SD, HD, BR?

Tachi

Tachi

Mushi-shi
I've been wondering this for a while.....With technology improving every year and we've got to High definition and BluRay.

Now on live action/normal films the difference between Standard definition and BluRay is very clear......But i've been wondering, why bother releasing Anime on a BluRay disc? It's not like their ulitising the discs fully. (Imo They should use the vast space on a Bluray disc properly by putting whole series onto one disc) But their not, their just releasing anime films....and even then, unless they've gone through the whole of an old movie (like they've done with GITS; 2.0) and touched up on the sound and visual quality.....how can you possibly improve the picture of an Anime that's new? They released DMC on BluRay....there's no real point because the standard of quality can't become sharper anyway.

I guess to sum things up, i'm asking.....why are they releasing Anime on BluRay when it can't be improved beyond its standard definition? Just seems like a scam to me.
 
Tachi- said:
why are they releasing Anime on BluRay when it can't be improved beyond its standard definition?
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I think we've been through this a few times in various threads over the past year or so, but most older anime can be improved far beyond SD. Only those shows which were digitally animated at standard definition (so anything made between roughly 1999-2006) can't. DMC, along with most newer shows, will have been produced in HD.
 
The basic answer to this is simply marketing to the PS3 croud and to those who also have that with an HD ready receiver. In actuallity very few anime that was made before 2008 will be true HD as to be true HD it will have been layed down on 1080i from the first recording of the production. Now that might have been the case in Japan as it was Sony Broadcast division (HQ here in Basingstoke I'll add :) ) what gave the world 1080i format and later 1080p. Anything before that will more than likely be just upconverted SD, which will look just fine on your HD player and receiver, but just won't be the real deal. However having said that you can bet the mortgage that all future productions will be HD from start, and then BD will be the format to run on, but again downconverted HD is just as good, maybe slightly better, as upconverted SD so its a win-win situation either way, and no need to rush out and sink large dosh on HD kit just yet. Hope this is useful. If you want to believe the fortune tellers 3D is the next "big thing", but the jury is still out on that one.
:wink:
 
Mohawk52 said:
Anything before that will more than likely be just upconverted SD, which will look just fine on your HD player and receiver, but just won't be the real deal.
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Don't forget the older anime though - most produced before '99 was hand animated and produced on film, so that can be re-scanned at a much higher resolution. Hand-drawn and painted cel animation has the most to gain by far in terms of detail.
 
ayase said:
Mohawk52 said:
Anything before that will more than likely be just upconverted SD, which will look just fine on your HD player and receiver, but just won't be the real deal.
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Don't forget the older anime though - most produced before '99 was hand animated and produced on film, so that can be re-scanned at a much higher resolution. Hand-drawn and painted cel animation has the most to gain by far in terms of detail.
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Oh absolutely! Film resolution and detail is the Holy Grail of electronic visual high definition anyway. :)
 
They wouldn't put a whole series on a BR disc, because from a business point of view there wouldn't be any profit involved in it.

Now release it in £20 parts, they just lap up the money.
 
ayase said:
DMC, along with most newer shows, will have been produced in HD.
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Yeah, but they released a SD version (which i bought at he Expo) and there was a BR version too....looking at the back of the case they looked the same quality.....so to me, it seems like the company just wanted to rip off their customers for the extra £5-£15

Mohawk52 said:
The basic answer to this is simply marketing to the PS3 croud and to those who also have that with an HD ready receiver. In actuallity very few anime that was made before 2008 will be true HD as to be true HD it will have been layed down on 1080i from the first recording of the production. Now that might have been the case in Japan as it was Sony Broadcast division (HQ here in Basingstoke I'll add :) ) what gave the world 1080i format and later 1080p. Anything before that will more than likely be just upconverted SD, which will look just fine on your HD player and receiver, but just won't be the real deal. However having said that you can bet the mortgage that all future productions will be HD from start, and then BD will be the format to run on, but again downconverted HD is just as good, maybe slightly better, as upconverted SD so its a win-win situation either way, and no need to rush out and sink large dosh on HD kit just yet. Hope this is useful. If you want to believe the fortune tellers 3D is the next "big thing", but the jury is still out on that one.
:wink:
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I've got a PS3, HDMI Cable and 32" LCD flatscreen....basic components to get the best out of a HD/BR film.....now i've seen the difference between normal films and HD/BR but in anime....i haven't seen any difference between recently released Anime on SD and BL. So as i said, it seems like a scam :/ As for the 3D effect....i was reading yesterday that within the next 10 years their trying to get to a stage where you won't have to wear the glasses for it to work. i was wondering earlier just how far they can go with 3D....they can't do like you may have seen in Minority report where the light is shot out of the video to make them look like their actually in the room.....because frankly to can't stop light in mid air without diving it a surface to land on. thus making it 2D anway, so basically projection won't work.....so all our films will be made to mess around with our eyes perception and the 3D effect will only work from certain acute angles......to me it seems like a waste of time.
 
