Hey - if you win the lottery... YOU can pay for all the equipment for HD-DVD!

I'm holding on to my standard DVD's thanks....

Why pay MORE for the SAME movie that's probably not gonna be
more 'enhanced' as you'd really like it to be?

I also don't go out to the theatres anymore....

Why pay 10 bucks to go see "Garfield" or "MI3"
when it's gonna be out on DVD in just a few months?!

the impact of watching a movie on the big screen is so much more powerful than what you get from watching something on a tv. this applies even to "small" movies without any explosions or crazy stunts. for example, i saw "the world" ("shi jie") in a movie theatre and on dvd within about three months, and the difference was huge. in the theatre, i was completely immersed in the movie's world. at home, it's easy to get distracted by other things, even in a "home theatre" that's set apart from the rest of the house.

if 35mm film only had 700 lines of resolution when projected in a theatre, then people would've stopped going to cinemas a long, long time ago. have you seen the slide shows or the video programs that they play before a movie starts? that's how bad 700 lines of resolution would look like on the big screen.

Tyler,

Yes, you're the only one who thinks HD looks creepy. (Why would you want a picture to look blurrier?) Anyway, I thought creepy was how you liked your films. :)

John

"A theater image with 35mm film only puts up about 700 lines." --TwisterZ

Standard film stock, be it 35 mm or 70 mm does not have lines of resolution, period. Pictures on film stock are not like digital pictures composed of pixels. A picture on film stock is made up of fine gradations of color or black & white. It is only when actual filmed pictures are tranferred to the digital domain that they are broken down into pixels, with 4,000-5,000 lines of resolution needed to do justice to a good filmed image.

As far as film being degraded by postproduction copying, that could happen, of course, but from the major studios over the past 90 years, that's simply nonsense. You need only look at any 35 or 70 mm print projected on a screen anywhere in the years from 1910 to the present to see how good the final results are.

Where does this mysterious number of 700 lines come from that you keep mentioning? What is your source for this information?

And, please, don't compare a still shot from a movie with what you will actually see on screen. The stills are only a rough idea of what is in the picture.

John

Am I the only person who thinks HD looks too creepy. Maybe its just me but all the stuff I've watched in HD looks like those eerie freaks in "The Polar Express". I don't like the way it looks at all.

Anything recorded with digital equipment and post produced in digital will have the resolution of the original camera, be it 720 or 1080. When you use a 35mm camera then make a positive from that negative then cut and splice and copy and print, you will continue to loose reolution. A theater image with 35mm film only puts up about 700 lines. A 70mm film has 4 times the resolution of a 35mm and at that size it is posible to get about 1400 lines top to bottom. The newer method is to shoot in 70mm and scan the original negative, then you can get the much higher resolution. Post production done at this resolution in digital doesn't suffer from the copy of a copy lose that the older film method suffered from. The current review of Blazing Saddles talks about the picture quality improving from the original DVD to the 30th anniversary edition and even more on the new HD version, but look at the still shot, this is not what we will see as the entire movie process goes digital. That grainess is the copy of a copy break down of the older post production method.

"All the analog post production done on movies before this century makes it difficult at best to get to the 1080 lines of HD." --TwisterZ

Let me see if I follow the thread of your reasoning. Analogue postproduction editing makes it impossible to get more than 700 (or 1080) lines of resolution? And this is because...why? Because computer editing before 2000 could only be done at low resolutions? I don't think that works because computer editing even before 2000 (as today) was most often done at high resolutions of 4000-5000 scan lines on enormous, sometimes multiple hard disks. And, of course, the great bulk of postproduction editing before the year 2000 was done using the film stock itself because computers weren't even invented yet, nor when they were invented were hard disks big enough to hold entire movies even in small pieces.

Or are you saying that since films shot digitally before 2000 weren't in more than 1080 lines, they can't come up with more than 1080 lines in their HD DVD transfers? That I might agree with in part.

Or are you really saying that just because regular film stock (35 or 70 mm) was worked on in postproduction--editing, color correcting, whatever--it can now never be scanned well into anything higher than 700 lines? You'll have to explain that one further.

John

I'm still buying SD movies as well, but only the older TV series (That Girl, Big Valley) and the classics (John Wayne/Ford Collection, Classic Comedies, Harold Lloyd, etc). The prices are simply too good to pass up.

movies shot with HD video cameras max out at 1080p in resolution. therefore, movies like "star wars episode 2", "star wars episode 3", "collateral", etc. max out at 1080p, not 4000i/4000p.

70mm film offers twice the resolution of 35mm film, so i don't know from whence you got the 700 lines of resolution number.