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Letterbox looks like CRAP on a widescreen HDTV :( — Page 2

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the only letterbox dvds I can remember watching on my friend's widescreen tv, off the top of my head, are "The Prophecy" and "Judge Dredd." Neither looked "all that bad," but this was on a nice bose dvd player hooked up with component cables to a 60 inch sony HDTV.
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The Bose players aren't all that great. They're okay, but whatever processing they use tends to soften the picture overall and actually tint it slightly. Last I heard, the drives were actually made by Toshiba.
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Yeah, I'm sure Bose's DVD players are made by another company (but that makes sense, since Bose really isn't the 'DVD player' business, per se).

I think Denon and Oppo are making some of the best DVD players now.

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Yea, I think my friend's family got it more for the 5.1 setup than anything else.
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Dual Layer DVDs usually look better than an old 4.7gb DVD movie. Most movies at this point in time are being released in Dual Layer or similar formats (DVD 9 for example). These discs have a larger capacity to store data, and will look a little better than movies from 5 years ago. A lot of these discs also have copy protection, something older DVDs don't have much of (but thisis beside the point).

While the picture quality certainly could be worse than it is, nobody can deny that the picture quality could also be better than it is. On a non-anamorphic film, you want to zoom in and remove the black lines, but you are astounded to find out that the quality seems to degrade. What you are not considering, though, is that this process is very similar to the Digital Zoom feature on a camera. If you zoom with the lens, your picture will still be crisp. But if you use the digital zoom feature, you might realize that the quality is not even close to what it was before zooming.
A picture image, wether a still picture on a camera or a moving picture in a movie, has a certain number of pixels associated with it. This number is constant and is defined as the resolution of the image. When you are watching a movie on a DVD player, the machine will attempt to play the movie at its native resolution. If you try to zoom in, you are only making those pixels bigger, you are not really zooming in. Bigger pixels looks like lower quality. Any movie that you do this to will give the same results every time. Zoom in and the quality does not look like it did before the zoom. Its just common sense. HD-DVDs and BlueRay DVDs might have less pixelization when you zoom in, I don't know. But for regular DVD movies, zooming in is gonna give a picture that is more blurry than the native image.

I would strongly recommend that you wait. Next year is the 30th Anniversary of Star Wars, there is no way that George Lucas does not plan to capitalize on this party. I fully expect every edition of all 6 movies to be re-released again on both HD-DVD and BlueRay DVD, maybe even as a deal with a new DVD player and/or TV package depending on the Retailers. It will be advertised yet again as "The Definitive Star Wars Collection for the technologically demanding conniseurs of Fandom all over the world." It will again be the re-re-re-release that will make all other sets and editions completely obsolete - garage sale junk. Commercials will say things like "if you haven't seen Star Wars on HD, you haven't seen Star Wars at all" and "the most complete Star Wars experience since auditorium theater seating" and "immerse yourself in the Star Wars universe like never before - you'll feel like you're flying the X-Wings down the trench - and your neighbors will feel like it too!" and "such a level of HD-THX clarity that you could literally sell tickets to your living room on MovieFone and be sold-out in a matter of minutes."
Just wait till next year.
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Originally posted by: hanakin Dual Layer DVDs usually look better than an old 4.7gb DVD movie. Most movies at this point in time are being released in Dual Layer or similar formats (DVD 9 for example). These discs have a larger capacity to store data, and will look a little better than movies from 5 years ago........

........If you try to zoom in, you are only making those pixels bigger, you are not really zooming in. Bigger pixels looks like lower quality. Any movie that you do this to will give the same results every time. Zoom in and the quality does not look like it did before the zoom. Its just common sense. HD-DVDs and BlueRay DVDs might have less pixelization when you zoom in, I don't know. But for regular DVD movies, zooming in is gonna give a picture that is more blurry than the native image. Well, fortunately these new OOT DVDs are at least dual-layered and flagged progressive. Another thing to take into consideration when you try to zoom in on them is to find a DVD player that performs the zoom after the processing chip(s) (rather than before). DVD players that do this provide a much better image quality of non-anamorphic DVDs on widescreen sets.
Originally posted by: hanakin
I would strongly recommend that you wait. Next year is the 30th Anniversary of Star Wars, there is no way that George Lucas does not plan to capitalize on this party. I fully expect every edition of all 6 movies to be re-released again on both HD-DVD and BlueRay DVD, maybe even as a deal with a new DVD player and/or TV package depending on the Retailers.

