4K restoration on Star Wars — Page 47

AntcuFaalb said:

MaximRecoil said:

PAL loses points simply because you are stuck watching films in fast-forward

I'd take 24->25fps over 3:2 pulldown any day.

I wouldn't. 3:2 pulldown doesn't bother me in the least, plus it gets automatically IVTC'd back to the original 24 full frames per second (technically 24000/1001 FPS [~23.976 FPS]) when played on a progressive scan DVD player (and pretty much all DVD players are capable of progressive scan).

Harmy said: I already pretty-much answered the VCD argument in this post. But I could elaborate - the fact, that something even worse exists doesn't make the bad thing less bad - if you had gout, the fact that you could have potentially got cancer instead, won't make your gout any less bad.

The fact that something even worse exists matters when placing things on a scale. Adjectives such as "horrendous" and "terrible" are inherently comparative terms in the first place, regardless of whether the comparison is implied or explicit. If everything were the same quality, those and similar terms wouldn't even exist.

In any event, you have already made an explicit comparison when you said the GOUT was "horrendous" and "terrible" (and "unwatchable", which you later sort of retracted), i.e., "by today's standards". And then you made the arbitrary rule that "dead formats" were excluded from the comparison. So, using your own comparison, and your own arbitrary rule (a rule which includes the VCD format), place the following on a scale from 1-10: VCD, GOUT, best-possible DVD, Blu-ray.

This would be true if the lower resolution was the GOUT's only problem - but it's not - it's not even its worst problem.

That's why I said:

On the other hand, a 16:9 DVD containing an e.g., 2.35:1 movie only has a relatively small increase in resolution in the picture area, about 25% more than a 4:3 DVD containing a movie in the same aspect ratio (and this extra resolution is only in the vertical), which is a far cry from Blu-ray having 500% more resolution than a PAL DVD. Having 5 times the resolution trumps having slightly more vertical picture resolution plus less and/or better DNR.

A good Blu-ray is pretty close to the quality of a typical 35mm film print (far from the quality of the 35mm negative however). The huge increase in resolution over any DVD makes the difference between 4:3 and 16:9, and PAL vs. NTSC, and DNR issues seem trivial in comparison.

I only know about the DNR issues with the GOUT from reading about it; I've never noticed them watching it (until I knew what to look for), and no one who has ever watched the GOUT with me has ever noticed anything unusual either. On the other hand, I did watch your Despecialized Edition of Star Wars, and I noticed the difference in quality in various scenes (it didn't prevent me from enjoying it however), and since that was only true 720p for most of it, the lower quality scenes mixed in didn't even represent as big of a discrepancy in quality as it is to go from PAL 16:9 DVD to Blu-ray.

Suppose you have a 30-foot screen and a high-quality 1080p projector. First you show the GOUT and it looks like crap. Who is going to even notice DNR issues when the resolution is way too small for the screen size? That giant pixelated mess would pretty well camouflage any other problems it has.

Then you show a better DVD, let's say your Despecialized Edition source files encoded to a 16:9 PAL DVD-9. It looks a bit better, but not much, because no matter how high quality the video is, the resolution is just way too small for the screen.   

Then you show a good Blu-ray, and now it looks good, and the difference between good and "a little better than crap" is a lot more than the difference between crap and "a little better than crap".

MaximRecoil said:

TV's Frink said:

Wait, what is the GOUT if 1 = 1 full glass?

I'm excited to see if this conversation gets any sillier.

 You mean: any sillier than your non sequitur?

 There is another thread elsewhere on this webzone that has a conversation nearly as silly as this one, hence the 1 = 1 reference.

So to answer your question, it's already sillier than my non sequitur.  I'm excited to see how much sillier it gets than it already is, and I'm glad to see it's not letting me down.  Especially given the generally silliness that is this thread and the manner in which it refuses to die even though it has no good reason to continue growing in length.  Also given the fact that the current silliness is 95% on your end.  And this is scientific fact, I tested it in a lab this morning.

Does that answer your question? 

Oh don't worry, I'm enjoying it too.

TV's Frink said:

So to answer your question, it's already sillier than my non sequitur.  I'm excited to see how much sillier it gets than it already is, and I'm glad to see it's not letting me down.  Especially given the generally silliness that is this thread and the manner in which it refuses to die even though it has no good reason to continue growing in length.  Also given the fact that the current silliness is 95% on your end.  And this is scientific fact, I tested it in a lab this morning.

 So... You're saying the lightsaber compositing matches the 2004 versions?

