I will start this with a lot of agreement. You all have touched on something that I have been thinking of for some time. Unless a DVD transfer company can find a perfect 70mm copy or 3 or 4 used copies in 70MM they can splice into one they are going to have a hard time getting more 700 lines of resolution. All the analog post production done on movies before this century makes it difficult at best to get to the 1080 lines of HD. I am sure you will see a much bigger difference when the new Star Wars movies make it to HD-DVD or BluRay or what ever comes out next week (LOL), there post production was done digitally at about 4000 lines and down converted.

With that said I will keep building my SD DVD collection, mainly on the older movies that will not benifit as much from HD. The great news is as HD discs gain in the market the SD discs will be cheeper, which should make most of us on a budget very happy.

By the way I still have about 400 Laserdiscs and 3 working players and only bought the DVD of Laser movies if it was widescreen or had extra footage.

Shookie,

I agree with Eddie on the movie theatre thing. It really is a completely different experience that you can't get at home no matter how many home theatre meatballs you buy. To me that's what the movies are all about; going to the theatre. Sure it may be spendy to go these days but this only means is to be more selective with your choices. I hate it when I see a good film on DVD -- great reviews and recommended by friends and family -- then have to kick myself for not seeing it in the theatre.

I live in a crappy southern town (*coughs* "Cartersville, Georgia" *coughs* "oh thank you for the RICOLI coughdrop, its sooooooo sooooooothing for my throat!").

But anyway, as I was saying, the town still is crappy, redneck-mixed-with-suburbanites-who-came-from-ATL, and the movie theater we have pretty much reflects what happens when you give the redneck populace management of a Carmike.

Ugh.

We have a new theater now that recently opened though I unfortunately haven't had the chance to visit it, if you dig what I'm blowing at you.

Some girl in my class said she took a trip over for some American entertainment at the local palace for American entertainment, left saying "smelled like farrats".

And I don't really dig farrats.

Ahh, college in one year... ahh.

Sorry I wasn't around yesterday, Wifes birthday, I was nowhere neer a computer or a tv.

This link might help shed some light on this topic.
- EXTERNAL LINK -

I am very sorry i didn't use the word "Equivalent" when talking about analog film.

Some of the info I have received was from conversations with engineers expressing there frustration trying to get even a good DVD from older film prints, sorry no documentation. Here again the Blazing Saddles example shows that what they start with will make a huge difference in the final DVD. I have a Laser disc of Animal House that looks like they dubbed it of a VCR tape, can't even watch it.

TwisterZ,

The article you reference is primarily concerned with the digital processing of digital photography at 2K (the current standard for digital filming) vs. 4K. You may be confusing this with the digital processing of photographic film content to disc.

Anyway, as you note with the "Blazing Saddles" example, the better the original film print and the higher the resolution used in its transfer to disc, the better will the digital reproduction of that film look. But, unfortunately, many great-looking older films have deteriorted over time and need complete (and costly) restorations before they will look good on disc, no matter what resolution is used in the transfer to the digital domain.

John

Hello John

It looks like we have come full circle and as I said up front "I will keep building my SD DVD collection, mainly on the older movies that will not benifit as much from HD"

This is the small part of the article that I was refering to
Due to the transfer process, a film-based workflow loses information at each step in the chain. This information loss starts in-camera, where lens and film movement reduce resolution of the images captured. The film itself has resolution limitations, and each stage of replication further loses information.

I just watched Way...Way out, the 1966 movie starring Jerry Lewis, on Comcast Cable INHD2. The picture was vary nice and the colors were very rich but there was almost no fine detail. I won't be replacing my DVD collection but I am looking forward to all the new movies in HD.


Here is another reference

- EXTERNAL LINK -

"I shared a surprising factoid offered by a THX executive during our prolonged telephone conversation of several years ago about the awful Phantom Menace transfer: the resolution of the 1080 format exceeds the resolution of motion picture theater distribution prints. The THX exec’s point was that distribution prints are several generations removed from the original negative. And every time an intermediate generation is struck, the resolution drops."

On a different issue check out "The Fourth Dimension" in this article