Screening samples in HD vs SD
 

I want to show HD samples in our meeting room to compare to regular SD and give our couples a chance to upgrade and bemore educated about the difference. We will be including HD next year so I also want to be able to show it to future clients.

Here is my concern, the 37" LCd display we have in our meeting room only goes up o 1366x768 resolution. I have it attached ot a mac mini to playback HD or SD content. However, since the screen resolution is lower than HD resolution and a mac will naturally do a decent job of scaling up an SD picture to fill the screen, the difference between HD and SD is not as noticeable. If I play both samples on my 30" Dell in my office, the difference is huge, but I'm trying to find out if there is a way to show that with our LCd TV. Do I need a higher resolution Lcd to properly show this? It looks like most have this resolution or lower.

Patrick

My wife and I just bought a 42" 1080P LCD HDTV at Sam's Club for $1099 plus tax. I'm still working on testing whether that's noticeably better than 720p displays, but hopefully so. On our old rear-projection HDTV, my wife says she doesn't see much quality difference with a Blu-ray movie than with good regular DVDs.

I use my sony SXRD to show demos in HD. You need a minumum of 1080i to show the full quality. I play my content from a tvix box, which I highly recommend for showing demos for both SD AND HD content. You can fit a ton of demos in a small box for under $300. Not to mention, the fact, it can display 1080p signals.

Jon

Thanks Jon. The Mac Mini is a great way to show demos and our website etc, so I am happy with that. It can also do 1080 P or whatever else you could ask.

Is there any way of preoperly comparing SD vs HD with our display?

Your tv will only display 720p, I am assuming the progressive part, but most hdtv's will display 720p. I think there is a noticeable difference on my tv when comparing the two, meaning 480i vs 720p. I think the greatest difference is when you show footage in 1080i. I deinterlace my footage prior editing with Cineform Connect HD, it makes a huge difference.

The problem I run into, is that people notice the difference but area happy is SD land. We still have people in my area shooting on SVHS and capturing to the mac and editing digitally. I think the sale comes from you versus the sale being made on the SD/HD version of the picture. Obviously, your shooting and editing are top notch. Yes, HD looks a ton better than SD but most do not care enough to spend more money for HD. My shooting style is much different than yours, I shoot more in documentary style vs cinematic style. I wouldn't mind edit and shooting in a cinematic style, in my area, they are so concerned about price and coverage.

At this point, how many people have the technology to watch it? I do, but I buy everything when it comes out. LOL I personally know of 4 people who have HD dvd players, which 3 are sony ps3 owners.

The 30inch dell, which I am assuming is your computer monitor, is a very nice monitor capable of much more than your 1080i hdv camera. I suggest you show it on the dell 30" until you get a new tv to show it on.

I am sure 30" is plenty for a demo.

Jon

Thanks for the info Jon.

actually Pat, your best option is to show the SD in DVD format, while showing HD in BD or HD DVD format... this would be the most accurate representation of the finished work.

I agree with SD DVD, HD DVD & Blue-Ray would be your an actual representation of the finished product. Do you have a blue ray burner, if not, I do. Secondly, do you have a blue-ray dvd player?

Jon

No Hd burners yet, I just use a mac mini in th emeeting room and make an Hd DVD, but as a data DVD and run from the mac's hard drive. I wan to tell clients that HD is an upgrade worth x amount and then show them the difference. Problem is, the mini upscales the sd footage to fill the screen and the screen isnt at a high enough resolution to show the HD properly, so they don't look as different as they are.

PS3 is a nifty lil tax deduction ;)

and if u cant author BD discs, thats ok, coz there are ways to make PS3 play HD footage with no need for menus

Play the SD dvd from your SD DVD player and play the HD dvd from the mac mini. Another option, is ff you buy a blue ray player, ie playstation 3, I can burn the Blue ray dvd for you.

Jon

Thanks for the offer Jon. No Blur Ray or HD DVD player thoguh, just the mac mini.

I think the best bet will be to show them on the 30" dell monitor which is much higher than HD resolution. I'll just have to take them into my office for that.

