If blu-ray wins? Will it affect the console war?

[rocketpig]

TheBigFatJ said:

Profcrab said:

I still think both BR and HD-DVD are going to be very minor formats for a long time. DVDs are cheaper and no less convenient. Also, many older movies just don't benefit from HD.

I quoted the first part truth: yes DVDs will continue to dominate for a long time. And for reasons mentioned above (people don't know DVD isn't high def, don't know what Blu Ray or HD-DVD is, don't want to pay more for media, etc) DVD will continue to dominate.

However, the second part -- "older movies just don't benefit from HD" is completely untrue. Many older movies were recorded on 35mm film, which resolves a *lot* more detail than 1980x1080.

In terms of resolution, 35mm is vastly superior to 1080p. It is possible to transfer a movie well from its original format to HD discs. However, the results will depend a lot on its original production values as well as the quality of the transfer itself. It's possible to use bad film or record under terrible lighting conditions, of course. HD isn't very high resolution compared to 35mm film, though.

A review of casa blanca from 1942:

http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/498/casablanca.html

The reviewer gave the video quality 5-stars -- sure, it's not widescreen, but it was a good transfer from the source film and it was a high production value movie. There isn't a technical reason why older movies don't have fantastic results on 1080p, especially since 1080p is such low resolution compared to the source.

They gave 4.5 stars to The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). It's even in color!

While you're technically right, it's bloody expensive to clean up the source film enough to make the transfer to high definition worthwhile. Movies like Casablanca will receive that treatment but many others won't have projected sales high enough to warrant that kind of expenditure. To clean up the source film properly, digital artists tackle the film frame by frame. That's terribly time-consuming and pricey to do for a National Lampoon movie that may only sell a few hundred thousand copies in its life. Compound that with the degradation that film suffers over time (more money spent to clean up color source, film deterioration, etc.) and you're looking at many movies that will never look much better than they do on DVD.

BTW, most film can be scanned up to a 2048x1493 resolution. While that is larger than a 1080p signal, it's hardly leaps and bounds over it like you implied in your post.