SWORDFISH: A direct comparison between 576p (PAL) and 1080p

[JAG87]

Hi everybody.

I recently acquired Swordfish in MPEG-2 at 1920x1080 (blu-ray). I figured since I have the PAL DVD, I could make a nice comparison frame by frame.

My DVD is 720x576p, so its a bit higher than standard NTSC (720x480). This does not affect the test much, the difference between 480p and 576p is negligible. Each 720x576 frame as been rescaled to 1920x1080 using the Lanczos3 algorithm (so the images are the same size). My results are rather disappointing. I am looking at this material through my Dell 3007WFP, and I fear that this screen is not big enough to give 1080p any credit. After careful examination, I concluded that there is quite a bit of difference between the two images from about 2 feet away (my working distance from the monitor), but I will never be watching a movie 2 feet away from my screen. Rather I would lean back 4 to 5 feet. At this distance the difference between 576p and 1080p is so slim it certainly does not justify the costs within.

My reasoning all crums down if you are watching the content on a 100 inch screen from 10 feet away. In this case 576p would look so blurred and horrible compared to 1080p that you would wonder how you ever watched SDTV. Basically the final statement I'd like to make is: don't buy anything under 60 inches to watch Full HD. 1080p shines on screens 60 inches and greater.

Please be kind and download this rar file with 20 bmp images. 10 are 576p and 10 are 1080p. Compare each frame and give me your opinion.

 

[nib95]

"I recently acquired Swordfish in MPEG-2 at 1920x1080 (blu-ray)"

That's your problem right there.
You need a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD with the VC-1 codec for a proper comparison.

 

[SonicIce]

convert then to png and save a bunch of megs. its lossless

 

[Matt2]

I couldnt be happier with my 50" DLP TV that sports 720p.

50" with 720p still looks awesome from about 8' away.

 

[kylebisme]

I can't say I've seen Swordfish since it first came out, but surely there are scenes with longer view distances and more fine detail to better illustrate the differences in resolution?

That said, the detail in the lines on peoples faces and things like texture of Travolta's sleeve in the frame where he is reaching for his sunglasses do look notably better in the HD shots; and I am viewing them at 8' from a 42" ED display, where as many people will sit closer to a higher resolution display where the difference would be even more dramatic.

 

[JAG87]

Thanks for the tip SonicIce,

nib95, this is the blu-ray rip. I am assuming the mpeg2 file has been recoded (something like DVD shrink) to a lower bit rate, because the file I have is 8.17 GB (seems a little small for blu-ray). The DVD version is 5.65 GB. Were talking mpeg2 stream and English 5.1 only for both 576p and 1080p. So in a sense you are right, the original blu-ray would look better because it would have higher bit rate. But I'm not sure how much better, since higher bit rate only helps mainly with color compression artifacts, not so much with detail and sharpness.

TheSnowman, 42" from 8 feet away... I don't think you should notice very much difference between the SD and HD shots. I am looking at them from 4-5 feet on my 30" dell and they look almost the same. I can only notice the differences if I stick my face closer (like 2 feet away). But thats my working distance and 2560x1600 is my working resolution. I would never watch a movie from that close, unless it was in 2560x1600p


by the way I have 20/16 vision with my contacts on, so I don't have eye problems.

 

[darkhorror]

Here is a good link to how close you have to sit to start noticing a difference.

http://www.msu.edu/~seyfarth/Optimal.jpg

 

[TanisHalfElven]

problem yis youre HD stream is ruined due to whatever crappy compression was used on it. hd-dvd and blue ray use h264 compression thats about 5 times better quality for the same bitrate.

 

[JAG87]

darkhorror, nice link man. thats a keeper.

tanishalfeven, you are wrong. blu-ray uses mpeg2. hd-dvd uses h.264 and VC-1.
still its true that the blu-ray mpeg2 stream would have better bit rate then my mpeg2 rip, and therefore yield a better image. I don't know how much better thou.



also, I have been doing some stretching with the images to simulate a 50 inch or 100 inch screen, and the 1080p image definitely looks a lot better once stretched. So when you download the images make sure you play with the mouse wheel a bit.

