Mostly because the companies who aren't doing anamorphic don't know any better. However, I'm finding that as time goes on, more and more companies who are doing widescreen have started doing anamorphic as well.
Dennis @ Black Magic, sorry if I've misinterpreted your post, but it sounds like you don't author your DVDs in anamorphic widescreen even though you shoot widescreen footage.
Did I get that right? If so, it's hardly a sign of quality, if you don't use the full vertical resolution the video signal can support.
I long ago stopped buying any non-anamorphic releases of widescreen mainstream movies, and I've stopped accepting it in porn as well.
I think we're getting our wires crossed, Dennis. It may be me who's misunderstood what an anamorphic transfer is.
As I've understood it, having an anamorphic transfer says nothing about whether your footage is 16:9, 2.35:1 or anything else. Anamorphic simply means using the area of the screen, that would have been filled with black bars on a 4:3 screen, for pixel data too. Then, when showing the movie on a 4:3, the TV or DVD player will have to squeeze the picture vertically to restore the proper aspect ratio. This means that a 16:9 TV only has to stretch the picture horizontally, and not vertically too, making for a better picture, with less wasted bandwidth in the video signal.
If I've gotten that right, having a non-anamorphic is wasting precious pixels, and unprofessional.
I think so too now. It did sound odd to use HD cameras and then not do an anamorphic transfer, but given the technical blunders to have come out of major US studios I couldn't be sure.
As I said earlier, most companies don't know any better. The posts here by Black Magic are a perfect example of that.
Black Magic, You couldn't be more wrong in what you have written. 16:9 non-anamorphic and 16:9 anamorphic have the exact same aspect ratio. They are both 16:9. The only differences are how they are encoded on the DVD and how DVD players handle them.
DVD is a 4:3 format. There are two ways of putting a 16:9 image onto a 4:3 format. The first methodology (non-anamorphic) is to actually burn the black bars along with the actual picture image onto the DVD. This wastes approximately 33% of the picture resolution with black bars. Anyone with a widescreen TV needs to zoom the picture vertically to eliminate the black bars and horizontally to fill the sides in. That vertical zoom is when that 33% of resolution is lost.
With the second methodology (anamporphic), the DVD is burned with the 16:9 image "squeezed" horizontally into the 4:3 space. The entire height of the 4:3 frame is filled with the picture image. No black bars are burned onto the DVD frame.
Now here comes the beauty of the original design of DVD. Your DVD player knows what type of TV you are watching on (it asked you when you set the DVD player up). If you are watching on a 4:3 TV, you will see the same picture quality that you would have with a non-anamorphic DVD. The DVD player will recreate the 16:9 image by inserting the black bars at the top and bottom. This process will reduce the resolution at the same level that it would have been lost had the black bars been burned on the DVD in the first place. So there is no quality gain or loss for people watching on a 4:3 TV.
However, if you are watching on a widescreen TV, you get that 33% of lost resolution back. The entire squeezed image is sent to your TV with the image filling up the entire height of the screen and the TV stretches the picture horizontally to generate the 16:9 aspect ratio.
The fact that anamorphic makes widescreen TV's look better, but does nothing to help a 4:3 image is why, rather than writing "anamorphic" on the back of some DVD's they studios prefer to write "Enahnced for widescreen TV's".
My understanding is that producing anamorphic DVD costs no more than producing non-anamorphic DVD's. It just a software option that either the author or encoder selects when the DVD is being authored or encoded. Since the anamporphic process is not done until the DVD is being authored/encoded, that means that editing can still be done the same way that you are doing it now.
I strongly suggest taking a look at the primer the oatmeal already linked to. The 1.85:1 part is more consistent with porn. But the entire concept of the primer is totally appropriate.
I realize that you think that you are making the best choice by making non-anamorphic DVD's. You're not.
I suspect Dennis @ Black Magic at first misunderstood anamorphic as implying 2.35:1, but his last post makes me think they do indeed do anamorphic transfers of their 16:9/1.85:1 footage.
Perhaps a tech guy was consulted between those last two posts?
BTW, Bill, which companies still release new widescreen movies with non-anamorphic transfers? With Wicked finally going that route, I thought they were among the last.
