munky wrote:Right, I just saw an advert for History channel HD's new series of lost films from world war 1 and 2....
'In glorious HD'
But filmed on what looks like a pinhole camera.
Also a lot of films that were made before 'HD' existed are shown on the HD movie channels. I havent watched any yet to comment, but how does that work? Do they just upscale them and increase the sharpness a bit? Or can they remaster a copy in HD from the original film? And if they can, would they bother?
And while we're here... If I use my pc to play a '720p' hd x264 film I happen across on my internet travels, output through rgb cable to my HD telly... is it really HD?
And how do I play x264 format files, or whatever they are?
i can help here - ima cameraman / editor of sorts.
Film - be it 35mm or even 16mm, is actualy quite high resolution- in fact, way higher than than high def. Film shown in the cinema has to be projected on a huuuuuuge screen. If you blew up a normal standard def TV programme on a screen that big, it would look awful.
Film doesnt exactly have an exact 'resolution' but most agree you can scan it up to a resolution of 4k (thats four thousand horizontal) - which is way higher than high def.
To remaster old films in HD, they just dig out the old master copy of the film, and have it scanned it- probably at 4k, then downscale it to HD resolution, and clean up any hairs/ dirt etc. Some old films can look pretty ropey in HD - film stock has come a long way, so older films look grainer. In fact, I watches terminator 2 in HD the other day, and i could see the diferences in film grain between two camera angles. One camera was probably running a higher ISO of film, so would be slightly grainer. This wouldnt have been an issue 15 years ago, but now with HD everyone is able to see every detail on their crisp sharp HD massive TVs.
The war footage you mentioned could have been shot on 16mm film. this cant be scanned in as higher res as 35mm, but you're supposed to be able to scan 16mm at full 1080 HD res. But - it'll have been shot on ropey old film stock, in a ropey old camera, with nasty old lenses. Is it HD? well it might have the right number of pixels, but i wouldnt call it HD.
Although these days, anything thats got more pixels than standard def TV, seems to be refered to as HD!
The 720p files you mention are technically sort of high def. 720 is the number of vertical pixels, and is the lower of the high def formats. H264 is simply the format the file has been encoded to. HD video takes up a lot of space, so clever encoding compresses the files down to a more manageble size. But this takes a powerful computer to decompress for viewing- or a PS3 or xbox. I know PS3's read and playback H264 files quite nicely. You might able be able to hook a laptop up to your HD TV for playing the files back.
Also, with such HD video files, your also at the mercy of whoever did the encoding- if they used rubbish settings, then the video might look dire.
hope ive made some sense
