Harmy

^This

bttfbrasilfan said:

Harmy, what kind of school are you doing? Film school?
I hope you understand my question...

I study English language and literature.

Don't worry guys. This project is still very much on and the summer release is still my plan, I just haven't been posting much lately because I've been really busy. I'm still not all done with school but I should be in a couple weeks or so.

Here's a random STAR WARS thought:

Lucas: I am altering the film. Pray I don't alter it any further.

Fans: This film is getting worse all the time!

Just thought it was funny :-)

I always thought she's looking through the glass at some monitor we don't see. But yeah, those graphics are awesome.

Here are mine: http://uloz.to/xSSTDNW/deed-v1-0-covers-rar

In my country, it always had the English crawl with a narrated Czech translation.

INv8r_ZIM said:

Please...PLEASE tell me this is ending up on the despecialized edition.  A gotod quality audience track is such a natural companion track for Harmy`s project.

I'm really hopeless with sound but if someone syncs it to the GOUT, I'll be happy to include it. I actually have a special feature idea for it for the BD but I'm not yet quite sure how all these things work in BD authoring.

Great to hear, thank you :-) I noticed that error some time ago (banging myself on the head for not fixing it in the DeEd v1.0) so I was on a look out for it when watching your video :-)

Nice video Ady. I dig the display enhancements - very cool, yet non intrusive and in keeping with the spirit of similar things in the original film (like the binoculars for example). One thing I noticed though, you didn't fix this SE colour fluke:

Do you remember him from before he was a ghost? You know, when he was still alive? ;-)

 The Blu-ray version of the telephone pole close-up shows much more detail—including noise or grain. The trouble with noise is that it's random so it doesn't compress well. This means the stronger iTunes compression needs to get rid of both detail and noise—which are the same thing to a compression algorithm—to hit its compression target. The BRD, on the other hand, can happily reproduce the noise as present in the source, burning up untold megabits and leaving details untouched.

 

Now, this is exactly what I was talking about. That looks ugly as f*ck in the iTunes version. Over-all the film is probably very watchable (which is admittedly quite an achievement at less than 1/10 the size of a BD) but it just doesn't do justice to the original cinematography.  Then of course, if you're watching this on an iPad or a small laptop, you probably won't even notice the difference but if you blow it up to like 50 inches or more, that's when thing will get ugly. And like I said, even a 50GB Blu-Ray of a film the original cinematography of which was very grainy, will have this problem (Aliens and Godfather are perfect examples of this).

Yeah, that's why I'm asking what the quality of the iCloud movies is, because while a 4.3GB 720p or 8GB 1080p can be fairly watchable on a small screen like for example a laptop, it's pretty bad on a big TV or a projector (depending of course on viewing distance, but if you're sitting far enough not to notice all the compression, you could just as well watch SD). And even on a small screen it still doesn't do the film justice - like I said, even BDs are still far too compressed (especially films with lots of grain like Aliens or Godfather) so if the streaming services offer video in anything smaller than 20GB you can't even compare them to BD - if they came from the same master, you'd probably get better quality and resolution from an anamorphic DVD9 than something like a 4GB 1080p.

I still prefer to be able to hold the movie in my hand but that admitedly sounds like a good service. What's the audio and video quality like?

The problem here is that this will continue to be the case for digital copies of movies as well, because of the simple fact that streamable/downloadable copies tend to mimic the quality of currently available physical media. DVD was the physical media, so we got 480p digital files. Bluray is the physical media, so we get 1080p (often just 720p) digital files. This is going to be the case in the future, IMHO. Which means each time the physical format moves forward, you'll need better PCs, more space, better internet... 

That's exactly what I meant - you still either need a really good computer hooked to your TV (which can be difficult) or a standalone player (or console) capable of dealing with the latest on-line content. So in this sense it's not very different than BD or other physical media.

timdiggerm said:

The problem with physical media is that

1. It breaks

You buy an optical disc -> You watch it -> You still have it -> The optical disc may break -> You wouldn't have that one movie any more.

You stream a movie -> You watch it -> You don't have that movie any more.

You download  movies -> You watch them -> You still have them -> Your HDD may break -> You don't have any of those movies any more.