You may be right.I don't know. Wicked was actually one of the first to go anamorphic. But then they went back to non-anamorphic for some reason. That may have coincided with David Crawford's move from Wicked to Evil Angel. I know that he was (and still is) a big proponent of anamorphic.
From astro's review:As you can see, Dennis, even though astroknight gave the movie a high rating, the non-anamorphic transfer held it back from getting a perfect tech score. Some of us do care about this. Especially because, possibly apart from a couple of extra minutes of encoding time for the extra pixels, it shouldn't cost anything to do it. It just looks sloppy and gives the impression that the producers didn't care about presenting their movie properly. It is the sort of thing that will prevent me from checking out a title.
I have to agree. A non-anamorphic transfer with a clear, sharp image, is easily preferable to an anamorphic transfer with serious chroma shift problems *cough*Space Nuts*cough* , or grainy picture *cough*Camp Cuddly Pines*cough* .
I guess that I should have done the search on reviews instead of doing the price search and then clicking through to the review as I usually do. There's no price search entry for this one.
By the way: The naming of "Perfection" is a bit confusing. In fact it's supposed to be a series. To my knowledge the official title of the DVD Astro has reviewed is called "Perfection - Pure Passion". There is another title going to be released in March called "Perfection - Touch Me". The cover looks pretty similar to the first one.
FWIW, making an anamorphic DVD from 16:9 footage (lets avoid using "anamophic transfer" unless we're talking film to tape) is as easy as checking the proper box when the final cut is endoded to MPEG2, and then checking the proper box when the MPEG2 stream is authored into a "track". Two box checks, and that's it.
Also anamorphic 16:9 tracks and 4:3 tracks can exist on the same disc.
24P tracks and 30i tracks can also exists on the same disc.
In either case, the check box is merely a "flag" to tell the machine how to format the playback. This "flag" can be checked or unchecked without effecting the underlying image.
Also, unless the material was shot with it (some cameras will do this) a hard-burned letter box actually take more time/money/effort.
Isn't it only the second checkbox (checking the proper box when the MPEG2 stream is authored into a "track") that just sets a flag, telling the player whether it will be getting an anamorphic stream or not?
Doesn't the first (checking the proper box when the final cut is endoded to MPEG2) format the image and, if necessary, change it's resolution and insert the black bars into the 72 hex 480/72 hex 576 stream?
??? With the MPEG encoder I played around with a couple of years ago (transcode), it was just a matter of selecting a few command line switches, and it did the required resizing/stretching/clipping/letterboxing automagically. Is that a separate step you have to initiate manually when working with professional gear, unless the camera does it itself?
Whether the finished sequence is in the DV codec or the uncompressed 10 bit codec, it needs to be converted to the MPEG2 codec. That is the codec that is used on DVDs.
I have no idea what you were playing around with, but the process of converting (encoding) a finished edit sequence to MPEG2 has nothing to do with resizing, stretching, clipping, or letterboxing.
Most especially, an anamophic 16:9 MPEG2 stream avoids the need for hard burned letterbox bars. When displaying in "letterbox" mode on a 4:3 monitor, the DVD player inserts the letterbox bars at the video exits the player, "pouring" the full resolution of the MPEG2 stream into the middle of the monitor.
No, but transcode did it all in one step. After setting the relevant switches, you just let it get on with reading the input stream, send it through the decoder, various filters (noise reduction, resizing, etc.) and the encoder. A few hours of unattended number crunching later, the finished MPG file was ready for authoring.
I just figured professional solutions would also be able to do it all in one step, without user intervention. It surprised me that you would need to do an extra step of work yourself (and not just leave it to the computer) to turn a 16:9 image into a non-anamorphic 4:3 image. Especially as we've seen so many non-anamorphic porn releases. I didn't take into account that their cameras could be inserting the black borders for them.
Consumer and "prosumer" video equipment and software causes a lot of confusion about how, why, and even what constitutes a professional approach. The "de-interlace" tool you mentioned in an earlier thread is a great example.
I don't know how this applies to newer hardware/software solutions and doubt that many porn companies did this, but when DVD first came out, when authoring & encoding a mainstream DVD a person would make manual overrides to some things that were automaticlly generated by the authoring and encoding hardware/software.
