Interesting read over at thedigitalbits.com

[Karl Soule]

Not sure if anyone reads www.thedigitalbits.com here, but there's an interesting article posted today about Blu-Ray mastering. The article is mostly about some of the challenges in the mastering process that have resulted in poorly received releases (like the Gladiator release.) However, there's one quote that jumped out at me with relevance here:

[FONT=arial, helvetica, courier, *] "And it quickly became clear to me that - 9 times out of 10 - native 1080p transfers just don't work for Blu-ray. That to me really seems to be the whole crux of the problem. If you really want to maximize the level of fine detail and image quality on Blu-ray, you have to go to higher resolution scans.[/FONT]"

Whole article found here:

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/mytwocentsa183.html#081810

 

[scott william]

that is interesting. good thing my camera shoots 4k!

 

[Pietro Impagliazzo]

Interesting quote indeed.

RED is absolutely future-proofed. R1s are going to be on par with standards from 5 years from now.

Can't say the same about other cameras...

 

[L. Langer]

It's an interesting quote, but as usual, Bill is just throwing it out there like it's a revelation. Everyone on the film restoration/DVD mastering bandwagon has been saying for the last ten years that the higher you go, the better off you will be. Unfortunately, due to the HDTV craze along with the DVD boom in the late 90's, you had a lot of masters of catalog titles being done in 1080 for the purpose of DVD releases which got recycled into Blu-Ray releases. Universal, Warner Bros (They are notorious for recycling masters whenever possible), Lionsgate, Sony, and Fox all regurgitated their older masters from the DVD catalog onto Blu-Ray disc just as they did with the older digital masters used for laserdisc releases in the 90's when DVD first came out. It wasn't until recently that studios went to 2K and above for mastering older titles so we've got a long haul if you're someone like me who loves older films.

 

[Kwan Khan]

Wow....

 

[Elsie N]

Good read. Reminds me of my first experiences with Neatvideo. I soon learned that a little noise was much more acceptable than a flat, smooth image.

 

[Michel Hafner]

What's a "native" 1080p transfer? I guess a transfer on a telecine that outputs 1080p and that's all you are going to see. That alone does not mean a substandard transfer for BD. Actually it has more resolution than any BD which is 4:2:0 color subsampled and only 8 bit. It depends in the first place on how the telecine internally arrives at the 1080p signal it outputs. It's a question of older telecines versus newer telecines, If "native" means there is no internal oversampling in the telecine but simply a 1080p resolution sensor then yes, it will lack resolution compared to today's transfers. But telecines have internally been using oversampling for many years whether you output 1080p or 2K.