Tachi- said:
I've got a PS3, HDMI Cable and 32" LCD flatscreen....basic components to get the best out of a HD/BR film.....now i've seen the difference between normal films and HD/BR but in anime....i haven't seen any difference between recently released Anime on SD and BL. So as i said, it seems like a scam :/ As for the 3D effect....i was reading yesterday that within the next 10 years their trying to get to a stage where you won't have to wear the glasses for it to work. i was wondering earlier just how far they can go with 3D....they can't do like you may have seen in Minority report where the light is shot out of the video to make them look like their actually in the room.....because frankly to can't stop light in mid air without diving it a surface to land on. thus making it 2D anway, so basically projection won't work.....so all our films will be made to mess around with our eyes perception and the 3D effect will only work from certain acute angles......to me it seems like a waste of time.
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Which is why I say the jury is still out on 3D. As for the difference between SD and HD for anime I agree with what you are saying, but like IBM discovered when they built the first computer; "Garbage in, garbage out". No matter how perfect the media format, you're not going to get anymore out then what you put in, so on that concept it's not a scam, more a limitation that you have to except for now, and the reason I say it's not that critical to have HD kit to view anime, I mean, how much sharper can a pencil drawing get? :wink:
 
Mohawk52 said:
So on that concept it's not a scam, more a limitation that you have to except for now, and the reason I say it's not that critical to have HD kit to view anime, I mean, how much sharper can a pencil drawing get? :wink:
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Yeah i know lol. but thats what i'm getting at.....at the end of the day its anime....it's been drawn....and you can't improve a pencil drawing much really....there's no point in having recent anime released on a BR disc because right now you can't get any sharper than what it already is....so they must be just releasing it for the unfortunate who don't realise there's not much difference and end up paying more than they realisticly need to.

In rationality....i don't think they can improve things anymore right now. Someone joked that the next COD will simply be a one way ticket to Iraq with a pistol. You won't get anymore realistic than real itself....and for the moment....i'm happy with the way life is, their on about using clouds as servers so you can get onto the internet wherever you are...seems abit like they've shot for the stars and ended up in alice in wonderland, having a tea party with a nutcase and a rabbit. just complete madness.
 
The much more recent stuff will benefit from HD, when its all CG the resolution is not a problem.

Older stuff I'd probably avoid. Unless they've gone back to a good and clean film master its not worth it, even then.... HD will show up all the faults with the master, such as the horrific frame jitter in Gunbuster and the small but annoying cell jitter in GiTS 2.0. GiTS Innocence in HD looked pretty darn good though.

The one thing in HDs favor is the fact that FINALLY you can get the correct film frame rate!
 
Tachi- said:
As for the 3D effect....i was reading yesterday that within the next 10 years their trying to get to a stage where you won't have to wear the glasses for it to work. i was wondering earlier just how far they can go with 3D....they can't do like you may have seen in Minority report where the light is shot out of the video to make them look like their actually in the room.....because frankly to can't stop light in mid air without diving it a surface to land on. thus making it 2D anway, so basically projection won't work.....so all our films will be made to mess around with our eyes perception and the 3D effect will only work from certain acute angles......to me it seems like a waste of time.
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Ways and means. Remember, once one has recorded a hologram onto a film, one only needs a single 'reference beam' of light to recreate the distribution of reflected wavefronts from the original object. Since a suitable holographic film can record different distributions at multiple incident angles, an observer will see different images at different angles as they view the same holographic reconstruction, creating a 3D effect.

