Firefly On Blu-Ray

POSTED BY: everyworldspinnin
UPDATED: Monday, February 18, 2008 08:07
VIEWED: 4350
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NEWOLDBROWNCOAT

Friday, February 15, 2008 7:36 PM

in the news today, on CNN.com, Wal_Mart has announced that it is going to stock Blu-Ray, and sell out regular DVD.

Not up on the format wars, nor the technical pros and cons, and I don't like WalMart, but I do respect its market force.
Might be time to invest in a player... this might be the deciding voice.

CHRISISALL

Friday, February 15, 2008 7:43 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by NewOldBrownCoat:
in the news today, on CNN.com, Wal_Mart has announced that it is going to stock Blu-Ray, and sell out regular DVD.

Good. Then I'll officially have no use for that store. Eff 'em.

DVD junkie Chrisisall

SIMONWHO

Friday, February 15, 2008 8:34 PM

I think he meant sell out HD DVD. DVD is 50 times (literally) bigger than Blu-ray at the moment and will probably remain a far bigger seller.

Quote:
Originally posted by cdm22:

I thought film has a MUCH higher resolution than 1080p though?

Well, most film does but there's also all the special effects and such like. If they need to be re-done, it'll cost a fortune but if they don't, those shots will look ropey by comparison to the rest of the show. We may just have to settle for a slightly imperfect series.

CHRISISALL

Friday, February 15, 2008 8:40 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SimonWho:
I think he meant sell out HD DVD. DVD is 50 times (literally) bigger than Blu-ray at the moment and will probably remain a far bigger seller.

oh.

Shutting up sir Chrisisall

STORYMARK

Friday, February 15, 2008 8:47 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by SimonWho:

Quote:
Originally posted by cdm22:

I thought film has a MUCH higher resolution than 1080p though?

Well, most film does but there's also all the special effects and such like. If they need to be re-done, it'll cost a fortune but if they don't, those shots will look ropey by comparison to the rest of the show. We may just have to settle for a slightly imperfect series.

That shouldn't be a problem. Most shows and movies since around '99 have been done with HD in mind, since the industry has been pushing this way for years. And since Universal HD is showing the episodes, I doubt that's an issue for Firefly.

One technical hold-up that might be an issue, is how they were encoded for HD. HD-DVD uses an entirely different encoding structure. I assume the eps shown on Universal HD are done in the HD-DVD style, since Universal was/is backing HD-DVD, and Fox was format neutral at the time. So, they may need to re-encode them all, which is a time and money expense.

"I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him."

SIMONWHO

Friday, February 15, 2008 11:21 PM

*warning: technical geek stuff ahead*

I'm afraid it's not quite as simple as that.

First up, there's no set standard for HD. The three most common are 720p, 1080i and 1080p. Firefly is broadcast on Universal HD which airs exclusively in 1080i - i.e. 1080 lines of picture information, interlaced. Blu-ray (and HD DVD) discs are almost exclusively 1080p (no interlacing).

Now it may be that they think the quality of the masters is good enough that they can use the original film but source material not originally aimed at HD + CGI from 6 years ago =/= a good recipe for picture quality.

EVERYWORLDSPINNIN

Sunday, February 17, 2008 6:12 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Storymark:
It'll happen eventually, but it's a bit early in the life of the format for them to be filling some of the smaller niches in the market - and like it or not, we're a niche. Very few series sets have come out on BR yet (compared to DVD). They still don't have a lot of the current hit shows on BR, so a much-beloved, but sadly cult-level show, is probably not a high priority.

"I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him."

True it is a niche, but a dedicated one at that. Besides, Fox already put The Shield and Nip\Tuck on BR. The difference is that those show have a dedicated fan base, and we have Browncoats. I'll take Browncoats any day.

Nuff said. :)

--------------------------------------------------
"All great truths begin as blasphemies." George Bernard Shaw

ASARIAN

Monday, February 18, 2008 8:07 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SimonWho:

*warning: technical geek stuff ahead*

I'm afraid it's not quite as simple as that.

First up, there's no set standard for HD. The three most common are 720p, 1080i and 1080p. Firefly is broadcast on Universal HD which airs exclusively in 1080i - i.e. 1080 lines of picture information, interlaced. Blu-ray (and HD DVD) discs are almost exclusively 1080p (no interlacing).

Now it may be that they think the quality of the masters is good enough that they can use the original film but source material not originally aimed at HD + CGI from 6 years ago =/= a good recipe for picture quality.

All HD-DVD movies, that I know of, are stored in 1080p, though early players only had the hardware to show 1080i. This means that Universal's first HD-DVD, Serenity, is stored as 1080p, too!

The reason for the lack of 1080p in early HD-DVD hardware was the use of a first-gen Broadcom chipset, which is limited to 1080i output. In fact, Samsung's first Blu-ray player also uses the same chipset, and then had to use another chip to de-interlace the 1080i signal produced by the Broadcom chip to output true 1080p. So I see no reason for them to redo much of anything. Just remaster/de-interlace the existing 1080i sources of the episodes to 1080p (de-interlacing != upscaling) and slap em on a Blu-ray disc. :)

Actually, any half-way decent 1080p native display with a good de-interlacer will reassemble the interlaced signals anyway and give you a clean 1080p image. So, on your 1080p computer screen, chances are you can already watch the Universal HD episodes, aired in 1080i, in 1080p (if you watch em from harddisk or some such).

--
"Mei-mei, everything I have is right here." -- Simon Tam

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