HD anyone?

[Nikhil Mulay]

Just discovered the joy of watching films HD courtesy good ol bit torrent, oh ya and demonoid. These guys have posted blu-ray rips of a lot of films on the site. The files, while compressed from the original, bury dvd and stamp like hell on the grave. I personally now find dvd terrible after watching these. Each film is either 4.5 or 8 GB and encoded in H.264. Screened 2001: A space odyssey at the crt and people were blown away by the image. At 1080p the image quality is brilliant, even with the compression. Now just waiting for a full HD projector at the institute!! PEACE!!

[Paramvir Singh]

hey Nikhil!
i want to take a look at the 1080p file.
wonder if the projection system/TV will support it though...

[Mandar]

gandu............ sorry for bad language.................. but sale......i am here in mumabi missing my 6.30 screenings and u are talkin abt had and allll...........f***** u man... i am fed up with watching dvds and whatever it is ...... even if its hd. i have seen the fiilm which u are talkin abt. but ..............sorry...extremly sorry............i didnt enjoy it.......was just something happning on screen...........bored of watching films on dvd anymore...........sorry canr deal wid it. never did in insti and also now i cant ..i dont enjoy them at all. leve watching them cerefully....or even listening to them. leve it.....

[Mandar]

sorry for lots of spelling mistakes........... was angry

[Paramvir Singh]

i understand your anger Mandy!
i miss watching good cinema on Celluloid.

but its a loss thats inevitable. the studpidest problem is, Digital is producer friendly AND novice director friendly. two people who are some of teh most powerful in a film schedule, apart from 'stars', unfortunately.

i have met many people who are more excited about 'shooting a movie on digital' rather than concentrating on the cinema.

post production houses are convincing directors and producers that digital is the way to go. multiplexes project inferior (lower than 2k) 'digital' and claim they are 'as good as film'.

mandy you and I are fighting a losing argument.

shoot film as much as you can. its not going to last for long.

[Nikhil Mulay]

well mandar, i beg to differ... dont think we shoud get emotional about this any more... digital is fast cathing up and will exceed the capabilities of film in a few years time. We are already at a stage where major films are being shot digitally and believe me.. it can get pretty damn good. It happened with sound too. people refused to believe that digital was going to be as good as analog but show me a single analog recorder in this country and i will eat my words. I for one still love the sound of my lp's; for me nothing sounds better than them and if could get my hands on an analog 24 tracker.... But at the same time i just finished my playback mix on protools. And if were biasing our views on HD by one screening in the crt, ill be the first one to say that its the worst place to judge this; we were wathing the film off a horrible benq multimedia projector which does not have the resolution nor the conrast to match the quality of the source and the speakers suck like hell even though its surround now, but were workin on it. But even then, it was the best print ive seen of this film coz all id seen before was horrible dvds. Im just waiting for the day when i can see images projected by the sony 4k projectors.....

[Paramvir Singh]

digital is fast cathing up and will exceed the capabilities of film

nikhil, at the risk of sounding old fashioned, i beg to differ.

this is not about matching or exceeding the capabilities of film, or for that matter, any imaging format.

its about creating a viable artistic means for telling stories.

(also we must remember its NOT just about story telling. its VISUAL story telling. else we are better off writing books and telling stories orally)

i dont think we should constantly measure film against digital because they are very different mediums. for starters, the H&D curve of film is non liner (which is what creates, partly, the magical quality of tones) vs that of digital or electronic, which is linear.

we cant really compare Oil with Acrylic or Water Colours.

but its true that digital is producer friendly. much as I hate the quality of digital intermediate that I have been subjected to, THAT too is producer friendly, since it creates ONE CENTRAL master for theatrical print, digital UFO exhibition, satelllite release, conventional and HD-DVDs and new media etc.

if you have ahot a lot of stills on an SLR and then shot on a DSLR, you will find the difference. which cannot be articulated. there is a difference.

some people like to say digital lacks soul. i cant really agree/disagree. but its different. its not necessarily better or worse. but it certainly is not the same thing.

