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Answerman - Semi Conscious


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Mohawk52



Joined: 16 Oct 2003
Posts: 8202
Location: England, UK
PostPosted: Sat Apr 12, 2014 9:41 am Reply with quote
jsevakis wrote:

Mohawk52 wrote:
Working in broadcasting as a Senior Technical Director as I do, it always makes me cringe when people still classify today's HD TV signals as "NTSC or PAL" when both analogue format standards have been dead since 2009 for NTSC and 2011 for PAL. The whole world is now 1080, (soon to be 4000).

Disagreed in that last bit, but anyway... The feature on BD players that does such conversion is listed as "NTSC/PAL conversion" so that's what I put in the article.
You got an NTSC receiver that still gets a signal off an aerial or cable without a digi box converter then? You might be still doing edits using SDI digi-Beta, pre-HDCam tape decks, but so do we when using old archived material, but all HD broadcast signals and studios in Europe and UK, and I believe Russia. and China too seeing as China got their power stations built by the Russians back in the Soviet days, are 1080i/50 and for Canada, the US and it's occupying territories, some parts of South America and the southern half of Japan it is 1080i/60.

Yes progressive has existed since the dawn of TV, but in anologue it gobbled up far to wide a bandwith to be of any practical use for broadcasters until it all went digital and then digital compression shortly later hense just about all flatscreens are progressive today, but your old anologue 525 NTSC CRT receivers, our 625 PAL CRT receivers and all anologue connected equipment that supported it one way or another are, or were interlace scanners. Still today inside mostly all studios, private and public, including ours, everything is still processed from camera head to final TX is all done in interlace. Progressive is done at the receiver with conversion circuits either built in or inside the external digi-box. As for what that BlueRay player is doing, listing NTSC/PAL for conversion standards, is being patronising to a purchaser's technical knowledge.
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TheAncientOne



Joined: 06 Oct 2010
Posts: 1868
Location: USA (mid-south)
PostPosted: Sat Apr 12, 2014 1:41 pm Reply with quote
jsevakis wrote:

Disagreed in that last bit, but anyway... The feature on BD players that does such conversion is listed as "NTSC/PAL conversion" so that's what I put in the article.

One item to keep in mind is that it is normal for BD players to also support DVD playback, where NTSC/PAL standards would be more relevant.

If the player supports analog output, NTSC/PAL becomes somewhat relevant if it supports SD output resolution and totally relevant if it sports a composite or S-video output option (although this output type is rare these days on BD players).

Even for broadcast TV, NTSC/PAL never applied for resolutions beyond standard definition. for HDTV ATSC is the standard for North America, and DVB-T for the UK and most of Europe.
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Mohawk52



Joined: 16 Oct 2003
Posts: 8202
Location: England, UK
PostPosted: Sat Apr 12, 2014 2:14 pm Reply with quote
TheAncientOne wrote:

Even for broadcast TV, NTSC/PAL never applied for resolutions beyond standard definition. for HDTV ATSC is the standard for North America, and DVB-T for the UK and most of Europe.
Just another way to name the same thing really. We in the "beezknees" wanted to ditch the alphabet soup and just call it what it is. Laughing
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agila61



Joined: 22 Feb 2009
Posts: 3213
Location: NE Ohio
PostPosted: Sun Apr 13, 2014 12:56 am Reply with quote
Mohawk52 wrote:
jsevakis wrote:

Mohawk52 wrote:
Working in broadcasting as a Senior Technical Director as I do, it always makes me cringe when people still classify today's HD TV signals as "NTSC or PAL" when both analogue format standards have been dead since 2009 for NTSC and 2011 for PAL. The whole world is now 1080, (soon to be 4000).

Disagreed in that last bit, but anyway... The feature on BD players that does such conversion is listed as "NTSC/PAL conversion" so that's what I put in the article.
You got an NTSC receiver that still gets a signal off an aerial or cable without a digi box converter then?
... As for what that BlueRay player is doing, listing NTSC/PAL for conversion standards, is being patronising to a purchaser's technical knowledge.


But its the most concise way to convey that feature, since even if "converts between 50Hz and 60Hz BD playback" was included, the feature list would still have to say NTSC/PAL conversion, or else lose the customers looking for that checklist feature ... as much of the market for that type of multi-region disc player has become accustomed to over the past decade.

All of that was even more fun in the 90's, when we moved to a PAL-1 country with NTSC tapes and the occasional PAL-SECAM tape from Paris.
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bob_loblaw



Joined: 14 Oct 2005
Posts: 229
Location: Tanning in Hell
PostPosted: Sun Apr 13, 2014 2:52 am Reply with quote
Shiroi Hane wrote:
Just leaving this here..