Therefore a 1 step process really wasn't necessary.
Nothing remotely professional about that. Just an option in the player software. I tried putting that player through its paces. Damn, well encoded 25fps 72 hex 576 progressive scan looks fine . If Blu-Ray wasn't around the corner, I might have had to get some PS capable gear. Do you use progressive scan on your shot-on-film stuff?
About these cameras that include the black bars in the recording, am I right in assuming that this is always an option, and that all those cameras will happily record anamorphic video? If so, can you, or anyone else who might be lurking, think of any reason why someone would choose to do non-anamorphic widescreen? Any reason at all?
After extensive conversations with engineers Technicolor, Kodak, and Apple we've determined that we use a one of a kind telecine, ingestion, and encoding process. Without getting too techincal, the gyst of it is that we have entirely removed the (formerly thought needed) introduction and removal from the film to tape transfer process.This helpful "feature" is only available on prosumer toys. I don't know if there are any cameras that will hard burn a 16:9 letterbox on a 4:3 frame that will not also shoot native 16:9.
Hard burned blackbars, and indeed even the concept of anamorphism are really relicts of the VHS era. I think in someways, the continued use of the terms confuses both producers and viewers. Certainly true in my case.
After extensive conversations with engineers Technicolor, Kodak, and Apple we've determined that we use a one of a kind telecine, ingestion, and encoding process. Without getting too techincal, the gyst of it is that we have entirely removed the (formerly thought needed) introduction and removal of 3:2 pulldown from the film to tape transfer process.
What this approach does is entirely close the gap between 24fps film production, 24P HD post, and NTSC post. It also allows us to present our films on DVDs that are 100% DVD standard compliant, have an entirely native 24P image chain, have no pulldown (with its attendant interlace artifacts), and can be presented with 20% lighter compression as compared to an equivelent running time of 30i material.
Phew. [wipes sweat from brow] Even after repeated Googling, I just couldn't figure out what you meant.
It sounds like your DVDs contain only a 24fps stream. Most recent (early 90s onward) PAL TVs can play 30fps video without problems in addition to their native 25fps. Can normal NTSC TVs handle 24fps video (interlaced of course), or does the DVD player do the 3:2 pulldown as needed?
There is no such thing as NTSC 24fps video, with or without interlace. NTSC is 30i, period, end of story. 30P simply means there is no temporaly shift between the capture of the first and second field. There is always a temporal shift between the display of the first and second field; and this is what gives material that is shot 30P it's distictive motion signature. 3:2 pulldown exploits mathematical relationship between 24fps and 60 1/2 frames (fields)/second to allow the display of 24fps material in a 30i environment. Our process avoids the compromises inherent in this scheme, most especially as they relates to telecine and cut lists.
When a 24fps DVD is played back on and NTSC monitor, the DVD player inserts the needed 3:2 pulldown on the fly. The required interframes are created only at the moment they are needed, so these frame never need to be compressed, allowing lighter compression for 24P material because there are fewer frames in the same running time.
Well, there's no such thing as 30i PAL either, but PAL TVs handle 30i video just fine (at least if it's fed through the RGB inputs). It didn't seem like such a stretch that your NTSC TVs could handle 24i video, only requiring the DVD player to do 24p to 24i and not worry about 3:2 pulldown.
Anyhu, I think you've answered all my questions. Thanks.
It doesn't have to be a true standard in order for equipment to be able to generate and/or display it.
Like I said, there's no such thing as 30i PAL, but the PAL TVs could handle 30i even if it wasn't mentioned anywhere in their documentation. It became an issue when Europeans modded their Playstations to play NTSC games, because PAL games were routinely poorly converted, with slowdown and black bars top and bottom.
You already said the source was 24p. Would this not contain the same info allowing it's display as either 24p or 24i, the same way my Lord of the Rings PAL DVDs can be displayed as either 25p or 25i? (Again I'm assuming the PAL DVD was shown as 25p and not at some other framerate. Could it have been 24p?)
If material is acquired in a progressive format and then displayed in an interlaced format of the same frame rate, there is no difference than if it were displayed in a progressive format in the same frame rate.
This is because there is no temporal difference between when field one is acquired and when field two is aquired.
Posted - Dec 23 2005 : 5:21PM
