Harmy

MaximRecoil said:

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.  

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

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?

See my post above.

And excluding outdated technology from the debate is in no way arbitrary, it's logical.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

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today's standards are higher, so it's perfectly ok for an 8-track tape to sound inferior to a CD, because it is an outdated format and you can't really compare it fairly - what we're talking about here though is the equivalent of a professional company taking that 8-track tape and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.

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).

 See my post above.

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.

Oh, come on Frink, we have a good thing going here, I can't remember the last time I was having this much fun discussing semantics :-)

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.

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

And excluding outdated technology from the debate is in no way arbitrary, it's perfectly logical if the debate is about today's standards.

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.

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.

MaximRecoil said:

Harmy said:

VCD is a format, which was never really alive :D

It is one of the most successful home video formats in history. Do you agree that VCD is the bottom of the barrel? If so, explain how the GOUT can also be bottom of the barrel.

I already pretty-much answered the VCD argument in this post. But if you insist on looking at VCD as somehow relevant to the debate, I can 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.

And I'm actually pretty sure that a really good PAL anamorphic DVD would be closer in quality to a BD than the GOUT would be to that DVD.

First of all, PAL loses points simply because you are stuck watching films in fast-forward; good for projects where you can fix the framerate, but not so good as an as-is release. In any event, a Blu-ray has 5 times the resolution of a PAL DVD. This makes it suitable to far larger screens than a PAL DVD, i.e., 1080p is good for typical movie theater size screens while PAL DVDs certainly aren't. 

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.

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.

I'm sure there are parts of the world, where people are still watching B&W TVs but that doesn't mean, that B&W TVs aren't dead technology (not to mention, that there are parts of the world, where people don't even have electricity).

This whole discussion is one big 1st world problem and that is perfectly fine but we should then keep it on 1st world terms. :-D

And MaximRecoil, I will concede, that when it comes to the GOUT, "unwatchable" is a bit of a hyperbole (although a well deserved one) but I firmly stand by "horrendous" and "terrible" :-)

Yeah, I know, hence the laughing smiley :-)

VCD is a format, which was never really alive :D

And I'm actually pretty sure that a really good PAL anamorphic DVD would be closer in quality to a BD than the GOUT would be to that DVD.

MaximRecoil said:

"Unwatchable" and "horrendous" and "terrible" are terms which denote the bottom of the barrel, especially when you think all three terms apply in combination. The LaserDisc releases were worse, so where are they on your ladder? The VHS releases were worse still; where do they fit in "by today's standards"? How about the VCD releases?

If we give this a number scale, 1-10, with 1 being "unwatchable" and "horrendous" and "terrible", and 10 being the best Blu-ray releases, then the VCD releases would be a 1, the VHS, Betamax, and CED releases would be a 2, the better LD releases on a high-end player would be a 4, the GOUT would be a 5 (the best DVD releases would be a 6 or 6.5), and Blu-ray would be a 10. One could argue slightly different numbers for each of those, but I'd love to hear a logical argument for giving the GOUT a 1.

 Simple, we are talking today's standards - VHS and LD are dead formats (and were in 2006 as well), so they don't enter into the debate about today's standards at all.

Well, I'm certainly not happy with those parts but steps were taken to at least mask the horribleness and "unwatchability" of those shots and those steps certainly wouldn't work on all shots in the movie, like close-ups of people's faces for example - luckily, I wasn't forced to use many such shots from GOUT and the shots with people's faces in them which I did have to use are definitely among the worst shots in the DeEd and they always make me cringe - I was so happy that I was able to replace the shot of Lando giving the announcement with a 35mm scan in ESB v2.0 - it was definitely by far the worst looking shot in v1.0 and all thanks to about 40% of it being from the GOUT.

Anyone's disappointment about the pixel AR doesn't make it "unwatchable" and "horrendous" and "terrible" - the fact, that it was a 13 years old transfer at the time of release, with heavy DVNR on top of that, is what makes it "unwatchable" and "horrendous" and "terrible," certainly by today's standards but it was at least "horrendous" by 2006 standards too. Back in the day, I was happy watching VHS on a CRT screen - today, I find the same combination unwatchable, because I'm used to a much higher standards.