[Nikhil Mulay]

well actually im someone whos been caught in the middle of the digital/film divide... As an acquisition medium, there is no equal to film in terms of resolution, contrast, colour gamut, etc. But again the convinience of digital gives it the lead in the post process. Again, taking a parallel from sound, this happened when cd was first released, it wasnt necessarily better sounding but it was more convinient. And man being an inherently lazy animal, convinience takes over quality at times.
Gamma curves is something im not so sure about, but surely all digital cinematography cameras have customisable gamma curves? and those could be set to mimic those of film? I dont know how close the look comes to that of film though... I agree there is something magical about film that probably cannot be quantified, but at the end of the day, its just possible that we are so used to the look of film that everything else looks terrible.
This is true of digital audio too. The best A/D converters and recorders capture sound so real, its hard to believe at times. What is missing are the colouration and the distortion that analog tape had(being a mechanical format, wow and flutter was always a problem) and people are so used to them that listening to audio without any distortion and aberrations is a major shock to most....

[Paramvir Singh]

but at the end of the day, its just possible that we are so used to the look of film that everything else looks terrible.

hi nikhil! i agree to the fact that we are so used to see everything on film, but disagree on digital looking terrible. it actually looks very nice. but its different. and yes, if we had never seen film, we would freak out over even HDTV, leave alone the new generation 4k and plus camera systems.

about CDs and audio: did you notice, no one listens to even CDs these days? its all mp3 audio! something even inferior! thats the norm!

also, in moving images, i think the younger lot spend more time watching YouTube than TV. and with IPTV having become a reality, I wonder if true HDTV will ever take off with half as much elan as SDTV.

have you noticed how poor quality news footage is these days?

that makes me wonder what quality image and sound acquisition we are talking about!

[Aravindan]

Sure, the development in digital is taking huge strides in a very short time. Infact, NHK has tested a 10K camera recently...and soon everthing would be available in the market and there is no end to what could be achieved.

All said and done there is something where it would be difficult for digital to measure upto film, atleast for the time being. For the sake of brevity and at a loss to find any other word, let me call it as character. Digital is pure mathematics, logic and algorithm....Its sooo perfect to execute what you order...and ofcourse is much more amenable if you are not happy. With film, there is always something which engages you in chance...something random and something incomplete...like a person..like a musical note..

This is not a nostalgic ranting. But if you actaully look at it, when an image is captured on film, there is no definitive array/matrix of space in which it is captured. It is captured on the silver halide crystals spread randomly. And mind you it differs from frame to frame. In digital it is fixed pixels on the microsensors...As Param pointed out, the response of film is lograthmic, like any human sensory organ and not linear like digital, I don't have to delibearte about the tonal rendition, contrast etc, but colours..ofcourse, the colours you see are interpolated colours with complex sampling algorithms and not anywhere near to the rendition of films...

Have said all the above, let me also state that a change over to digital is imminent and would be a necessity due to economical and pragmatic production reasons...However, our careless handling of the mother negatives, the dust pollution in the labs, the recycled baths in the developer tank, the old carbon arcs in the theater and foggy screens had robbed us of a real experience of watching a 'film release'...but lets not throw away the medium as old fashioned or not hip or cool enough...

Correct me if Iam wrong, isn't it true that with advent of lot of digital sound recording around, the demand for a simple analog mike like SM 58 saw a huge boost in the recent years...by the way HS.264, I think, is a compliant set up by the ITU and not by the DCI.So there it goes...

[Aravindan]

Sorry Nikhil, I meant H.264 and not HS...

[Nikhil Mulay]

well i for one really enjoy the recent outburst in HD films... it gives me access to films that i have not seen before with a picture that is beautiful to look at... most of these films, i can never get to see on print, so why not on a very good second best?... And i do believe on a good projection system, blu-ray has the ability to blow you away with its image quality ....

[Aravindan]

I completely agree with you Nikhil...with the advent of digital age, sharing of information and experience had become more accessible and democratic. Well..blu ray is there. Infact, we are going to release one of the carnatic concert we shot for theaterical release on blu ray in couple of days/weeks. However, blu ray just means more space and conversely less compression (or better compression algorithm) and therefore better image quality. But what I hear is that it can support codecs like MPEG 4, H.264, MPEG-2 etc which can be equivalent to E-Cinema and not D-Cinema (like JPEG 2000). So, its only my urge and aspiration that all of us, when we do digital, should render out in the highest quality and not get caught with multitude of image formats...thanks.