LFletcher
Prominent Member
Just got back from a rather intimate demo (four people from the AVForums including myself and some young women from the PR company) of Blu Ray hosted by Sony Pictures Executive Vice President of Advanced Technologies Don Eklund.
Don started the event with a PowerPoint presentation about Blu Ray and its relative merits. He also briefly touched on the fact that Sony is investigating using AVC and/or VC-1 (they have had Microsoft in to demonstrate it). He did say that they are likely to adopt AVC rather than VC-1, but I suppose time will tell. Europe will use 1080p24 (just like the US) for movies, but 1080p50 is supported.
The usage of mpeg2 was promoted due to the encoding time of using it. Mpeg2 encodes can be done in real time, which is obviously a good thing if you are a movie studio, but of no real interest to me as the consumer. AVC and VC-1 encodes take a lot longer (he said several weeks) and cannot be done in real time.
With regards to audio, he said that Sony is using uncompressed LPCM soundtracks at the moment because all users would be able to use the analogue outputs of the players to get the full benefit of the track (An uncompressed soundtrack takes up 4GB for a 120 minute movie, compared to a Dolby Digital one taking up about 400MB). It was pointed out that the PS3 wouldnt allow this due to a lack of analogue outs, but he said that the PS3 can use HDMI as a means to listen to the LPCM track via a suitable amp. So thats about 6 people that will be enjoying that with their PS3
Region coding also reared its ugly head. It appears that new releases will be region coded and catalogue titles wont, so its a game of Russian roulette for those of us that want to buy films from more than one region (Ill return to this later). The java games that they can put on disc were also mentioned. They should be similar to the kind of games that you get on mobile phones (he showed some stills from a Kung Fu Hustle game and XXX). I asked how much space these games would take up and the response was megs rather than gigs. As something I have no interest in the fact they take up very little space is a good thing.
He also mentioned that the PS3 was quite a capable Blu Ray player, and that Blu Ray as a format was unlikely to be replaced anytime soon (i.e. the next 5/6 years) as there was no big leap in quality to be gained anymore, like from VHS to DVD or DVD to HD. Launching a new format is very expensive it costs billions of dollars apparently.
After that he got onto the good bit, and actual demo of Blu Ray. He had two screens setup; both screens were the 46 inch Sony X series full HD resolution LCD screens. Neither had been properly calibrated, but had had contract and brightness adjustments as well as noise reduction turned off. They were also put into 1:1 pixel mapping mode so as to remove any overscan. The material was run off a Samsung BD player and a D5 master unit.
The first demo was a split screen demo of Click (using a single screen), SD on the left hand side and the BD section on the right. It was fairly obvious which was the DVD version and which was BD. Apart from having a much sharper and clearer image the BD side didnt suffer from some issues that plague DVD (halos etc). Don did have the Click DVD to show us if there was any doubt that the DVD side of the image had been doctored to make BD look much better, but this invitation was not exercised. This demo was run from the D5 tape.
The next clip was the same, but the SD DVD side had been replaced by the D5 master. The two images were very difficult to tell apart (Ill mention no names, but at least one person thought that the BD side was the D5 side). It was mentioned that there was grain/noise in the picture, but this was attributed to the camera that was used to film the movie. Apparently digital cameras can still add noise to the image (Im have zero knowledge about digital cameras in this sense, so had no reason to question this statement).
The next clip was of the soon to be released Black Hawk Down (mpeg2, BD50). The D5 master was playing on the left hand screen and the pressed BD disc was playing on the right hand screen via the Samsung BD player. The two were synched so that they were showing the film at the same time and left to run. First up I think that this film will cause quite a bit of controversy. Every other version I have seen of it has a lot of grain, and so does the D5 master. So it shouldnt be too surprising that the BD version has quite a lot grain also. A comparison between the two versions really did show very little difference. The only real difference that I noticed was the BD version had a little less grain than the D5 did. Assuming that the D5 master is the best version of Black Hawk Down available then it appears that Sony Pictures has done a very good job of transferring it onto Blu Ray disc. Does it look like a shiny new episode of a TV series shot on a HD camera not really. Does it look like the D5 tape yes it does.
For reference, Don said that BHD was encoded at 30mb/s. Click was 25mb/s and Tears Of The Sun 16.7mb/s.
Final clip was the trailer from Open Season. It looked very very good, but its CGI. I havent ever seen bad CGI in high definition on any screen, but if they can bring this to BD looking like this, youd show it to your friends and they would go wow. Monster House isnt going to look quite like this as he said the director wanted to add some grain to the image to make it appear more like film.
Back to region coding. I was lucky enough to be given a few UK BD films S.W.A..T and Ultraviolet (did I say lucky? Hmmm not so sure). Guess what, both of them play quite happily on my US Panasonic player, so it certainly looks as if some BD discs wont have region coding on as Sony stated. This can only be a good thing, with the biggest problem being which titles will play.
I believe that quite a bit of this will be in an upcoming Podcast with an interview with Don, Ill get in early and apologize for my contribution towards that .
