Hidden trailers

Posted on April 24, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

Today I gathered some information from the Blu-ray of Michael Jackson’s This Is It, which I’ll be reviewing in the next few days. I use BDInfo to drill down into the tech details, and go through every menu link on the disc in a player, relating what BDInfo tells me to each item I find and recording it in my database.

But sometimes, like a re-assembled clock, there are bits left over. BDInfo suggested that there were four substantial elements not accessible via any menu on the disc in normal playback, at least as far as I could find. It turned out that they are movie trailers, which is odd. The disc does have an entry for trailers under its ‘Special Features’ menu, but shows only one (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs).

I dragged the files to the player on my computer one by one to see what they were. They turned out to be the trailers for Did You Hear About the Morgans?, The Men Who Stare at Goats, Planet 51 and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

Posted in Blu-ray, Disc details | 2 Comments

Avatar gives 3D backwards recognition

Posted on April 24, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

CinemaSquid has posted the technical specifications of the Blu-ray for Avatar on the AV Science Forum here. Looks like it will be pretty good. One point that caught my eye was the disc title: ‘RED_BIRD_2D_WW’. Presumably ‘Red Bird’ was some kind of code name. I would have thought ‘WW’ meant ‘world wide’, except that the disc is locked to Regions A and B (a welcome improvement over Fox’s usual habit of locking all discs to a single region).

And I can only suppose that the ‘2D’ means that Fox is planning a 3D version in the near future.

Meanwhile, I will probably never review this disc. I still won’t sign the company’s Non-Disclosure Agreement, and although it has relented on many titles, it still insists on this for what it calles its ‘Triple A titles (like Avatar).’

Posted in 3D, Admin, Blu-ray, Region Coding | 3 Comments

Lip Sync

Posted on April 22, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

About eighteen months ago I did a substantial piece on lip sync which was published in Sound and Image. I’ve just uploaded it, and here it is. It deals with what lip sync problems are, the processing in our brains that generate different results, and what can be done about it.

An excerpt:

Let’s say that I am standing next to you. If you speak to me, the sound of your voice, relative to my view of your lips, will be delayed by around one millisecond (one thousandth of a second). If I am standing in one corner of my office and you are standing in the other corner, about seven metres away, your voice will be delayed by about twenty milliseconds. Now twenty thousandths of a second may seem like too short a time for a person to notice any difference, but I have just this moment made an audio file with two clicks separated by twenty milliseconds, and they are clearly distinguishable to any ear.

Yet here’s the odd thing: my brain will delay my vision of the movement of your lips so that it matches the sound of your voice. Likewise, your brain will do the same to your vision of my lips when I reply.

Posted in Audio, How Things Work, Imperfect perception | Leave a comment

3D content

Posted on April 22, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

Now that 3D TV is about to hit the home, there will be a shortage of 3D content. Samsung is attempting to address this by having a processor generate a 3D look for 2D material. I doubt that this will be very successful.

So could this see the resurrection of some old content? Years ago I wrote of having trouble getting a decent copy of Dial M for Murder, but wouldn’t this be a good opportunity to release a high quality Blu-ray version in both 2D and 3D. How about House of Wax and It Came From Outer Space?

Posted in 3D, Blu-ray, Cinema | Leave a comment

This can’t be the end of Bond

Posted on April 21, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

Even if MGM Studios goes down, some other studio must surely pick up the franchise. It’s worth too much.

Note, 3D is implicitly receiving part of the blame.

Posted in 3D, Cinema | Leave a comment

How Does 3D look?

Posted on April 21, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

In a comment to the previous post Nick asks ‘how did the 3d actually look?’

Tricky to describe, in large part because I haven’t yet seen a 3D flick at the cinema in 3D, so I can’t compare it to that, but only to reality and to other TVs.

I haven’t seen the Samsung yet, but I have seen the Sony which works in a similar way as I understand it. I saw it some weeks ago, so the passage of time has necessarily attenuated the accuracy of my observation. So with that proviso, I’d say they look pretty much the same (for reasons to do with light polarisation, the Panasonic retains its effect better as you tilt your head, but the Pansonic is also more subject to making external light sources appear to flicker).

Compared to reality, it doesn’t really look much like 3D in my opinion for several reasons. But it at the same time it does.

