Bjoern Roy
Second Unit
- Joined
- Oct 15, 1998
- Messages
- 315
Here we go.
Let me clarify my intentions here first. Shrek is a very good transfer. If most of my DVDs had a transfer like Shrek, i would be in heaven. I think Toy Story's is a tad more defined, has better contrast delineation and less ringing. But i would use both to show of my system. Toy Story might also not be the best quality achievable on DVD, but its a bit closer to that limit than Shrek. When Shrek is an A, then the Toy Story's are an A+.
The intend of my posts are multiple:
1) Show how much better a DVD could actually be with its 720x480 resolution.
2) Show that the slight ghosting/ringing on the Shrek DVD isn't 'artistic intend', but an actual flaw, albeit a rather minor one.
Those of you, who have read some of my posts/reviews, know that in addition to pointing out flaws (like EE etc.), i like to have some kind of a comparison, to demonstrate the issue. E.g. for TPM, i used the R2 disc and the trailer as a reference, to show just how bad the EE in the R1 feature presentation is.
What makes this analysis of Shrek special, and kind of a milestone, is that i have a couple of highres rendered images for comparison, as a reference! That way, i will not only be able to compare several incarnations of DVD transfers with each other, but rather the DVD transfer to the original rendered frames.
That way, we have a great opportunity to show 1) from above. What would a DVD image look like, if the content would use the 720x480 pixels to its fullest intend, without any filtering, softening, EE, etc...
And we can also see, whether the slight ringing/ghosting (in form of halos around bright objects) that can be found in the transfer is there by intend, or a flaw of the transfer. But again, this is from a nitpicking front projection point of view, the ringing in TPM is ten times as pronounced.
I have several highres pics from Shrek. Some are about ~1700x950 pixels, which is most likely close to the resolution the complete movie was rendered at for the film presentation. Toy Story was rendered at about ~1500x850, if i remember correctly. One picture is in the 3000x2000 dimension, which i doubt was used for the prints, but rather as a show off.
I always found the Shrek DVD transfer to be slightly to dark/murky. The highres pics on the other hand are slightly too bright. The brightness i saw in the theater (several times, different theaters) was somewhat inbetween, which was more pleasing.
1. Colors, brightness, framing
Link Removed
You can see that the top picture from the DVD looks kinda murky and pale, while the bottom one might be a tad too bright. It nicely reveals more shadow detail, though.
Which interpretation of the color scheme is correct? I don't know. The dragon in the lower picture looks a tad too mangenta to me.
Also note, that the framing is different. For whatever reason, the DVD cuts off some picture content at all 4 sides. Especially noticable at the top and bottom. For what its worth, the Pan and Scan version does have the full vertical information of the bottom picture, but looses some more at the sides. As if they were trying to emulate Super35 transfers?
2. Dragon
Highres image size ~1700x950.
Link Removed
This is a crop from the highres picture. Lots of detail, amazing.
Link RemovedLink Removed
The left is the highres pictures downsampled to 720x480, emulating a perfect DVD transfer. I reduced color information, to emulate 4:2:0 encoding. The crop on the right is the DVD still. Both frame crops are zoomed 3 fold to see the difference better and match the size of the highres crop.
Look at how soft and blurry the DVD frame is. It isn't using the potential of the 720x480 resolution at all. Especially in the vertical dimension. Consider the left to be the upper limit of what a DVD could possibly look like. I often complain about DVD transfers being filtered to reduce entropy (for less encoding artefacts at same bitrate) or to reduce interlace flicking. But never before have i been able to show you guys exactly what we are missing, because i didn't have a reference to compare the DVD capture to. Here you have it.
While the downsampled 720x480 frame on the left is less detailed than the original above, it still is perfectly in focus and uses the resolution to its fullest.
The other thing to note here, is the ringing. Take a look at the middle horn. In the original and the downsampled picture, its well defined. In the DVD, it has a bright halo around it (above and below). This ringing/ghosting effect can be seen throughout the DVD. Sometimes it simply looks like ordinary EE, at other times, it seems like bright areas seem to resonate/glow into the suroundings, which is a bit different than EE, because the corresponding dark halo is missing. Its definitely not by intend, though, since it doen't show up in any of my original pics. I will post more examples of later.
As you can see in the next round, there IS an actual intentional 'glow' effect used in some scenes, but it looks different from the effect discribed here.
continued...