Good times.

Say, wasn't their another promo image BVUSA tossed out into the wild that had the same catchphrase and some kind of glitter/star' effect? I wish I knew where I saved it on my hard-drive.
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Buster D



Joined: 16 Jun 2005
Posts: 81
PostPosted: Sun Apr 13, 2014 3:55 am Reply with quote
jsevakis wrote:
Macron One wrote:
Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040 is a mostly cel-animated production, i believe.


Mostly. The OP/ED were VERY jaggy, garish early digipaint, and it's one of those shows that uses different frame rates. It would be impossible to nicely present in HD.


There wouldn't be different frame rates in the cel/film based parts, which is the majority of the show. The rest they can either decimate or just present the whole thing at 1080i. Far from impossible.

Quote:
Buster D wrote:
Justin also implied that Captain Tyler's Blu-ray upscale was really bad, but from what I remember, the screenshots looked pretty good for an upscale.


Really? The screenshots I've seen make it look easily as bad as Nuku Nuku.


Screenshots and a review were posted by hissatsu in the defunct mania.com forums (he also occasionally posts here IIRC, if you PM him he can probably re-post the screenshots). It wasn't a Q-Tec style upscale with smearing like Nuku Nuku, it was basically the R2 DVDs with better encoding. You might have seen screenshots from a rip that someone decided to apply filtering to, or be thinking of another show. It's still of course a waste of money since it just upscales DVD masters instead of giving the show a new HD film scan, assuming one is possible.
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Mohawk52



Joined: 16 Oct 2003
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Location: England, UK
PostPosted: Sun Apr 13, 2014 12:59 pm Reply with quote
agila61 wrote:

But its the most concise way to convey that feature, since even if "converts between 50Hz and 60Hz BD playback" was included, the feature list would still have to say NTSC/PAL conversion, or else lose the customers looking for that checklist feature ... as much of the market for that type of multi-region disc player has become accustomed to over the past decade.
Yeah, patronising isn't it?

Quote:
All of that was even more fun in the 90's, when we moved to a PAL-1 country with NTSC tapes and the occasional PAL-SECAM tape from Paris.
Hence the inception of 1080 as the global HD standard to get rid of all that, which makes region blocking even more blatant, and stupid. Laughing
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Mikeski



Joined: 24 Sep 2009
Posts: 608
Location: Minneapolis, MN
PostPosted: Sun Apr 13, 2014 2:07 pm Reply with quote
Mohawk52 wrote:
agila61 wrote:

But its the most concise way to convey that feature, since even if "converts between 50Hz and 60Hz BD playback" was included, the feature list would still have to say NTSC/PAL conversion, or else lose the customers looking for that checklist feature ... as much of the market for that type of multi-region disc player has become accustomed to over the past decade.
Yeah, patronising isn't it?

Doubly so since the "PAL/NTSC" thing probably came forward from DVDs, which are also not PAL or NTSC, but still got called that. (Though their visible scan-line counts were chosen to match those analog broadcast schemes.)

And those acronyms carried forward since Bluray players play DVDs. Which, at this point, makes about as much sense as advertising a current AMD-processor computer as an "IBM PC-compatible".
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Touma



Joined: 29 Aug 2007
Posts: 2651
Location: Colorado, USA
PostPosted: Sun Apr 13, 2014 3:20 pm Reply with quote
Mikeski wrote:
Mohawk52 wrote:
agila61 wrote:

But its the most concise way to convey that feature, since even if "converts between 50Hz and 60Hz BD playback" was included, the feature list would still have to say NTSC/PAL conversion, or else lose the customers looking for that checklist feature ... as much of the market for that type of multi-region disc player has become accustomed to over the past decade.
Yeah, patronising isn't it?

Doubly so since the "PAL/NTSC" thing probably came forward from DVDs, which are also not PAL or NTSC, but still got called that.

I thought that either NTSC or PAL was needed to create a composite video signal to match the receiver.
If that is true and the information is not on the disc then where does it come from? Is it generated in the player based on the region that it was made for?
If it is not true then ... never mind.Smile
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agila61



Joined: 22 Feb 2009
Posts: 3213
Location: NE Ohio
PostPosted: Sun Apr 13, 2014 3:40 pm Reply with quote
Mohawk52 wrote:
agila61 wrote:

But its the most concise way to convey that feature, since even if "converts between 50Hz and 60Hz BD playback" was included, the feature list would still have to say NTSC/PAL conversion, or else lose the customers looking for that checklist feature ... as much of the market for that type of multi-region disc player has become accustomed to over the past decade.
Yeah, patronising isn't it?