I would also like to thank Phil and Stuart (oh and Nic ) for the opportunity of going.
Any questions?
Don started the event with a PowerPoint presentation about Blu Ray and its relative merits. He also briefly touched on the fact that Sony is investigating using AVC and/or VC-1 (they have had Microsoft in to demonstrate it). He did say that they are likely to adopt AVC rather than VC-1, but I suppose time will tell. Europe will use 1080p24 (just like the US) for movies, but 1080p50 is supported.
The usage of mpeg2 was promoted due to the encoding time of using it. Mpeg2 encodes can be done in real time, which is obviously a good thing if you are a movie studio, but of no real interest to me as the consumer. AVC and VC-1 encodes take a lot longer (he said several weeks) and cannot be done in real time.
With regards to audio, he said that Sony is using uncompressed LPCM soundtracks at the moment because all users would be able to use the analogue outputs of the players to get the full benefit of the track (An uncompressed soundtrack takes up 4GB for a 120 minute movie, compared to a Dolby Digital one taking up about 400MB). It was pointed out that the PS3 wouldnt allow this due to a lack of analogue outs, but he said that the PS3 can use HDMI as a means to listen to the LPCM track via a suitable amp. So thats about 6 people that will be enjoying that with their PS3
Region coding also reared its ugly head. It appears that new releases will be region coded and catalogue titles wont, so its a game of Russian roulette for those of us that want to buy films from more than one region (Ill return to this later). The java games that they can put on disc were also mentioned. They should be similar to the kind of games that you get on mobile phones (he showed some stills from a Kung Fu Hustle game and XXX). I asked how much space these games would take up and the response was megs rather than gigs. As something I have no interest in the fact they take up very little space is a good thing.
He also mentioned that the PS3 was quite a capable Blu Ray player, and that Blu Ray as a format was unlikely to be replaced anytime soon (i.e. the next 5/6 years) as there was no big leap in quality to be gained anymore, like from VHS to DVD or DVD to HD. Launching a new format is very expensive it costs billions of dollars apparently.
After that he got onto the good bit, and actual demo of Blu Ray. He had two screens setup; both screens were the 46 inch Sony X series full HD resolution LCD screens. Neither had been properly calibrated, but had had contract and brightness adjustments as well as noise reduction turned off. They were also put into 1:1 pixel mapping mode so as to remove any overscan. The material was run off a Samsung BD player and a D5 master unit.
The first demo was a split screen demo of Click (using a single screen), SD on the left hand side and the BD section on the right. It was fairly obvious which was the DVD version and which was BD. Apart from having a much sharper and clearer image the BD side didnt suffer from some issues that plague DVD (halos etc). Don did have the Click DVD to show us if there was any doubt that the DVD side of the image had been doctored to make BD look much better, but this invitation was not exercised. This demo was run from the D5 tape.
The next clip was the same, but the SD DVD side had been replaced by the D5 master. The two images were very difficult to tell apart (Ill mention no names, but at least one person thought that the BD side was the D5 side). It was mentioned that there was grain/noise in the picture, but this was attributed to the camera that was used to film the movie. Apparently digital cameras can still add noise to the image (Im have zero knowledge about digital cameras in this sense, so had no reason to question this statement).
The next clip was of the soon to be released Black Hawk Down (mpeg2, BD50). The D5 master was playing on the left hand screen and the pressed BD disc was playing on the right hand screen via the Samsung BD player. The two were synched so that they were showing the film at the same time and left to run. First up I think that this film will cause quite a bit of controversy. Every other version I have seen of it has a lot of grain, and so does the D5 master. So it shouldnt be too surprising that the BD version has quite a lot grain also. A comparison between the two versions really did show very little difference. The only real difference that I noticed was the BD version had a little less grain than the D5 did. Assuming that the D5 master is the best version of Black Hawk Down available then it appears that Sony Pictures has done a very good job of transferring it onto Blu Ray disc. Does it look like a shiny new episode of a TV series shot on a HD camera not really. Does it look like the D5 tape yes it does.
For reference, Don said that BHD was encoded at 30mb/s. Click was 25mb/s and Tears Of The Sun 16.7mb/s.
Final clip was the trailer from Open Season. It looked very very good, but its CGI. I havent ever seen bad CGI in high definition on any screen, but if they can bring this to BD looking like this, youd show it to your friends and they would go wow. Monster House isnt going to look quite like this as he said the director wanted to add some grain to the image to make it appear more like film.
Back to region coding. I was lucky enough to be given a few UK BD films S.W.A..T and Ultraviolet (did I say lucky? Hmmm not so sure). Guess what, both of them play quite happily on my US Panasonic player, so it certainly looks as if some BD discs wont have region coding on as Sony stated. This can only be a good thing, with the biggest problem being which titles will play.
I believe that quite a bit of this will be in an upcoming Podcast with an interview with Don, Ill get in early and apologize for my contribution towards that .
I would also like to thank Phil and Stuart (oh and Nic ) for the opportunity of going.
Any questions?