Demons: The Official Announcement

[LoBo]

A higher bitrate can be used for movies resulting in better quality.
Higher bitrate means less pixelization in fast moving scenes, and overall crisper picture quality. High quality transfers makes the most impact on the picture quailty, but high bitrate does improve it.

[PaulD]

Originally Posted by LoBo

A higher bitrate can be used for movies resulting in better quality.
Higher bitrate means less pixelization in fast moving scenes, and overall crisper picture quality. High quality transfers makes the most impact on the picture quailty, but high bitrate does improve it.

But if people are really happy with the way the film looks then it's irrelevant surely? Sure, if people think the film looks poor and it's a terrible transfer then you'd look at the bit rate and the size of the film on the disc and think "well, that's clearly why it looks bad - the bitrate is pathetic and they should have done more with the compression and disc space". But if your eyes which watch the film are satisfied then so what?

I genuinely get the impression from that review that he's checked the bitrate first and then gone into the film with a negative mindset actively looking for 'mistakes'

[Daemonia]

Originally Posted by LoBo

A higher bitrate can be used for movies resulting in better quality.
Higher bitrate means less pixelization in fast moving scenes, and overall crisper picture quality. High quality transfers makes the most impact on the picture quailty, but high bitrate does improve it.

Are you 100% sure on that? I just chucked in a really crappy Vipco DVD, it had an almost maximum bitrate for MPEG2 SD video, and yet it still looked like shit. By your reasoning, with such a high bitrate, it should've looked like a Hollywood Blockbuster. But it didn't.

I think there's a difference between bitrates and how the film is originally encoded. A film taken from a poor source can still have a massive bitrate and look like shit.

Back in the day when DVD first came out, the punter got what they were given. There was NO dialogue with any labels and complaints were often ignored. So, looking at this forum and the way Arrow respond to queries, we've come a long way. A very long way indeed.

Not seen the Demons BD's yet, but The Beyond was amazing, certainly no complaints here. I thought it looked terrific. And Phenomena, one of the very best HD transfers of a cult film I've ever seen, it really is that good.

Now, I'm no Arrow fanboy (whatver that is) and would certainly raise an issue if I had any and would have no fear of doing so here on these forums. That also says a lot about how Arrow conduct business. My only (minor) gripe so far was with the sound on A Bay of Blood, but I'm also aware that the sound on this film has been problematic for every single release I've ever seen of it, so I suspect Arrow didn't have much to work with. It's a minor quibble, though.

[PaulD]

Incidentally, when Predator was initially released by Fox in a bare-bones edition it was criticised for, among other things, its low 19mbps bitrate. Fox ended up re-releasing it with a higher bitrate encode on a BD-50 disc.

That version was the Ultimate Hunter edition. Y'know, the one we all know and love for it's shiny waxy glory


Just saying.

[LoBo]

The Vipco must have been poorly restored and 8 to 9 kbps wouldn't have made it so much better. Demons and Demons 2 was restored properly by using the original negatives, so it would have had less compression problems and such if the average bitrate was like 30 kbps.

1 example here: http://www.caps-a-holic.com/hd_vergl...ss=1#vergleich

http://www.caps-a-holic.com/hd_vergl...ss=1#vergleich

The faulty disc have 12522 kbps which is too low and the replacement disc have 27998 kbps. Both screencaptures have compression artifacts. On the first screencapture, the replacement disc have no artifacts and like the faulty does.

The second also have noise problems and some of the compression artifacts goes away on the replacement disc because of much higher bitrate + it has 10GB more of the file size for the film. If anyone think high bitrate doesn't make any difference of the picture quality, ok, it's your opinion.

[Daemonia]

I was under the impression that with HD codecs like AVC or VC-1 that it's less about bitrates and more about more efficient encoding. It's well known that MPEG2 is a greedy codec and will eat up all the available space given to it - hence the essential need for high bitrates for SD video. I'm also pretty sure that HD codecs behave completely differently.

[LoBo]

I don't know so much about the different codecs, but Wikipedia says this:

H.264/MPEG-4 AVC - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"H.264 (AVC) can often perform radically better than MPEG-2 video—typically obtaining the same quality at half of the bit rate or less, especially on high bit rate and high resolution situations."

That may be true, but having higher bitrate doesn't hurt the films. My Japanese BD of Night of the Living Dead have an average of 38 kbps and i think it looks very good.

[PaulD]

Originally Posted by LoBo

That may be true, but having higher bitrate doesn't hurt the films. My Japanese BD of Night of the Living Dead have an average of 38 kbps and i think it looks very good.

It doesn't necessarily help them either though; cf. the Predator: Ultimate Hunter Edition debacle

[LoBo]

That's because it has so much DNR that erases all the details. Even if it had 40 kbps wouldn't help that edition at all. If a film has a high quality transfer with little to no DNR and high bitrate, the bitrate would only improve and help the film.

[PaulD]

Originally Posted by LoBo

That's because it has so much DNR that erases all the details. Even if it had 40 kbps wouldn't help that edition at all. If a film has a high quality transfer with little to no DNR and high bitrate, the bitrate would only improve and help the film.

I'm aware of that! My point being the bitrate isn't the be-all and end-all of a release