Just got back from a Blu Ray Demo by Sony Pictures Don Eklund

LFletcher

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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 wouldn’t 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 that’s 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 won’t, so it’s a game of Russian roulette for those of us that want to buy films from more than one region (I’ll 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 didn’t suffer from some issues that plague DVD (halo’s 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 (I’ll 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 (I’m 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 shouldn’t 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 it’s CGI. I haven’t ever seen bad CGI in high definition on any screen, but if they can bring this to BD looking like this, you’d show it to your friends and they would go wow. Monster House isn’t 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 won’t 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, I’ll get in early and apologize for my contribution towards that :blush: .

I would also like to thank Phil and Stuart (oh and Nic :smashin:) for the opportunity of going.

Any questions?
 
Thanks for all your effort and nice review! :smashin:
 
Were you shown eny interactivity on eny upcoming BR movies, did Black Hawk Down for instance have eny? Sounds like a fun evening :)
 
Were you shown eny interactivity on eny upcoming BR movies, did Black Hawk Down for instance have eny? Sounds like a fun evening :)
No but he did show an "Easter Egg" which is apparently on all Blu-Ray discs. If you press 7669 on the remote, it will give you colour calibration bars. If you skip to the next frame/chapter, you get another calibration screen which will prove much more useful, as it shows the proper dimensions, so you can see is your screen etc. is overscanning.
 
No but he did show an "Easter Egg" which is apparently on all Blu-Ray discs. If you press 7669 on the remote, it will give you colour calibration bars. If you skip to the next frame/chapter, you get another calibration screen which will prove much more useful, as it shows the proper dimensions, so you can see is your screen etc. is overscanning.
Just remembered that, and was about to post it. Should be rather useful.

One other thing that Don stressed was that unless you are watching on a proper 1080 screen you really aren't in a good position to judge either format to their proper potential. Did I mention that Sony make a nice 1080 LCD or some nice 1080 projectors :D
 
One other thing that Don stressed was that unless you are watching on a proper 1080 screen you really aren't in a good position to judge either format to their proper potential. Did I mention that Sony make a nice 1080 LCD or some nice 1080 projectors :D
Did Stuart get the point across that he wouldn't turn down a Pearl for evaluation purposes? :)

But no he did mention that some advocates for HD or BD weren't watching it on a proper 1080p screen and therefore were not benefitting from the material - which I think the guy from Pioneer in the podcast also said.
 
Did Don let slip any Sony titles we're likely to see this December?
 
Did Don let slip any Sony titles we're likely to see this December?
Only 2 bits of information was noted by myself regarding releases.

1 - Monster House was mentioned for Xmas release on UK BD.

2 - The release schedule for "Early 07" was said to be 50 titles.

The press pack mentions the 3 BD-50 releases (Click, Black Hawk, Talladega Nights) as all Early 07.

Over lunch, I thought I heard mention of Da Vinci Code as a UK title but didn't catch specifics.

This week's Podcast should have the discussion between all parties that attended, our thoughts and hopefully snippets of Don's presentation.
 
What do Sony consider to be catalogue titles, titles over 12 months old?
 
Was their any mention why they failed to use the BDP-S1?
 
What do Sony consider to be catalogue titles, titles over 12 months old?
I assume they are referring to any titles that come out before they implement region coding. Once they implement it, I figure that they won't re-master those titles with RC active.
Was their any mention why they failed to use the BDP-S1?
Unless I missed it, I don't think it was mentioned - I think we were more interested in what they had to say really.
It was interesting that they were playing to the DVD vs BD arguement rather than HD-DVD vs BD debate which would have been more interesting - other than saying that the storage was greater and they offered uncompressed sound, HD was hardly mentioned.
 
My wife picks holidays at the wrong time ;)

Did you feel the information was accurate from what you know or sales pitch?
 
as far as digital noise goes, in low light digital sensors will give you noise(nikon are more noisy in some instances than canon sensors)so it is likely that thats true.

interesting stuff eh!
 