Of course, I doubt that 3D televisions will use holography. Lenticular lenses (similar to those pseudo-animated ridged plastic rulers sold in gift shops) are commonly used to produce the same effect as a 3D holographic film, albeit with less clarity.
Still, this shows how the technology isn't beyond conception within classical and modern optics. One just has to make different light signals —recorded from the same object— to be incident on the surface of our eyes at different viewing angles.
As you say, this isn't exactly the healthiest way to trick our eyes, but that's a problem for the marketing divisions to solve...
 
Tachi- said:
Yeah, but they released a SD version (which i bought at he Expo) and there was a BR version too....looking at the back of the case they looked the same quality.....so to me, it seems like the company just wanted to rip off their customers for the extra £5-£15
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I expect both boxes have the exact same resolution for their pictures because they want both versions to look good on paper :)

I notice a big difference in decent blu-ray anime transfers over their often more compressed, fuzzier DVD cousins. As with the early days of DVD the results can be variable but if there are only a few pounds in it I will usually go for the blu-ray version. When choosing I often skim technical sites to see whether the studio has done a good job with the blu-ray and made it worthwhile or dropped the ball.

In a practical sense I also like the more flexible, quick menus on blu-ray as well as the usual plethora of language/subtitle options compared to DVDs, especially for mainstream titles. A lot of my mainstream DVDs don't even have SDH text available, let alone extra languages. Their blu-ray versions are often loaded with options.

R
 
Oh, definitely. If I'm going to get a bluray, its generally a fairly long thought-process for me - mainly consisting of me looking at what people say about the transfers (with some reviews being completely moronic, you need to trust the reviewer or site more than anything). Also, since BD's have come around, I don't buy DVDs as flippantly either. I spend a lot of my time hesitating because I want the full effect of what something is meant to do.
 
Tachi- said:
They released DMC on BluRay....there's no real point because the standard of quality can't become sharper anyway.
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DMC was animated in about 720p. Hand drawn anime is in whatever resolution you like, as far as the purposes of Blu-ray go.

If this doesn't answer basically every issue raised in your first post, I'm not sure what would.
 
ayase said:
Tachi- said:
Only those shows which were digitally animated at standard definition (so anything made between roughly 1999-2006) can't.
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In terms of detail, you're correct that you can't get any more detail, but it's all about how it's presented, most anime DVDs have been poorly encoded, not utilising all the available bitrate and thus having a lot of artifacts. Blu-ray can quadruple the bitrate of DVD if necessary, but SD upscales are averaging ~20Mbps or less at the moment, which is still an upgrade from DVD. Less artifacts is better.
 
I've never really got into the whole "High Defination = Ultimate upgrade" fad. I'm a simple guy that's happy to see the big picture and still have only "ok" detail. As long as DVDs are cheap and give us a good picture, then I aint going to pay extra for the "squeeky clean quality" that everyone desires in the Blu-ray fandom.
 
DVD quality has suffered as people expect more and more on a disc for less and less money. Series used to be on 7 or 8 discs, now its 4.

Freedom on BD looks pretty good, but its all CG so it should look good. But a list price of almost £70 for 7 eps on 4 BDs.....
 
If they used the space up more effectively....like i mentioned before, although some think its not financially viable for the producers to release full seasons on a single BR disc. Well, they could spend more money improving the main menu. Some of the menu systems look really cheap and tacky. others are impressive (the ones that have things moving in them are more appealing than something thats static with just music playing over and over again and again do nothing for me) its the finer little things that make a overall large difference on how the anime can be recieved. You get what you put in at the end of the day. if they lowered (or just set a certain price) then more people might want to watch anime.

HMV's anime section prices tend to differ from store to store. I've seen discs (like hellsing ultimate) go for £7 for over a year, and then the next week i check they've raised it to £15.99. as for when they have a sale....why is it that the anime prices don't budge?

Looking forward to a virgin media store opening in luton, atleast HMV will have a rival. since woolworths went we've only had HMV and Cex to go to for anime. (and Cex's anime choice is......limited)
 
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