Well, that's simple, it's because that's much closer to the way those shots looked like on the original prints - it also helps them to look much less "matte-paintingy", especially the "cardboard-cut-out" soldiers - you'll notice in the comparison, that much more of that shot was originally a matte-painting than just the soldiers and that it looks terrible in the GOUT because of the bad black levels.

So, the resulting restoration will be 2K but sourced mostly from 4K scans? Sounds good to me :-)

Are you swapping the sources and re-rendering the work you've already finished before or are you keeping those parts from the 2K scan?

CRTs make my eyes bleed...

This reminded me, I wanted to show you guys this:

Nice. Thanks!

Yowza....

Well, as was mentioned before, the theatrical BD looks like ass because of DVNR.

Well, it seems like you may have had the same idea as I did a while ago - I thought about layering the theatrical BD over the Extended one for the Theatrical scenes and then setting the blending mode of the theatrical BD video to color but I did some tests and it wasn't quite so easy, because the cropping is very different, where the OT BD is more cropped on the right and less on the left than the EE BD (or the other way round, I don't temeber exactly), so you have to crop the EE footage quite a bit for this approach to work, plus the cropping difference isn't consistent troughout, so you'd have to readjust the overlay shot by shot and even the warping is slightly different, so this approach is problematic at best.

Well, that's obvious but are you going to do it?  It's not going to be easy due to both the length of the movie and the fact that the colors of the EE are so destroyed, that certain levels are completely gone.

Huh?

Yes, the EE of FOTR is a far superior transfer but with screwed up colors.

I don't think there's a big edge enhancement problem in either release but if there is some edge enhancement, it's likely in the theatrical version, which also sufferes from extensive DVNR.

Well, yes but simply getting rid of the green tint is something I did in ffdshow settings every time I watched the official BD but the colr-timing has been changed far beyond just the green push - the original timing was far more stylized than the EE BD, which has a more real-life look to it once you get rid of the green tint, so what I'd like to see would be a version with the true original colors or at least close to them - I wanted to try doing this myself but I'm quite busy with real-life stuff and other projects and I know there are people who are much better at color correction than I am.

The demo reel was heavily compressed 720p - even a cleaned up scan of an exhibition print could easily look that good in compressed 720p, so the quality tells us nothing about the source - now I've compared the sabres there with a scan of an I.B. Print and the glows are definitely not the originals, which were much more diffused but the cores actually look very close - both the '97SE and more so the GOUT have the cores blown out and thus looking too fat, so the thickness of the cores in the RMW reel is closer to the original than the GOUT.

Now, the colors in the RMW reel are closer to the way the scene looks in the '97SE broadcasts than on the I.B. print but they look far far better than the 2004 version.

I honestly don't know what to make of this either - Zombie makes some good points about it not being for the 3D release, but I still wouldn't count it out as a possibility - maybe they did do some tests with the 2004 footage and decided, that a remaster was needed for a 3D conversion, because the murky dark 2004 master is completely unfit for a 3D release and as we've learned, the colors and shadow detail can only be salvaged up to a point, so they may have decided that they needed a new master for 3D and today, when you're professionally remastering a high profile film like this from film elements, it would be border-line insane to go any lower than 4K.

Now, they didn't give TPM a 4K remaster but they still did remaster TPM for the 3D release but there's so much 2K CGI in the movie, that they decided to go for the original digital 2K masters instead of scanning film, because the 2K masters would likely have been the source of any complete copy of the movie on film anyway, so by scanning any complete copy of the film at 4K they would basically just be re-digitizing those same 2K files with an added layer of dupe grain and dirt and scratches, only to end up with something that is ultimately still only a 2K to 4K upscale. If they wanted it to look any better, they'd have to re-scan the raw negatives and completely re-do all the VFX, so the film-out masters were the best possible source they had for the completed film. The fact that they then decided to destroy the remaster with DVNR is sad but it also may have something to do with the 3D release - grain just isn't great for 3D.