 

[Stoneburner]

man.... you ever wonder if the blu ray swordfish is just an upconverted version of the ddvd version anyway? man.... that would suck.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

Originally posted by: JAG87
tanishalfeven, you are wrong. blu-ray uses mpeg2. hd-dvd uses h.264 and VC-1.
still its true that the blu-ray mpeg2 stream would have better bit rate then my mpeg2 rip, and therefore yield a better image. I don't know how much better thou.

I guess you don't read Anandtech articles??

Originally posted by: Matt2
I couldnt be happier with my 50" DLP TV that sports 720p.

yes you could, you could have a 1080p 50" TV

 

[BladeVenom]

Most Blu-ray movies have been in MPEG-2. It's only recently that they started using better codecs.

 

[TanisHalfElven]

Originally posted by: BladeVenom
Most Blu-ray movies have been in MPEG-2. It's only recently that they started using better codecs.

yeah but the true HD codec is h264. untill you use that even blue rays capacity is not enough

 

[JAG87]

a dual layer blu-ray (50GB) is plenty to host a full HD 1080p mpeg2 movie with extremely high bit rates

25 mb/s
for a 2 hour movie, there are 7200 seconds
25/8 = 3.125 MB/s
3.125 * 7200 s = 22.5 GB

err, if you put movie only, even a single layer will host it, but since features and menus are required i guess it has to be dual.

and, in case you are wondering there is no difference between mpeg2 at 25 mb/s and h.264 at 25 mb/s. with those kinds of rates the video is almost flawless. the real beauty about h.264 is that it can render the same quality with only 5-10 mp/s (a quarter of the mpeg 2 bit rate on average).

 

[Fallen Kell]

You can't just start out by saying that 1080p is all hype. You need to know how the 1080p material was produced. Hell, I could make my HTPC give me 1080p output, but that doesn't mean the source material is 1080p. You will never get much better resolution then what the original source material used. Sure you can do some digital clean-up of "noise" are reduce the artifact sizes, but if they simply took the 576p digitized version they already had, and simply "upscaled" it to 1080p, well, you won't see any difference in quality.

I will tell you for a fact that many studio's are simply re-releasing the exact same movies using the digital version of their DVD material. They are not going through the process of taking the original movie prints and re-digitizing them at a higher resolution. Most are simply taking the quick and easy way out for their older movies and just upscaling the material and running a few digital cleaner programs on them to sharpen up the edges, remove some of the noise and clean up the pixelization that the upscaling process creates.

Don't make any kind of comparison off older movies. You need to use movies that you know they made correctly. Many of the new releases are being created correctly. The same with some films that were shot using digital camera equipment to begin with as it is an easy process to convert those movies to new higher resolution formats (the new Star Wars movies were filmed using digital cameras and the original Star War movies when they were in the process of being edited for their DVD release were digitized at a very high resolution because Lucas at least understood that the technology was moving in that direction and thought ahead for the blueray/hddvd formats and future formats so that he wouldn't need to go through the process of re-digitizing the movies again for a long long time...)

 

[kylebisme]

Originally posted by: JAG87
TheSnowman, 42" from 8 feet away... I don't think you should notice very much difference between the SD and HD shots.

I'm not sure wht you would think, but I watch a lot of HD and SD content on this display at that distance and I assure you that there is an obvious difference. Again, I pretty sure you could have picked some better shots to highlight higher fedlity of the HD souce, but even in your shots there are notable difference in clarity between the two.

 

[JAG87]

this is why

http://www.msu.edu/~seyfarth/Optimal.jpg

if you do some math you can find that on a 42" screen when viewing 1080p content your optimal sitting distance should be 6 feet, and your viewing distance should not exceed 7.7 feet (6 feet is calculated with the 2.0 factor while 7.7 is calculated using the 2.5 factor from the chart).

 

[kylebisme]

Well yeah I'd need to sit closer to the display to get the full effect benift, and have a much higher resolution display as well, but that does nothing to change the fact that there is still a very obvious improvement in image quality from HD images at 8'.

 

[1Dark1Sharigan1]

Ever seen any of those 1080p HD WMV videos? Those alone should tell you that 1080p is not just hype. Certainly many HD-DVD and Blu-Ray releases aren't significantly better than their SD-DVD counterparts but we're still early on in the game. As HD-WMV videos show, there is clearly can be a huge difference in image quality, but it won't necessarily be seen for a little while.