Harmy said:

Erm, no "more horrendous" and "more terrible" are comparative terms - "horrendous" and "terrible" are simply terms of horrendity and terribleness - something can be horrendous and terrible and that in no way implies that nothing could be more horrendous and terrible.

I've already explained why "horrendous" and "terrible" are inherently comparative terms. The very concept of such words demands that something better exists or can be imagined, and therein lies the comparison. And, as I've already said, "horrendous" and "terrible" are both "bottom of the barrel" terms, which also demands things above it in the barrel, either real or imagined.  

But ok, you want a scale: VCD - 1, GOUT - 2.5, Good DVD - 6, Good BD - 10.

I find your scale odd, because on the line between VCD and BD, the GOUT and good DVD are relatively close together, which I illustrated with the 30 foot screen example. The 30-foot screen example pushes the best home video format we have toward its limits, which makes it a lot easier to see how inferior formats compare to it. Do you really think there would be a drastic difference in perceived quality between a good DVD and the GOUT when displayed on a 30-foot screen?

And excluding outdated technology from the debate is in no way arbitrary, it's logical.

It is not only arbitrary, but it is counter-intuitive as well. The very concept of judging things "by today's standards" implies that the thing you are judging is not up to today's standards, which usually means it is old, obselete, etc. In nearly all cases where things are judged "by today's standards", the thing being judged is something that hasn't been manufactured for many years. Someone might say, "This 8-track tape doesn't sound very good by today's standards," and that would be perfectly normal. What would be abnormal (and arbitrary) is if someone then said, "You can't judge it by today's standards because it is a dead format".

And yeah, sure on a 30ft screen, what you said may be true to a point, although even then a proper anamorphic DVD would make a huge difference over the GOUT, I've seen both the GOUT and the 2004 DVD projected on a large screen and the difference was still very big, although in both cases it wasn't very good of course.

Well, I explained the point of the 30-foot screen example above. Yes, BD is a home video format, but when making objective assessments of quality, you have to consider its potential (even if that potential is usually not realized in practice). When you push BD to its limits, the differences between various DVDs in the pond become trivial next to the ocean between them and BD.

But we're talking about home video here and yes I would personally never go back to watching even anamorphic DVDs but I remember when my dad first got a 1080p HDTV, I was testing the GOUT on it and my dad saw and he immediately said that it looked like crap and asked if I was sure there wasn't anything wrong with it, so I tried putting in the 2004 DVD and he was like: "See, now this is HD!" And when I put the HDTV 1080p version on (I was playing all of that from my laptop) he was like: "Meh, that's pretty much the same." True story.

On my 22" CRT PC monitor (Mitsubishi Diamondtron, 1920x1440), sitting only a couple feet away as you normally do with a PC monitor, I can see the difference among a bad DVD, a good DVD, and 720p. I generally can't see the difference between 720p and 1080p however. But 1080p has quality that doesn't become perceptible until you get into much larger screen sizes. 1080p/2K is enough resolution for commercial theater-sized screens (AotC and RotS for example).

Short Round said:

TV's Frink said:

So to answer your question, it's already sillier than my non sequitur.  I'm excited to see how much sillier it gets than it already is, and I'm glad to see it's not letting me down.  Especially given the generally silliness that is this thread and the manner in which it refuses to die even though it has no good reason to continue growing in length.  Also given the fact that the current silliness is 95% on your end.  And this is scientific fact, I tested it in a lab this morning.

 So... You're saying the lightsaber compositing matches the 2004 versions?

 I'm pretty sure the answer to that is no, I'm not saying that, but I'll have to do more testing and get back to you.

JEDITED

Harmy said:

Here's another great example from the same screenshot:

 Wow, the GOUT really is terribly horrendous, wouldn't you say?

Harmy said:

OK, so I just had to do it... Here's a comparison between the GOUT upscaled to 1080p, the 2011 BD scaled down to 720x576 and the back up to 1920x1080 and the BD in its native resolution - I'd say, that it's pretty clear, that the difference between the GOUT vs. ANAMORPHIC is more pronounced then the difference between anamorphic vs 1080p. And yeah, I know that the official SW BD is far from being reference material but the difference here is so large, that I think it's definitely enough to show the GOUT's horrendity and terribleness ;-)

And I'd say, that the biggest flaw of the GOUT transfer is simply its age - the technology used to make the transfer in 1993 is just hopelessly outdated and was already hopelessly outdated in 2006 (hell, the transfer in this comparison was made in 2004) and the transfer was mediocre even for the technology for which it was originally made, as evidenced by LD fans and home-video enthusiasts complaining about it back then.