I admire your optimism, hanakin, but I've lost hope that we'll see anamorphic transfers of the OOT in the '07 boxed set (much less blu-ray or hd-dvd). We'll definitely see HD versions of the SEs, because those are the only versions of the OT that exist in GL's mind now.

Personally, I have no interest in an HD SE trilogy, nor any boxed set that doesn't contain new anamorphic transfers of the OOT, so the current non-anamorphic DVDs will have to suffice.

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I had it with zooming in all the time and decided to just make a back up copy by running it through DVDRebuilder and converting the 4:3 to 16:9. As far as quality is concerned, I sent it through multipasses in HCEncoder and stripped the Spanish and French tracks. It does look better this way than zoomed in on my player. And at least the subs for those few scenes that need it doesn't fall off the screen. It doesn't make any improvemens overall but it's just a convenience for me. But damn it Lucas, this took me a couple of hours to do onmy home computer that's 4 years old. He could have done the same thing, probably with bette results.
There's good in the Original Trilogy, and it's worth fighting for.
"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people."
http://www.myspace.com/harlock415
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Originally posted by: Harlock415
But damn it Lucas, this took me a couple of hours to do onmy home computer that's 4 years old. He could have done the same thing, probably with bette results.


I theorized about this during the summer. The only reason I can think of for why LFL didn't just make the 4:3 into 16:9 is that, while it would have no doubt looked better on widescreen displays than the non-anamorphic transfers that they gave us, it might not look as good on 4:3 displays. If they had cropped a 480 picture and then made a new 480 picture out of that, people watching it on 4:3 displays would be seeing it after the dvd player performed the 4:3 downscaling (or downconversion, whatever it's called). This might not have looked as good as the 480 letterbox non-anamorphic transfer that he gave us, but of course that screwed over anyone trying to watch it on a 16:9 display.

Lucas/LFL is really behind the times. First he waits until the best possible moment to release the trilogy on dvd, several years after the format had clearly caught on, then waits two more years to release the O-OT in a format that's been obsolete for nearly a decade.
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Originally posted by: generalfrevious
can someone show screenshots on here?

There's a ton of them around here if you do a little digging. There are a few in this thread:


CLICK

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I will give my take on the quality of the DVD's on my RCA 52" HDTV, it is pretty good after a few adjustments. Now in everything I am saying, of course a remastered anamorphic transfer would be better.

I adjusted my picture when watching DVD's to 'Vibrant' and it really made a difference. I spruced up the colors that were sort of dull before, it gave a little more detail to fleshtones, but the only thing it does is it has a little more red overall in the picture, but it doesn't bother me. The only parts that are really noticeably bad in the movies are the a couple shots of Tatooine & Hoth when they are just showing the sand & snow and you can really see the grain, but it is only for a couple of seconds.

I am telling you guys, you have to tinker with the picture options on your HD TV's, and I think everyone can enjoy the movies again. I have watched them now a couple of times, and I honestly enjoy them now without thinking of the 'non-anamorphic' issue anymore, and dare I say I am pretty happy with them now.

I am a stickler for awesome quality when watching a movie, but for some reason I haven't had a problem with the September 12th release, and I think it goes to show the power of the movies over the power of pristine quailty sometimes. If Lucas includes an Anamorphic O-OT transfer in the '07 Saga Boxset, I will buy it, if he doesn't, then I will pass. What can we do at this point anymore?

I hope this didn't come off as a pro-Lucas rant, cause I still think he is an asshole for the way he has treated the fanbase that made SW what it is today.
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To be totally honest, I probably wouldn't care about them being non-anamorphic either if the damn subtitles weren't getting cut off. Everything I've read says GOUT is the best transfer out there. The anamorphic transfers probably look better on a 16:9 tv, but like I said they probably don't look as good on 4:3 televisions, short perhaps of doing that full resolution reverse stretch trick, and who really wants to do that?

Lucas could've been cool, he could've told us in advance about whatever he's doing next year ala New Line with Lord of the Rings or Warner Bros with the recent Blade Runner release, but then we'd have no reason at all to buy shitty non-anamorphic transfers unless we didn't know the difference.

Black friday can't get here soon enough.