Hi Patrick,
That might do the trick but is it an actual representation of what the client might recieve once it is burned? I have seen HD and SD side by side on a G5 displayed at a trade show and the difference wasn't that noticeable. Also I own a Toshiba 1080p LCD and I don't notice a difference between SD and HD DVD all that much. The colour is a little brighter that is about it. I would let your work speak for itself, it is truly inspiring and beautiful, so I would take out the SD price and only offer HD and rather than upselling offer it to the clients for a nominal charge and be the hero rather than a salesperson.

Jason,

I will be including it for '08 but was considering it as an upgrade for current couples under contract. I agree it would be best to not sell it as an upgrade in the future, but for now I also don't want to give it away. I have talked several people in sticking with SD and a couple others into going for HD to test out the workflow and what not so we are ready for all Hd next year.

When I compare the Hd samples on our 30" Dell monitor, which is much higher than HD rez, the difference is huge- and I'm just talkng about the sharpness and detail. It is tough to show the difference on an LCd though.

This sounds odd given that full 1920x1080 resolution is possible on today's better HDTVs, so the difference from SD should be as apparent there as on any higher-resolution display. But I'm testing this on a 1080p display and also not seeing as much difference as I expected between HD and SD versions of the same footage. Could it be that our HDTVs aren't displaying full HD resolution even when we think they are? Some sort of connection issue or something?

My HD LCD will play back 1080i or 1080 p but its resolution is 1366x768 so there is not enough pixels there to properly show HD, unless I'm missing something. When it comes to my 30" Dell, the resolution is 2560x1600 so there is no more than enough pixels to properly show HD. That is what I am attributing the difference to.

Patrick

Hype!!! Having worked for Sony Canada, there is alot of hype on HD, but the upgrade is not as significant as you would think. They bill it as the greatest thing to happen to television but in reality when we were to setup the showroom we were to make the SD sets look so so and were given a disc to setup the HD sets. We in the business call it the bait and switch. Show them the crappy picture with a good price point and dazzle them with the HD picture and upsell them instantly. I think that neither format will win and both may just fade away, as people can't seem to really see the difference.

With a proper comparision, I find it impossible not to see the difference.

Update: I just ran a demo on my 1080p display in which the difference between SD and HD was more noticeable than an earlier demo I'd created. The main distinction between the two demos was that the first one was split-screen while the later one switched back and forth between SD and HD versions of the same shot. Surprisingly (for me), I'm finding it easier to see the difference in the full-screen version than the split-screen one, perhaps because I can focus on the same object at the same place on the screen in each scene.

Below is a link to the file I created for demonstrating this, for those who want to see it. The first section of the clip is HDV footage downsampled to DV and then uprezzed back to HDV; second section is a full-quality HDV version of the same thing.

http://www.videomem.com/hdv/HDvSD.m2t

I disagree with the bait and switch comparison between SD and HD. I can only campare my sony SD and HD cameras but there is a definate difference between the two formats.

On the other hand, when I go into most stores which sell HDTVs they've done little or nothing to demonstrate the full quality such displays are capable of generating. And yet people are still buying them left and right because they like the image qualtiy, even from a poor signal on a non-optimized HDTV set. And even if HD quality doesn't matter to most consumers, the switch from a 4:3 to 16:9 viewing format is reason enough to upgrade our production gear. Most DV cameras can't generate decent widescreen SD footage, let alone HD.

There is a visible difference between the two there is no doubt about that. However, it is not as significant as the hype dictates. The future of tv and video is HD there is no doubt about that as well. The reason most people are buying HD ready tv's is because we are being sold on the promising future ahead of us. Also, a key selling feature is 16:9 format as most DVD's are widescreen and look alot better than 4:3. For the average consumer they might not really care about HD yet but the promise of a better video in the future might be enough to entice them. As with anything we are selling if you pitch it right they will gobble it up even if the picture difference is minimal on your LCD screen. If you talk like the difference is great they will see it. It is all a mind game. The 16:9 video also looks better because it gives you a more cinematic feel as opposed to plain video which seperates us from the uncle Bob can do that mentality. We constantly use the term movie as opposed to video and cinematography to videography because it plants that message that it is a quality product and seperates us from our competition. Also Patrick how big is your studio? And how many staff are working for you? Have you been doing this long?