2. Distribution is slow and expensive compared to digital

It takes me less time to get off my ass and go to a shop to buy a Blu-Ray than it does to download 50GBs from the internet and it will for the foreseeable future (and at the school dorms I've probably got the fastest internet connection available in my country).

3. Every time we want to make advancements in quality, they make you pay again. This last one is my biggest gripe with DVD-->Blu-->Future

That one I have to give you. Although, if we were talking directly about BD, I already have all the tech and at this point to stream movies, you must buy specialized tech too or at least f*ck around with the tech you already have.

4. Also, the proprietary nature of Blu-Ray sucks

I'm not sure what you mean by that.

For those of you who talk about how you don't get alternate commentary tracks, etc with digital

1. That's possible with digital

True, it's possible but so far not available.

2. Most people don't care

That's why I compared BD to LD, the people who do care (have standards) will rather buy the film on BD or some even better future format than download it.

timdiggerm said:

Let's say this, then: Physical media is dying.

I strongly disagree with that. Discuss here.

So, in Ady's ESB:R thread there was a discussion about whether Blu-Ray is on it's way out and will be replaced by streaming. I wanted to continue the debate without derailing Ady's thread.

My opinion is that physical formats are not on their way out and Blu-Ray is currently the best physical medium commercially available, so I expect it to stay a while. I think Blu-Ray is to DVD what LD was to VHS and LD was around for over 20 years.

I think Blu Ray will still be replaced by a better physical medium in a few years, rather than streaming, because the only problem with BD is that it's still got too much compression; 1080p is what many theatres use for digital projection on huge screens and it looks great, so I think that will always be enough for home presentation, at least in terms of content, but what will be needed is higher bitrate.

I watched Aliens on BD some time ago and the film was really grainy, as it well should be, but the compression algorithm couldn't quite cope with the grain and it often got pretty pixelated. I noticed the same effect to one degree or another in practically every film on BD, so I think if there's going to be a future format, rather than more resolution, it should add enough bitrate to accommodate lossless 1080p; and it will probably be a long long time before most people are able to stream a movie with a bitrate of lossless 1080p, while some physical media can already provide that now.

It's also owning a physical copy of the movie that's important to me and I'm sure many others, so I think physical media are not going anywhere for at least the next decade but probably longer.

Damn, I always planned to go to America by an ocean liner one day and now I'll have to wait for the Titanic to be rebuilt.

LOL, that's cool :-) I've actually seen it in a shop here before.

OK, I checked the differences between the theatrical and SE versions and it seems that the broadcast was the SE version after all and the DVD upscale shots were probably used to replace some scenes damaged or missing in the HDTV capture - there are some glitches here and there, the kind you get when you have a bad signal on a digital broadcast, so I can imagine that if some scenes were riddled much more with those, the creator of this encode decided to replace them with the DVD, although the DVD upscales look pretty horrible (though still better than the PAL DVD, so I assume that the NTSC DVD does indeed look better).

As to the movie itself, I found the first half pretty boring but then it picked up. Maybe I'd actually like the theatrical version better, but then I liked the scene where he's aboard the Alien ship at the end and most of that is apparently an SE addition.

OK, I'm watching it now and it seems like the HDTV broadcast was the 1989 version and whoever made this release spliced in the SE scenes from the DVD (at a cut between scenes, the quality suddenly got lower and the logo from the upper right corner disappeared). Otherwise, the broadcast sourced scenes look like they're from a decent HD telecine but without any major restoration work (it sports a lot of specs and dirt). There isn't much grain to be seen and faces are kind of waxy but I think that's due to the compression rather than DVNR.

Anyway, it's up on uloz.to, if anybody wants it. It shows up on their search engine, so no need to PM me. Just a reminder: you should own the DVD!

It's 2 hours 50 minutes long, so I think it's the SE.

You_Too said:

I don't know why I thought it was a DVD upscale... haha

That's easy, because due to the amount of compression in it, it looks no better than an anamorphic DVD lot of the time (it definitely looks better than the non anamorphic abomination that is the only commercially available version though). I could upload it to uloz.to in the evening, if anyone's intersested - the DL speed is limited to 300kbps but if you use JDownloader, you can still have it in a few hours.