A few pictures about....The Sound of Music (1 Viewer)

[Patrick McCart]

Edge enhancement creates the illusion of sharpness. You can take any image and sharpen it, but at the cost of losing fine detail.

 

[Jeff Whitford]

Scott I was wasn't called an idiot for not seeing EE. It was for prefering the original DVD caps. On my system projected from almost 23' away a little extra contrast isn't the worst thing. By the way I used to be a professional photographer and know what makes a good photograph but I dont claim to be a DVD production person. Obviously edge enhancement wasn't used in the darkroom.

 

[Jeff Whitford]

"Edge enhancement creates the illusion of sharpness. You can take any image and sharpen it, but at the cost of losing fine detail."
What do you define as detail? In the first screen cap on this page you can clearly see indiviudual hairs on Julie's head and the blades of grass. How is that a loss of detail?
On the next its all a blur.

 

[Citizen87645]

Isn't the Unsharp Mask in Photoshop based on a darkroom principle of taking a blurred copy of the negative and sandwiching it with the original? I don't know if you could overdo it in the darkroom but overuse of that filter in Photoshop will produce similar results to what we see in the caps of the first DVD release.

 

[TonyD]

only looks that way because the caps are so small compared to an actual viewing size.

as stated before in this and other EE threads EE does create the loook of more detail or sharper image but not on a large screen view.
the EE takes over the space that would normally be the true small details and covers it with the rings and other video noise.
on large screens it looks fuzzy.

 

[Citizen87645]

Also if you work through the Video Essentials calibration disc the issues around sharpening are covered there.

 

[Damin J Toell]

Thus, illusions to falsely heighten detail.

A good transfer of a film already has all of its detail in it. There is no need to trick the eye into thinking it sees more, especially at a loss of true fine detail, and while having to endure magical force-field-like halos surrounding people and objects.

DJ

 

[GlennH]

Well, I guess others covered it more eloquently, but as I read this and before reading their responses, my first reaction was "that's NOT what you're seeing." Believe me, those individual hairs are NOT actually there - they are being created as "shadows" of what is there, creating false edges that look like more picture detail. It's a phantom.

Look at a person in real life standing against a bright sky or building. They don't have a halo ring around them. Nor does one see this on film. It's only in the digital video domain.

 

[Arnie G]

The new transfer looks like a veil of grain has been removed. To me it looks 10 times better.

 

[Patrick McCart]

Here's an example of how edge enhancement works...

I shot this picture myself:

[url=http://img474.imageshack.us/img474/8030/orig14vg.jpg] [/url]

and here's the same one with edge enhancement similiar to the original Sound of Music applied:

[url=http://img474.imageshack.us/img474/8509/orig20tk.jpg] [/url]

Hey, the 2nd one looks a lot sharper, right? Let's take a closer look...

Enlarged portion of the original:

[url=http://img478.imageshack.us/img478/4610/orig1big4dj.jpg] [/url]

Enlarged portion of the "enhanced" version:

[url=http://img478.imageshack.us/img478/8721/orig2big7ry.jpg] [/url]

Notice how the "enhanced" photo simply makes stuff stand out at the cost of smoother gradients. The smooth colors on the leaves are now blocky. I shot the photo in JPG format, so the compression, which was soft in the original is now blocky (the same thing happens to fine grain... it becomes clumpy).

If you look in Ron's first SOM captures, notice how certain lines on Maria's dress are more prominent than others due to edge enhancement. In the SE's cap, every line is uniformly defined, which is expected.

 

[Stephen PI]

I worked for a year on a project recently, and all the 35mm film material was mastered to the 24p HD format. I made it clear from the beginning to the telecine colorist that I did not want any DVNR or edge enhancement applied. The colorist removed all the EE (which is officially known as 'Aperture Correction') and the image was clearly too soft, immediately proving to me that EE is a necessary part of the picture make-up.

