Uh-Oh... three WB (film) HR discs somewhat sloppily upconverted to 1080p!!! (1 Viewer)

[Ed St. Clair]

Yumbo,
No need to ask me.
As you well know there are issues with the title you posted about. WB has admitted to the mistake. They have attempted to not have it happen again.
Would luv to see them rectify the problem with this title and the others I mentioned (which LW2 can be added). Please keep us updated on this release!
Good luck!

 

[AaronSCH]

That's what I was referring to Ed...

 

[Paul Borges]

I would think the answer would be no. Those interlaced masters would need completely new transfers. How long do new transfers usually take? Anyone know?

 

[Ed St. Clair]

GOOD ONE!!!

Yeah, that would be an EZ poll!
Luv to get paid for that one!!!
Let's see... number/percentage of "AR's" on HTF HiDef Forum...
Ding!
Done!

 

[dkny75]

Well they did a new transfer of Serenity for the Eurpean releases so they could get the bitrate down to include all the different language tracks so it could be a possibility. It does look better than the U.S. release but it's not like I did a blind test so it could just be a placebo thing.

 

[Paul Borges]

I don't think they did a new transfer of Serenity. I believe they re-compressed it using a more efficient version of VC-1.

 

[Ed St. Clair]

So, that makes the UK Serenity a "re-master".
Do you think/believe the UK version has better PQ?
If I remember right, I like the UK cover better. ;-)
Same SQ, right?

Was bummed to find out the WB BD versions of the HD DVD "bobbed" titles were also mastered from the same transfers as the HD DVD's. Was hoping this would have been a quick cure. Since HD Disc is so young, I think its going to be awhile, at least a year, till we see any of the "bobbed" titles re-visited.

 

[TomTom]

Usually a couple of weeks. the film gets xferred and cleaned up with dirt removal. And an extensive Quality Control Report is done on it. The color has to get approved by the powers that be. You have a lot of color correction capabilities that can leave you with an "un-estimateable" estimate of how long it takes.

 

[Yumbo]

Will try Last Samurai in terms of volume level to know if different masters used. Release dates are now 14/2/07.

 

[Dave Mack]

Dave, others...
what was the final conclusion on these titles? Where they indeed "bobbed" from a 1080i master...?

thanks

 

[Cees Alons]

Dave,

Practically, that would also mean they were taken from an analogue recording. It's still really very, very hard to believe!


Cees

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Actually, most digital HD recordings have been made in interlaced form, on video tape. Sony's HDD-1000, a competitive open-reel machine from Hitachi, the well-known HD-D5 cassette, all record interlaced video natively. You can now get 24p on HD-D5, but that's a change, and the new tapes won't work on old decks.

I honestly doubt that many of these recordings were made on analog tape. The only analog HD tape formats are the "Tsukuba Expo" one-inch open-reel machines made by Sony and Toshiba from 1985, the 1/2 inch Uni-Hi cassette of circa 1990, which wasn't a mastering format anywhere to the best of my knowledge, and of course "W-VHS", which doesn't have the bandwidth for HD (limited to 12 MHz, although it will record 1125 lines). All three suffer from signal-to-noise and bandwidth problems, although the one-inch type is the best (very tricky to set up, though). Anything transferred after about 1990 will probably be a digital recording, but for progressive recordings you're looking at probably 1998 or 2000 as the earliest date.

 

[Cees Alons]

The essence of the story seemed to be that they used a 3:2 pulled down transfer (?) and "bobbed" it to a higher resolution. Given your info, that most were digitized recordings already, I can hardly believe the pulled-down "masters".
Not totally impossible, but highly improbable.

Sounds like one of those "millennium-scenarios" - only heard before 2000 (y2k), of course.


Cees

 

[DaViD Boulet]

WB industry sources have already confirmed that these particular titles were sourced from older 1080i60 HD masters which had already been split into fields with 3-2 pulldown on the tape, and then were improperly "bobbed" to convert to "1080p24" for HD DVD/BD authoring. Digital or analog isn't really the issue here... many digital HD masters are "hard coded" in 1080i60 form with 3-2 pulldown already applied. a D-VHS tape is such a format, for instance.

That wouldn't have been a problem had they just used the right deinterlacing method to convert back to 1080p24 for HD DVD/BD authoring. They goofed in this case.

