HD DVD Question

[Jem90]

Hi all I have just received a HD DVD player for my birthday. My question is that Most of the discs available seem to be re mastered films. Will there be a significant performance upgrade from DVD format. Were the original films recorded in high resolution in the beginning or are the films just going through a scaler?

 

[tonyc]

You will notice a difference if you have an HDTV. NOT subtle! Some of the newest ones are native HD. Most are remastered.

 

[Audiophiliac]

Some HDDVDs are re-transferred from film to the HDDVD format. These should look better than the standard DVD. Some are simply reformatted to the HDDVD video spec. and it will be a wash whether it looks better or not.

But any new movies that are captured digitally and transferred to HDDVD/BluRay are absolutely eerie in how much resolution and detail they have....its awesome.

 

[Jem90]

Do you have a favorite Hi Res disc ?
I have only got the Last Samurai HD disc at the moment.

 

[Cherian]

Film has more resolution than 1080p. This is why most movies can be made into HD and look good in 1080P. As long as the original film is clean then HD disk will look good. I just got Enter the Dragon on Blu-ray and it looks way better then my DVD of it. And this movie was filmed in 1973.

 

[Joey_V]

Film has more resolution than 1080p. This is why most movies can be made into HD and look good in 1080P. As long as the original film is clean then HD disk will look good. I just got Enter the Dragon on Blu-ray and it looks way better then my DVD of it. And this movie was filmed in 1973.

That's good to know... thanks Cherian!

 

[Reverb2009]

Cherian is correct.

Films have a master tape known as a D5 master. Each D5 master tape costs about 5 grand to produce and has around 4000 horizonal lines of resolution. A standard DVD or Hi-Def digital transfer is master off this D5 tape. If you look on the back of a standard DVD produced in the last few years they will say Mastered in or form hi-definition. This means the studio digitized the D5 master to 1080 Hi-Def then made a 480i transfer off of that. Unlike a few years back they would master a film from D5 strait to 480i.

If a film does not have a Hi-Def transfer a studio will go back to the D5 master tape and re-master a movie in Hi definition because you can always down rez a movie or photo and retain most of the detail you can never up the resolution and add the detail back, once it’s gone, it’s gone.

There are a few films on HD-DVD that don’t look much better then their standard DVD counterparts, The Fugitive and Full Metal Jacket being two of them. These two transfers were mastered in Hi-Def before HD-DVD or Blu-Ray’s standards were finalized. They were mastered in MPEG-2 codec at 1080i then reprocessed later to 1080P for HD-DVD. They are not true 1080P transfers and they are old ones at that before studios mastered the art of hi-def transfers. Encoding a film is an art form all to it’s own, it takes skill and experience to compress a film onto a small disk and retain the integrity of the film.

 

[Jem90]

Thank you all for taking the time to answer my question much appreciated
In your opinion what disc should be my next purchase ?

 

[tonyc]

I like Batman Begins.

 

[ScottG]

I like Batman Begins.

Batman is a great disc... Forbidden Planet is visually amazing...

 

[STV]

Jet Li's Fearless or
Happy Feet (Sure It's a computer animated title, but the PQ and the sound are both phenomenal!)

 

[HopelessDFilms]

Hd Dvds

A tip that I have posted many times before is about a "cheat" to purchase your HD movies on the cheap! I will repeat myself for the newer members and for those who may not have seen it as of yet....

We all probably know that Best Buy has some of the largest selections in stock of our HD movies (blu and HDDVD) although their prices aren't all that spectacular. The trick to this is price matching to Target.

The best part of this trick is that price matching to target is really price matching to amazon.com since Target online is based primarily through amazon, at least for their media sections.

The truly greatest part of this is that the prices found on amazon tend to be the cheapest of anybody, the other great thing is when amazon runs a crazy special on HD movies, you are still able to get those prices, for example....

a month or so ago amazon ran a special where a large handful of movies for blu and hddvd were all going for ~15$!!!!! Normally most discs are priced around 20$ while newer and more sought after discs may be raised to ~25$ while still much cheaper than the 30+ at best buy.


Now with all that aside....


My highly recommended discs are as follows;

for you lucky hd dvd backers:rocker: , HVE just released their setup disc in hD
http://www.target.com/gp/detail.htm...4/602-7746618-6159841?ie=UTF8&asin=B000IHYY3Y

Blood Diamond
Departed
Last Samurai
Chronicles of Riddick
Batman Begins
Collateral (only because this is a strict digital to digital transfer, the movie was shot on sony's new cinealta HD cameras... roughly 100,something thousand dollar cameras ..... I believe they used the F90 model...not sure tho)

That's just a few selections to check out....

Hope this helps!