Very basically the procedure for optimizing the focus in telecine is as follows. The colorist adjusts the focus with the SMPTE 35mm set-up loop and then re-focuses on the film itself by blowing up the image and focusing on the grain. At this point without EE the picture is still soft and unnacceptable. EE needs to be added to bring it to 'zero level' standard, similarly to using audio equalization to create a flat signal. If the EE goes beyond 'zero level' into the plus area it becomes disproportional to the 'internal' detail and becomes artificial.



I would like to offer that what you see as detail is any small object that is in certain range of the camera vs. where the EE is set at, is artificially detailed. The fine detail is there, it is because it is too small at that distance to be visible to the eye or the details cannot be resolved by the display.

 

[John Alderson]

Great example Patrick.

In my opinion, EE on DVD is far more noticeably objectionable on the moving picture, whereas stills can sometimes (at first glance) look better when "enhanced."

 

[Jeff Whitford]

Guo, I never done anything with photo shop and am very well aquainted with VE

Damin, That quote is a very good explaination

Stephen, Even better explanation.

Patrick, that is an exellent way of showing what the difference is. But I do have to say the the upper photo is not blurry but the caps of Julie from the new disc are.Was there any contrast difference done to your second one?

I showed the examples David posted to a couple people and they all liked the old one better. I'll keep my old one and all you guys buy the new one and everyone is happy.

 

[TedD]

Stephen PI, please tell us which make and model of telecine was being used in your project. Would that have been 24P 1080 x 1920 or 24P 720 x 1280?

Ted

 

[Stephen PI]

Ted, I am sure it was 24P 1080 x 1920.
Spirit Telecine I think.

 

[Thomas T]

You don't have to have a huge screen to notice the EE on The Sound Of Music. On my 32" monitor the EE is glaringly obvious and just makes the film impossible to enjoy and I'm not even a "techie" kind of person. I look forward to the new edition of the SOMDVD.

 

[DaViD Boulet]

Jeff,

No one is an idot for preferring one image over another...and as all things in the subjective realm of our perceptions...there are many variables at play in determining what 'looks better' to us. For instance, I could imaging that someone with a 7 or 8 inch CRT projector might prefer the original DVD on their system because the added EE would help to better define the clarity (a made up example).

Great to hear that you're front-projection equipped. Could you share some details of your system (projector technology, scaling etc.)? I'd love to know more...I'd be curious if your system is similar to my own or if it's demonstrably different (not that either of us have had the chance to see the new disc on our systems...but at least the fact that you like the appearance of the old DVD is revealing).

-dave


BTW, in regards to "EE" in the video domain...I think that the key is that an image needs to be sampled at more than twice the resolution of the final HD image (like a 4K scan) and then digitally downconverted to maintain clarity/sharpness without having to artifically preserve it with "EE". I'd bet that since HF detail needs to be pre-filtered to avoid aliasing, that scans at the 1920 x 1080 resolution actually lose visible detail in comparison to the original analog film frame...and perhaps a bit of EE is necessary to bring the sharpness back to "0".

I think the kind of EE we're being critical of in this thread is EE that clearly pushes the "sharpness" past that 0 mark...exaggerating details and noise--adding ringing and a hardness to the image that a "flat" image (even if "flat" still means a tiny bit of EE to acheive it) would not have shown.

 

[Jeff Whitford]

My setup is a Seleco/Sim2 HT250 from either a Panasonic RP56 (480p)or Samsung DVD-HD-950(set at 1024x768). No outboard scaler/processor.

 

[DaViD Boulet]

That's a great projector. And your DVD players are top-drawer too. I wish we lived in closer proximity so we could experiement with this DVD release in each other's systems and see if we're seeing the same things in each system or if our display chain is producing different results on the screen. Sometimes folks have different opinoins because their objective image looks different in their system. Other times the images can objectively look the same but they have different subjective impressions about what they prefer.

Thanks for sharing!

 

[Jeff Whitford]

David, it would be fun to get togather but im sure you would show me several examples of EE and then I would see it everywhere and hate half my DVD collection.