Needless to say they won't make the same mistake again.


p.s. a decade ago some HD scanning equipment scanned films directly into a 3-2 pulldown 1080i60 format. These legacy interlaced masters could be converted to 1080p24 with proper 3-2 pulldown reversal if no new transfer could be obtained (though much has improved over the years and new HD transfers would probably provide gains in fidelity for many reasons beyond the deinterlacing issue).

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Well, the old digital tapes would all be transferred using 3-2 pulldown at the telecine. If the masters were made before 2000 (as an approximate date) that's how it would have been done. "Digital" has nothing to do with the question. You could have an all-digital chain, using a Rank Cintel with HD option and SDI output to your digital grader, then SDI again to your digital VTR, and the signal generated at the source and recorded on the tape will be 30 frames per second, interlaced. Most digital HDTV equipment was (and is) built for that standard, just as virtually all analog HDTV equipment was, and that scanrate dictates the use of 3-2 pulldown.

 

[Cees Alons]

I see. And then you'll have to be a itsy-beetsy-teeny-tiny bit lazy and use the tape for a HD DVD transfer without reconstructing the original digitized film-frames from it first. Which would be quite possible to do, but asks for an attentive eye, now and then.


Cees

 

[DaViD Boulet]

Exactly. That's it.

for some reason, most deinterlacing algorithms for HD have just ignored the whole "3-2 pulldown reversal" thing until recently. Bizarre in a way because for the last 10 years 3-2 pulldown reversal has been common with deinterlacing 480i60 film-based material. Part of the reason it has only caught on recently with HD too may be that it's only recently that there's really been a need: the advent of consumer-ready 1080p displays is a relatively new thing and no one cared enough to worry about whether our interlaced HD material was getting bobbed or frame-reconstructed for 720P gear bcs the differences were less significant on 720p displays. Heck, uptil just a few years ago there wasn't even any way to *store* a master in 1080p24 form--all the tape and digital-file formats were locked into a 1080i60 sequence.

Now with full 1080p displays and native 1080p24 formats like HD DVD and Blu-ray, the differences are very clear. "bobbed" deinterlaced signals look slightly soft in camparison to the real frame-reconstructed 1080p. When my friend with the 1080p JVC projector updated his scaler/deinterlacer to one that did 3-2 pulldown for HD film-source, we couldn't believe how much sharper and more detailed it looked versus the "bobbed" HD we had been watching and thinking was great up until that point. After seeing *real* 1080p, the previous picture looks soft!

In any case... because it's only been in the last year or so that deinterlacing engines have started to embrace the idea of full frame-reconstruction for HD film source material, chances are that most software at studio mastering facilities hasn't incorporated these new algorithms. Any mastering house using a deinterlacer that's more than a year old, regardless of price, probably has a solution that doesn't incorporate 3-2 pulldown reversal for HD deinterlacing! Not hard to imagine that early in the authoring game for HD DVD/BD a few masters slipped through that had bobbed their way from 1080i60 to 1080p24. With so many hands handling different part of an authoring project (or various aspects being handled by different parties altogether), it's impressive that the problems we've noticed so far have been so few.

 

[Rolando]

Hi guys, would you mind stating for me (and others I am sure) the titles that were affected?

From reading through some of the first posts and last paost I was able to deduce 2.

Full Metal Jacket
and
The Fugitive.

What were the others?

Also maybe David can update the firts post with this info?

THANKS!

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Yes, considering that any teenager ripping Star Wars laserdiscs knows to use the "Telecide" filter in VirtualDub, it seems an odd mistake for a mastering house to make. Of course, there's nothing magical about HD film-to-video transfers, or "digitizing" film frames. Except for the newest high-resolution digital cinema film-scanners, the trick is basically done in one of two ways : either a light beam scans across the surface of the film frame, and is picked up by a set of photocells, or the film is projected into a camera. Neither of these techniques "cares" whether the image sensor is analog or digital. As a matter of fact, strange though it may seem, there have been "continuous" or "progressive" flying-spot scanners for years, which move the film through the gate without stopping and starting it, and use a single line of light for scanning — and up until quite recently, such machines always incorporated a frame-store to convert the resulting 24-frame progressive signal into a 30-frame interlaced signal!

 

[DaViD Boulet]

ChrisDac,

Great Information. Thanks for educating us!