Its quite useful to the customers who neither know nor care what in the hell any of it means in a technical sense, but know that if they get a piece of gear that says NTSC/PAL conversion, it's able to play their stuff brought or sent to them from home on their TV bought down the street. That is likely to be the majority of customers.

For those customers, they can get advice from someone who's solved that problem any time over the past twenty years, and it works.

For the minority of customers who know and care about the difference ... as high information customers it ought to be obvious to them what it really means in terms of the actual technical formats, without requiring additional spoon feeding and hand holding in the feature list.
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Mohawk52



Joined: 16 Oct 2003
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Location: England, UK
PostPosted: Sun Apr 13, 2014 3:44 pm Reply with quote
Touma wrote:

I thought that either NTSC or PAL was needed to create a composite video signal to match the receiver.
If that is true and the information is not on the disc then where does it come from? Is it generated in the player based on the region that it was made for?
If it is not true then ... never mind.Smile
It's true if that receiver is NTSC, or PAL and they would have been pure anologue circuits. that all died when it went from elecromagnetic waves to 1's and 0's, ie anologue to digital. The data on a DVD disc is MPEG2 and BluRay uses MPEG 2 and 4. As we are evolutionally anologue creatures a digital to anologue converter is the final stage into a receiver whatever it is.
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RHorsman



Joined: 13 Aug 2003
Posts: 151
Location: Loch Loman
PostPosted: Mon Apr 14, 2014 11:57 am Reply with quote
In the early days of Blu-Ray wasn't there very occasionally an issue where the main content on a disc would be HD and region free, but extras would be SD and unreadable due to PAL/NTSC compatibility? I never encountered it myself, but I thought I heard about that cropping up.
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Comsr



Joined: 02 Sep 2012
Posts: 27
PostPosted: Mon Apr 14, 2014 2:56 pm Reply with quote
jsevakis wrote:
configspace wrote:
]There is also another more expensive alternative than just upscaling the final rendered masters and that is to recomposite. That is, take each pre-composite, pre-final-rendered video track from RETAS and then render the tracks in higher resolution, then composite them. Most of the assets are of varying resolution anyways. Character assets/frames are usually scanned in at pretty high resolution. J.C. Staff for example, uses 960x1600 for their characters for TV production, even low budget shows like Twin Angel.

Yes, this is great when possible. Lain looks amazing. What other shows have gotten this treatment?
Elfen Lied BD was rerendered from original source files.
It's nothing like Lain's reworked scenes, it's just the raw data in higher resolution.
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Buster D



Joined: 16 Jun 2005
Posts: 81
PostPosted: Mon Apr 14, 2014 9:34 pm Reply with quote
RHorsman wrote:
In the early days of Blu-Ray wasn't there very occasionally an issue where the main content on a disc would be HD and region free, but extras would be SD and unreadable due to PAL/NTSC compatibility? I never encountered it myself, but I thought I heard about that cropping up.


This can still occasionally happen, I believe. Stuff where the disc might be region free with the main feature in 1080p24, but the extras are in PAL or 1080i50 so a player that will convert them (like an Oppo) will be required for many US TVs. Pretty sure the Australian release of The Transformers: The Movie is like this. This site documents such releases (they'll have "Note" next to "Yes"): http://bluray.liesinc.net/index.php?region=b
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Buster D



Joined: 16 Jun 2005
Posts: 81
PostPosted: Mon Apr 14, 2014 9:35 pm Reply with quote
ComSR wrote:
jsevakis wrote:
configspace wrote:
]There is also another more expensive alternative than just upscaling the final rendered masters and that is to recomposite. That is, take each pre-composite, pre-final-rendered video track from RETAS and then render the tracks in higher resolution, then composite them. Most of the assets are of varying resolution anyways. Character assets/frames are usually scanned in at pretty high resolution. J.C. Staff for example, uses 960x1600 for their characters for TV production, even low budget shows like Twin Angel.

Yes, this is great when possible. Lain looks amazing. What other shows have gotten this treatment?
Elfen Lied BD was rerendered from original source files.
It's nothing like Lain's reworked scenes, it's just the raw data in higher resolution.


It's also been done for Gurren Lagann, Working!, Kannagi, Manabi Straight, and probably some others I'm forgetting. They look beautiful, better than a lot of low-budget anime that were done in HD from the beginning.
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