I would just like to thank Laurence for attending today and giving us his write up. We will be featuring more of this demo in this Wednesday's podcast which includes a round table discussion on what we saw while it was fresh in the mind and I also grabbed Don just before he left for his plane back to teh US to answer some points in more detail. I also have the full demo speech recording and Stuart has some video clips and some images taken on a 1080 DV Cam.

For those who asked, of course this is a marketing excerise by Sony and the PR people, BUT, it is very encouraging that they are now taking note of sites like the AV Forums (We were the only guests there, talk about intimate!) and it's members and hopefully in the future we may be able to extend invitations to more forum members should similar events come around. It may have been marketing and aimed at the enthusiast market, but they did nail it by having someone who developed some of the technology involved and who is a very well respected industry figure do the talking, so hats off to Kate and the girls at the PR company.

More coming soon in the podcast and on the Forums as we all write up our thoughts and add some pictures. (Laurence was quick out the gates on this one, I'm only just back home in Durham now!)
 
Did you feel the information was accurate from what you know or sales pitch?
I'd say it was fairly accurate, with hints of sales pitch. Whether we like it or not, he won't come out and say that region coding sucks, because he has a business to protect. Or that java games are rubbish and we don't actually want them.

On the other hand he gave us bitrate figures much lower than had been speculated at (i.e. Click is 25mb/s and not the 40 odd it was worked out at over at the AVS), which with plenty of people beating on mpeg2 won't help his cause. I also know what I saw with my own two eyes, so unless they used poor D5 masters to validate the quality of Blu Ray, both HD-DVD and Blu Ray can be transparent to the master and can both offer execeptional high definition.

Whilst I'm at it, I remembered another answer I got. Everyone's favourite title - The Fifth Element and why it wasn't up to much. Pretty much blamed the master. He said that it was the same master that they used for the superbit version. Everyone had commented on how good the superbit version was, so they believed that the master would be adequate for the Blu Ray release. They got that pretty wrong (having said that the master is quite clearly to blame for some of the releases issues).
 
It's nice and encouraging to see that Sony are prepared to come all the way over here to show you (and us) what Blueray can do. Were they here anyway or was it a special trip for this demo only?
If it was a special trip did you get the feeling that they were trying to put things right from a generally poor reception that BR has received from the forum members to date?

I hope this continues and Sony (and HD-DVD) continue to expand on this relationship and feedback to this enthusiasts site.


-Neil
 
Were they here anyway or was it a special trip for this demo only?
If it was a special trip did you get the feeling that they were trying to put things right from a generally poor reception that BR has received from the forum members to date?
I think they had been over here for a few days doing the whole press thing.

It certainly seems that they are under no illusion where the public perception of their product currently lies (with regards to quality anyway) and what they would need to do in order to change that.
 
Nice write up – a very interesting read. Look forward to more insight on this week's podcast's – thanks for all your efforts.
 
On the other hand he gave us bitrate figures much lower than had been speculated at (i.e. Click is 25mb/s and not the 40 odd it was worked out at over at the AVS).....

Must be the diff between video and full mux rate. There's no way any current movie needs a 40mbit video rate for transparency.

More generally, amused by some of his comments on MPEG2 - unsurprisingly he failed to mention that 24mbit mpeg2 still has 2 or 3db worse signal/noise than 12mbit AVC. Good to see the encouragement for AVC though, it's undergone a lot of improvements in the last year and really should be the format of choice - but only if the BD hardware out there has enough juice.
 
Having heard rumors and read feedback of the PQ from Click and now hearing what you are saying about BHD the mind boggles.

If they look like they do and yet are still true to the masters then why in the heck would they choose these movies as some of their initial BD50 releases. They had to know that based on all their hype that peoples expectations would be very high and that even a perfect transfer that wasn't reference would be creamed on these forums.

It sounds like he was being honest in his previous interview about the mpeg2's being good representations of the masters, but that just brings into questions how they are picking the movies they release. Either that or they are so suppremly confident that they don't really see the need to show off the format. Maybe Sony really doesn't think they are in a format war.

Anyway it sure sounds like a very cool time going through the demo's etc.

PS. At least it sounds like BHD will look awesome on the bitrate meter thingies Don was talking about hahaa. Unless of course you happen to think lower is better :cool:

Cheers,

Richard
 

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