I'd agree to some extent with what Jason said, but add that with HD it's arguably easier to deliver a clean image than with SD. When I play a finished HDV clip at full bandwidth on my HDTV there's no question it looks good, whereas with regular DVDs it's a struggle to squeeze adequate quality out of so few pixels at such low data rates. So even if average viewers don't notice whether HD looks significantly better than SD, at least they'll think the HD looks good. Making SD look that good is hard work and costs movie companies a lot of money for encoding equipment; we can match or exceed that level of quality now with a few thousand dollars in production gear.

If i we're to showcase 1080p on a tv to clients in a normal room, id look into at least a 46+" 1080p display, or even better hopefully a 1080p projector filling up a 100" screen. That will defeinately do the trick. Of course the 30" Dell will suffice provided hte viewer is sitting @ the monitors standard viewing distance. But once you treat the monitor like a TV and sit as far back as you would if it were a 30" TV, u will not notice as much differnece.

Perceived resolution is determined by display resolution, screen size, and viewing distance.

For regular TV displays where you are required to sit a reasonable distance from the TV set itself, you will need as large as possible display to fully see and appreciate the brilliance of 1080p (WUXGA). I never understand why anyone would actually pay an extra 1/3 of the price for a 32/37" or even a 42" 1080p tv when to the average viewer, itll be impossible to tell the differnce between the 720p version. Sure it is double the resolution on paper, but considering the size of the screen and the viewing distance there is no percerived resolution difference whatsoever.

On a computer display capable of WUXGA 1080p native resolution, i think the minimum size is 24" right now. Now at the standard 2 feet viewing distance looking @ a 1080p 24" monitor or perhaps Patricks 30" monitor (I think its 2k rez/WQXGA) there is a HUGE difference difference between my 1080i hdv work vs my downsized anamorphic widescreen 720x480 dvds. In this case the display size and the viewing distance allows the viewer to see the detail in HD. Mind you the DVD does look good, but just cannot compare to the MPEG2 HDV.

If your screen is large enuf considering the viewing distance, and the material is properly encoded, there is a significant difference between HDV vs SD. Once you skew any of the above factors then you'll have a harder time tellign the differnece. I notice this all the time @ the Sony stores. I stand far away and watch some HD demo on a 50-60 inch tv and it looks fantastic. Once I move close enuf I realize its a SD DVD demo, with the material shot in HD. But from far away enuf, you can never tell the difference.

Also Patrick, I would recommend that when showingcasing to clients SD vs HD, I'd say your best bet is to pop in a regular DVD for your SD stuff, then just stickign with playing a de-interlaced MPEG2 HDV .m2t for the HD stuffs.

IMO BD & HD DVD are still in its infancy to get a workflow good enuf for us videographers to get pristine output with minimal signal loss and so forth; even with dvds being around for so long I am shocked at some of the crappy DVD output ive seen some videographers present even today. (a little off topic i know)

now it is properly admitted that in regular situation, you would be not able to find a great difference between a good SD and HDV or between an 1366x768 or full HD.
by regular situation , i mean the use of LCD screen at any size (usually between 32-42") viewed at at least 6 feet.
the fault is due to the high quality of commercial DVD and the (relative) low quality of HDV (it is a different story with movies shot with real HD cams). Additionally most of players are not properly connected to the screen (using HDMi or components at minimum)
For sure, if you play a commercial blu-ray/HD-DVD movie on a 60" 1080 screen, you will see a difference, as well on big screen from projector.

I just paid $1099 plus tax for a 42" 1080p monitor and feel that was money well spent: I can connect it to my laptop or surf the internet from my PS3 with no straining to read any fine text, and it looks great for displaying digital photos. I thought about saving a few bucks by getting a 720p screen of the same size, but my wife convinced me it was worth spending more for showing HD content to clients. (Bless her heart.) Now I'm confident I'm finally seeing my HD projects at something approaching maximum quality, which I didn't feel I was getting with lesser HDTVs. And even though I may not use this display very often as a computer monitor, knowing that works well was worth the price.