SD DVD, HD TV's, Will Bluray help?

[Darryn Carroll]

Hello all, well now that I have finally upgraded our TV to HD, I can see some degradation while watching my wedding DVD's. I am surprised I have not heard from clients about this. My question is this: Will burning a Bluray disc that was shot in SD look better on an HD TV than a SD DVD? I dont have a Bluray burner, but would certainly research if this will help. I am so comfortable shooting SD and not ready for investment and learning curve of shooting HD.

[Jeff Harper]

Darryn, I'm no expert, but I'll still offer my opinion on your dilemma.

First, Bluray discs themselves, the actual discs, have no affect on quality. Bluray discs are simply a delivery format. You can technically put HD on a DVD and it will look like HD. So the disc is not what makes your video look better, it's the actual files on it that make the diff.

Learning how to handle high resolution footage and then putting it on Bluray does have a learning curve, but you can do it. We all had to start where you are at. It is do-able, you can do it when you decide.

You'll need a game plan to start out, when you take the plunge.

You will get lots of conflicting advice about a lot of things when you start asking for help, but eventually you'll sort through it all.

[Eric Olson]

Originally Posted by Darryn Carroll

Will burning a Bluray disc that was shot in SD look better on an HD TV than a SD DVD?

It is possible to upsample 480i30 SD video to 720p60 using super-resolution techniques to obtain something noticeably better than what your new HD TV does automatically. At the moment super-resoltion is mostly a research curiosity and computationally too expensive to be practical. Some software may be found at

super resolution video software - Google Search
http://compression.ru/video/super_re...lution_en.html
http://web.missouri.edu/~kes25c/

If you try any of this software, it would be interesting to hear the results.

[Adam Gold]

A Blu-Ray disc (even if it just contains SD material in DVD format) won't play in a Regular DVD player (at least that's my understanding), but a good upscaling Blu-Ray Player will make a good DVD look noticeably better on an HDTV. We make SD DVD and HD BD versions of everything, and on everything but the biggest screens, they look practically identical. Well, pretty close, anyway.

Of course, this helps you but not your clients unless you give away a nice BD player with each package (not actually a stupid idea, what with nice Sony and Panny BD players available at Costco and online at under $100 each).

If your clients aren't complaining, I guess there's no reason to make the investment. But to me, saying you're not comfortable upgrading to HD is like saying you're not comfortable making the switch to color.

[Mark Williams]

If you encoded DV25 video for blu-ray at a higher bitrate (15000kb/s) as compared to what you would normally encode for a SD DVD (8000kb/s) wouldn't you get superior image quality closer to the original recorded material when played back on a blu-ray player?

[Eric Olson]

Originally Posted by Mark Williams

If you encoded DV25 video for blu-ray at a higher bitrate (15000kb/s) as compared to what you would normally encode for a SD DVD (8000kb/s) wouldn't you get superior image quality closer to the original recorded material when played back on a blu-ray player?

That's a good point.

[Jeff Harper]

I agree Eric, that does sound very interesting, and I can't imagine why it wouldn't work.

[Jeff Pulera]

From my experience, if you have a clean SD source and the MPEG-2 encoding is clean, then a DVD should look pretty nice on an HD set if coming from an upconverting DVD or Blu-ray player via HDMI. If playing via analog from an old DVD player and letting the TV upscale, then SD video can and will fall apart on an HD display.

Regarding the idea of encoding MPEG-2 at 15000 vs 8000, that does not mean the result will look twice as good. It is still SD video. Think about it - if you encode at 30000, will it look TWICE as good as the 15000 encode? No, there is a point where it looks as good as it's ever going to and higher data rates won't do anything. It's still SD video and raising the data rate doesn't make it HD. It is always 720x480 and that is more the issue than the compression when watching on an HD display.

I haven't experimented with trying to go beyond 8000, but in fact due to program length, most of my DVDs are encoded around 4500 and look great on my 50" 720p plasma display. So in my opinion, if your source is SD, then just make the best DVD that you can and don't worry about it. Think about the GARBAGE people watch every day online on YouTube and such, people's expectations are just not that high - they don't have the critical eye of us video nuts! They are more interested in the content. Don't beat yourself up over the quality.

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor

[Mark Williams]

I don't have a blu-ray burner. Anyone willing to try this out and share the results?

"If you encoded DV25 video for blu-ray at a higher bitrate (15000kb/s) as compared to what you would normally encode for a SD DVD (8000kb/s) wouldn't you get superior image quality closer to the original recorded material when played back on a blu-ray player?"