Continue reading →

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Three dimensional Panasonic

Posted on April 20, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

I went to Melbourne today courtesy of Panasonic to see its dancing girls and enjoy a lunch. Oh, and to see some products. Like 17 new plasma TVs, ranging from the $999 107cm 1,024 x 768 pixel Viera TH-P4220A, to the 127cm $3,299 Viera TH-P50VT20A. Actually, that last one is the smallest of the four models in the VT20 range, but the only one on show. These go up to 165cm but the other models won’t be available until October or November.

The 127cm one will be available in June, and for three months you will get packaged with it the 3D versions of Coraline and Ice Age 3. Because the VT20 TVs are 3D models. You also get with each one a set of LCD shutter glasses (additional sets cost $199).

Now that I’m sitting here, I realise I forgot to ask something: does this TV have some kind of psuedo 3D effect it can apply to 2D material? I’m pretty sure the answer would be no, or they would have mentioned it.

Instead, they focused on the main game, which will be Blu-ray 3D. As with the 127cm TV, Panasonic’s DMP-BDT300 3D Blu-ray player ($599) will be released in June. Here’s the front:

Panasonic DMP-DBT300 3D Blu-ray player

But what about the back? That’s what I’ve been wondering about lately.

What if you have a highly satisfactory home theatre receiver, as I do, that has no particular reason to support the new HDMI 1.4 3D video standards? Are you going to have to rewire your system every time you want to watch a 3D movie? You would have to pull the HDMI cable from your receiver, plug it directly into your TV instead. And you’d have to use an optical or coaxial digital audio cable to deliver substandard audio to your receiver instead of the full DTS-HD MA or Dolby TrueHD that we get on most Blu-ray discs these days.

So what about the back? On the back of this unit, along with a bunch of other connections, are two HDMI outputs. They specifically thought of this and provide one to deliver audio to your receiver and one to deliver video to your TV. The former can be used for audio.

Incidentally, they explicitly acknowledged the Pioneer Kuro development team, now folded into Panasonic’s TV R&D unit, for helping improve the performance of their latest TVs. Amongst other things, they claim a dynamic contrast ratio of five million to one.

Posted in 3D, Blu-ray, Equipment | 2 Comments

Blu-ray vs DVD comparison: Nowhere Boy

Posted on April 20, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

Nowhere Boy is a pleasant little biopic, made last year, covering a few years in the life of the young John Lennon. I really quite enjoyed it, and you will too if you like laid back British drama. Here is the comparison, and here is a sample (Thomas Sangster, probably best known from Love Actually and Nanny McPhee, playing the 14 year old Paul McCartney):

Nowhere Boy comparison

The first person to mention in comments to this post the average video bitrate for this movie (check the ‘Picture’ data on the comparison page) can have a copy of this movie on Blu-ray (no box, test pressing, but works just like the real thing).

Posted in Blu-ray, Disc details, DVD | 3 Comments

Blu-ray vs DVD: Logan’s Run

Posted on April 20, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

… or, Homer’s revenge.

Here’s a sample from the comparison:

Logan's run comparison

Now doesn’t the DVD rendition of Jenny Agutter remind you of this scene from the classic episode of The Simpsons, ‘The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace‘? Here’s Marge after Homer’s ministrations:

Marge with Homer-applied makeup

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Blu-ray vs DVD comparison: Monsters, Inc.

Posted on April 19, 2010 by Stephen Dawson

I love doing Pixar (and similar) computer animations for these Blu-ray vs DVD comparisons. Previously I’ve done Cars and WALL-E. The reason they are so good is because in both formats, the picture quality is optimal. That’s because there is no physical film intermediate stage: the computers that render the output at a suitable resolution for film still produce digital output. It is possible that this version is then downsampled for DVD and Blu-ray formats, but it is also possible that the video was rendered directly from the computers for the different target resolutions.

Anyway, I have now added Pixar/Disney’s 2001 classic, Monsters, Inc. Click on the movie title to see it all. Here’s one of the comparison shots, showing how much better fur comes out:

Blu-ray vs DVD comparison

Note: Toy Story and Toy Story 2 are both scheduled for Blu-ray release in the next couple of months on 19 May 2010 (update at 10:35am).

Posted in Blu-ray, Disc details, DVD | Leave a comment