of taste and shouldnt be discussed in this thread).

Since I'm the OP and consider my questions answered I wouldnt mind if this thread gets closed so everyone who is deadlocked in this pointless discussion with cheapjack gets released from his/her misery.

 

I hope they release the DE of TMP, as I love it more than the original, and the TOS movie Blu-rays look stunning, at least in my opinion. I love them. Best of luck to you on those DEs. I hope they get made!

 

The TrekCore screem cap from IV with the BOP is stiking.

The DVD cap looks like a picture out of a comic book or a cartoon and the BluRay cap has deeper more realistic colors. Impressive.

 

Oh, really? I've come full circle from to quite enjoying the entertainment value of this thread. I for one will be sad to see it go.

 

Whoops, got this wrong. Missed the bit that said '3 hours of extra material'.

Twit.