The number of pixels in the digital master is one thing but the actual resolution is another - just like it's been demonstrated that the BD doesn't actually resolve as much detail as 1080p could, the GOUT also seems to resolve less detail than the 274 lines of resolution could.

As you've said, the 2011 BD doesn't even qualify as a "good BD". Plus, I don't have a massive screen (which would take full advantage of the quality of a good BD and exploit the deficiencies of DVD resolution) to look at your picture on.

Also, what happened to the detail/grain in your GOUT screenshot? It looks slightly posterized. This is what it should look like (mine on the right, yours on the left):

CatBus said:

Hey as long as this pissing match is going on, I can't believe nobody's challenged the idea that a 4:3 CRT SDTV was "current technology" in 2006 just because some people still had them.

I mean, sure, I had one then, but that's because I'm a cheap bastard and always a bit behind the times as a result.

 I had one then because I couldn't move it.  We had to move to a different house just to be rid of it.

Whoops, I didn't read close enough.  I had a 30" 16:9 1080i CRT.  It weighed 8,000 lbs.

Harmy said:

They are terms of something being really bad, that doesn't mean you need to put it on some scale.

They are inherently comparative terms by definition. Why would someone say "horrendous" instead of just "bad"? Because "horrendous" means "very bad", i.e., worse than bad, i.e., in comparison to "bad", it is worse:

hor·ren·dous

: very bad or unpleasant

See my post above.

See my post above, or since it is short, I'll just repost it:

As you've said, the 2011 BD doesn't even qualify as a "good BD". Plus, I don't have a massive screen (which would take full advantage of the quality of a good BD and exploit the deficiencies of DVD resolution) to look at your picture on.

That just makes no sense - "You can't judge it by today's standard, because it is a dead format" is exactly the perfectly logical thing to say when someone says "This 8-track tape doesn't sound very good by today's standards," because you can't, because today's standards are higher, so it's perfectly ok for an 8-track tape to sound inferior to a CD, because it is an outdated format and you can't really compare it fairly

It isn't supposed to be a fair comparison, which is why the qualifier "by today's standards" is added. Pretty much the only time people ever say "by today's standards" is when they are comparing something old to something new; that's the whole point. Saying "by today's standards" gives the older thing an excuse.

- what we're talking about here though is the equivalent of a professional company taking that 8-track tape and transferring it to CD and selling it - then if someone said: "This CD doesn't sound very good by today's standards," they'd be perfectly right to judge the CD by today's standards, because CDs are still standard today, whereas 8-track tapes are not.

They'd be more likely to just say "This CD doesn't sound very good." "By today's standards" usually only comes up when the thing being judged is obviously old. But as I said, anything can be judged by today's standards, including new things which for whatever reason don't meet today's standards. There is no rule, logical or otherwise, that limits it to current things (except for the one you made up).

Have you ever heard someone say something to the effect of, "This was pretty good for its time,"? People say stuff like that all the time about old things, and it is simply a different way of saying that it isn't very good by today's standards, hence the "for its time" qualifier.

See my post above.

 You too.

I guess it could be the NTSC-PAL conversion (my GOUT disc is PAL) or the fact, that it isn't exactly the same frame.

The exact frame doesn't matter. The results are the same no matter which frame you choose from that section.

And you don't need a massive screen, you just need to get closer to a smaller one.

It isn't that simple. If it were I could see the difference between 1080p and 720p on my monitor simply by moving closer than the usual ~2 feet away, yet I can't. There is some overlap with screen sizes and viewing distances, but a 22" screen is not nearly big enough to reproduce the effect of a 30' screen from a good seat, even if your nose is touching it.

1920 pixels across a 17.6" wide screen (22" diagonal) = .0092" wide pixels, and 1280 pixels across the same screen = .0138" wide pixel, both of which might as well be equally small to the naked eye, even up close. 

CatBus said:

Hey as long as this pissing match is going on, I can't believe nobody's challenged the idea that a 4:3 CRT SDTV was "current technology" in 2006 just because some people still had them.

Just to clarify: by "some people", you mean that about 85% of the TVs in U.S. households in 2006 were 4:3 CRT SDTVs. "Current" doesn't necessarily mean "new" or "latest", by the way.

I mean, sure, I had one then, but that's because I'm a cheap bastard and always a bit behind the times as a result.  Non-anamorphic DVDs may have passed critical muster in 1998, but not in 2006--not at all.

The GOUT was crap the day it was released, by the standards of the time. You couldn't even find a cheap porn title that was released in 2006 as a non-anamorphic DVD.

 Your text here has to do with disappointment, not with objective quality. 

I'm with Frink on this one -- this conversation is silly.

But extremely entertaining!