[JediFonger]

ever since quicktime started streaming movie trailers, i've been on top of it. i think i must've seen all trailers released in the last 5 years =).

just recently, that's changed a bit. i've been very picky about watching ONLY HD trailers. has this el337ism affected you... yet?

[Joel C]

No, because they are always all choppy and take forever to load, and I can't really see a difference on my flatscreen monitor.

[Darcy Hunter]

I've also become picky as to what trailers I watch off of the QT site. Ever since they've been providing HD content I've been eating it up. I even find myself watching trailers for movies I have no interest in just to check out the video quality. I still check out regular trailers if I'm really interested in the film, but those 1080P ones are amazing (sometimes). However, I've noticed that some HD trailers are better than others. For instance, while detail is outstanding (you could see every fiber on peoples clothing, and every blemish on their skin) some trailers (like the King Kong one)exhibit excessive colour banding in certain scenes. While my computer is too slow to properly playback 1080 or even 720p, I notice a massive improvement even with the 480p ones over the non-HD full screen ones. I am lucky enough to have access to a G5 PowerMac at work with a 24" WS monitor, and it plays back 1080p content flawlessly. You can even see fine film grain in the transfers.

One thing I have noticed is that if you have the time, and own QT-Pro, you can convert a 1080p QT trailer to an AVI file, then use Windows Media Encoder to convert the AVI into a WMV file. Even on my home computer, these files play back smoothly and retain all of the fine detail.

[Todd H]

I LOVE the HD Quicktime trailers. The 1080P ones look outstanding and play with no dropped frames on my 20" Intel iMac.

[JediFonger]

joel+darcy,

didya know that you don't need quicktime for windows to playback the 1080p content provided by quicktime.com? download&install:
-coreavc video decoder (0.0.0.4 is the latest revision i think)
-coreaac audio decoder
-haali media splitter

-MediaPlayerClassic (if you don't have it already).

and if you need more tuning of aac decoding, ffdshow filter.

i playback 1080p content on my dual mp2800 very smoothly.i think most of your PCs are faster than mine. just rename it to somn like .hdmov instead of .mov.

re: color banding, i did notice that as well. i was kinda disappointed when i spotted that. i enjoy these trailers (all qued up on a playlist) on my front projector and you can see those finer details.

if i were outputting to these trailers, i'd do it from the editing station directly. i get the feeling that they output 480p and then upscale that to "1080p". that or it's just mere compression.

[Darcy Hunter]

Thanks for the tip YiFeng, I'm going to try this when I get home tonight.

Quote:

if i were outputting to these trailers, i'd do it from the editing station directly. i get the feeling that they output 480p and then upscale that to "1080p". that or it's just mere compression.

What did you mean by this? That even the 1080P ones are actually 480P up-converted? Other than the banding effect I mentioned, I do notice a quality improvement from 480P to 1080P.

[JediFonger]

i dunno. i was just throwing a dart of a guess.

you had mentioned seeing color banding. i just thought that it was either low-res or bad compression that made the color banding apparent. i think it's apparent in almost all DVDs AFAIK, just not as explicit. i'd imagine 1080p solving that issue... but it's still cropping up in these trailers. an easy example is King Kong 1080p, there's a LOT of color banding in the fog scenes.