Let me clarify my intentions here first. Shrek is a very good transfer. If most of my DVDs had a transfer like Shrek, i would be in heaven. I think Toy Story's is a tad more defined, has better contrast delineation and less ringing. But i would use both to show of my system. Toy Story might also not be the best quality achievable on DVD, but its a bit closer to that limit than Shrek. When Shrek is an A, then the Toy Story's are an A+.
The intend of my posts are multiple:
1) Show how much better a DVD could actually be with its 720x480 resolution.
2) Show that the slight ghosting/ringing on the Shrek DVD isn't 'artistic intend', but an actual flaw, albeit a rather minor one.
Those of you, who have read some of my posts/reviews, know that in addition to pointing out flaws (like EE etc.), i like to have some kind of a comparison, to demonstrate the issue. E.g. for TPM, i used the R2 disc and the trailer as a reference, to show just how bad the EE in the R1 feature presentation is.
What makes this analysis of Shrek special, and kind of a milestone, is that i have a couple of highres rendered images for comparison, as a reference! That way, i will not only be able to compare several incarnations of DVD transfers with each other, but rather the DVD transfer to the original rendered frames.
That way, we have a great opportunity to show 1) from above. What would a DVD image look like, if the content would use the 720x480 pixels to its fullest intend, without any filtering, softening, EE, etc...
And we can also see, whether the slight ringing/ghosting (in form of halos around bright objects) that can be found in the transfer is there by intend, or a flaw of the transfer. But again, this is from a nitpicking front projection point of view, the ringing in TPM is ten times as pronounced.
I have several highres pics from Shrek. Some are about ~1700x950 pixels, which is most likely close to the resolution the complete movie was rendered at for the film presentation. Toy Story was rendered at about ~1500x850, if i remember correctly. One picture is in the 3000x2000 dimension, which i doubt was used for the prints, but rather as a show off.
I always found the Shrek DVD transfer to be slightly to dark/murky. The highres pics on the other hand are slightly too bright. The brightness i saw in the theater (several times, different theaters) was somewhat inbetween, which was more pleasing.
1. Colors, brightness, framing
Link Removed
You can see that the top picture from the DVD looks kinda murky and pale, while the bottom one might be a tad too bright. It nicely reveals more shadow detail, though.
Which interpretation of the color scheme is correct? I don't know. The dragon in the lower picture looks a tad too mangenta to me.
Also note, that the framing is different. For whatever reason, the DVD cuts off some picture content at all 4 sides. Especially noticable at the top and bottom. For what its worth, the Pan and Scan version does have the full vertical information of the bottom picture, but looses some more at the sides. As if they were trying to emulate Super35 transfers?
2. Dragon
Highres image size ~1700x950.
Link Removed
This is a crop from the highres picture. Lots of detail, amazing.
Link RemovedLink Removed
The left is the highres pictures downsampled to 720x480, emulating a perfect DVD transfer. I reduced color information, to emulate 4:2:0 encoding. The crop on the right is the DVD still. Both frame crops are zoomed 3 fold to see the difference better and match the size of the highres crop.
Look at how soft and blurry the DVD frame is. It isn't using the potential of the 720x480 resolution at all. Especially in the vertical dimension. Consider the left to be the upper limit of what a DVD could possibly look like. I often complain about DVD transfers being filtered to reduce entropy (for less encoding artefacts at same bitrate) or to reduce interlace flicking. But never before have i been able to show you guys exactly what we are missing, because i didn't have a reference to compare the DVD capture to. Here you have it.
While the downsampled 720x480 frame on the left is less detailed than the original above, it still is perfectly in focus and uses the resolution to its fullest.
The other thing to note here, is the ringing. Take a look at the middle horn. In the original and the downsampled picture, its well defined. In the DVD, it has a bright halo around it (above and below). This ringing/ghosting effect can be seen throughout the DVD. Sometimes it simply looks like ordinary EE, at other times, it seems like bright areas seem to resonate/glow into the suroundings, which is a bit different than EE, because the corresponding dark halo is missing. Its definitely not by intend, though, since it doen't show up in any of my original pics. I will post more examples of later.
As you can see in the next round, there IS an actual intentional 'glow' effect used in some scenes, but it looks different from the effect discribed here.
continued...
)
