Star Wars 4K, Now with added Jedi

[beecee]

Finaly , both DNRand nonDNR versions are down, non hdr version looks like your watching it through sand covered glasses, major grain, but its still amazing like best i've seen, way better than the awful blurays, this will look great on my projector.

Just about to try the hdr verison so hopefully that will look better, just happy that my TV plays them straight from my usb stick.

corrected.. cheers for pointing it out Brad,

[Brad]

You mean DNR not HDR?

[beecee]

well the DNR version looks way better on my TV than the nonDNR version, going to fire up the PJ and hopefully it will display.

Best its ever looked, and unless Disney pull it out of the bag, you wont get it better, highly recommended for any star wars fan, cant wait now for Empire and Jedi.


EDIT:
Fired up the PJ and it works, my SonyX800 player down scales to 1080p and it's brilliant, well impressed.
will watch it again later tonight, for proper blackout conditions.

[Colin]

I’d like to see this but feel like it would just be another disappointment. Soundwave got me the last version they did on Blu-ray and it was, to my eyes, pretty poor on the image quality front.

[beecee]

pop along colin have a ganders at it.

[Asura]

Cheers. Why were we blending 2 images to get hdr photos back in the day then? Or using graduated filters to keep sky details? Educate me!

It's fine to be confused; HDR is a really nebulous term which has been applied to multiple things. HDR as a video game feature, HDR photography and HDR video content/displays all refer to the same basic idea, but they're actually different things and not really that interchangeable.

High-Dynamic-Range just refers to the idea that your colour range in an image is both high (i.e. the lightest to the darkest range is big) and dynamic (basically where you peg the top and bottom range you show in the image is movable).

In photos, traditionally you would take a photo with one exposure/aperture setting. However, this creates a problem if you're taking a picture with both very bright and very dark elements in one picture. This is the best example I've seen:



If you imagine your colour range, the under-exposure above captures detail at the top of the range, but nothing at the bottom. The over-exposure captures detail at the bottom of the range, but nothing at the top. By blending the two images, you have detail across the range (high) then you can play with how you blend the two to decide where you actually want the detail to lie (dynamic).

HDR videogame graphics (the ones people were going onabout around the start of the Xbox 360's life) were different. Videogames, traditionally, used lighting models where the lights in-game would scale from 0-1. This was fine for theoretical models but creates a problem; in real life, a typical office room with no windows will usually be lit at around 80 Lux. Direct sunlight on a sunny day might get up to 100,000. The scale between these two is not linear either. This means games where the user transitioned between indoor and outdoor environments always felt a bit odd, because in real life we always see this transition as our eyes adjust. That's one of the reasons why, in Unreal Tournament '99, even the biggest outdoor areas often just "feel" like really big indoor areas.

For HDR games, the industry shifted to representing light in a slightly more realistic way. The simplest approach was making it so that instead of using 0-to-1 for their light range, artists could use any numbers they wanted (high) then they can scale everything based on the lit things visible onscreen (dynamic). They could even do more advanced things where you adjust the scaling to more accurately mimic the behaviour of the human eye (this was done to great effect in the first Lost Planet).

HDR displays, then, are just a further extension of this idea. They just take the approach that you could make it so the pixels on a screen can get brighter or darker than the previous maximum extents, so a wider range of bright and dark colours can be shown. It's high because of the range, and dynamic because you can control the range. This will work with some movies, I think, even those that weren't designed for it, because I believe movies already have a higher range than television/video formats.

[Dogg Thang]

Yep, they do. Also I imagine a large number of TV shows only have their range narrowed at the end. Everything I've ever worked on gets things into broadcast-safe range at the end. But the reality is that the reason we can do that is that the difference between the pulled-back old broadcast range and full HDR really isn't a big deal and vanishes into pointlessness when you take into account all the varying settings TV sets go out with. The main difference is that you can get a nice blinding white, which we'd rarely want anyway.

[Brad]

Taking the right hand image from Asura's post, are you saying that movie makers were already capturing that data on film back in the 70s? If so why weren't photographers privy to this technology? As pointed out, we either had to expose for the highlights or the shadows in difficult scenes; you couldn't do both. How did film makers manage to avoid this problem?

[Asura]

Taking the right hand image from Asura's post, are you saying that movie makers were already capturing that data on film back in the 70s? If so why weren't photographers privy to this technology?

No, they weren't capturing that much. That example represents a huge range that is only really viable with digital photography, just to demonstrate the concept.

However, they were using high quality film and cameras, so they were capturing more than television was capable of displaying (just not the crazy range shown on HDR photos like that one), because projection technology (paired up with cinemas being purpose-built rooms to give the optimum, consistent movie-watching experience) was already superior.

So if you want to perform a new transfer of, say, Independence Day for HDR displays, you might be able to do it, because the existing DVD/BluRay transfers didn't capture the full range in the first place.

As pointed out, we either had to expose for the highlights or the shadows in difficult scenes; you couldn't do both. How did film makers manage to avoid this problem?

There are some nuances to this.

The first is lighting; film-makers would use lighting to create a specific mood, especially when shooting on-set. Lighting in films can be very different to real-life, like if you were on the set watching the scenes being filmed, you'd be surprised what they do to get the right look, with different types of lights pointing all sorts of directions. So if the film-maker wanted to light a scene with a great deal of light and darkness, they would have to set up the lighting and adjust things until it "looked right". So the solution isn't technological; it's practical.

Secondly though, they're filming video, which works a bit differently to still photography. It also serves a different purpose. A photographer might want to capture a sense of how something likes in real life, or an idealised version of it. A director adjusts the lighting in a scene as part of telling a story.

In photography, HDR has a reputation for creating these dream-like, hyper-real images:


... which some people dislike.

So this is one of the "hidden skills" to film-making/direction/production design.

[Dogg Thang]

So if you want to perform a new transfer of, say, Independence Day for HDR displays, you might be able to do it, because the existing DVD/BluRay transfers didn't capture the full range in the first place.

In all likelihood they transferred at full range and then pulled it in for output to DVD/BluRay and still have those. The bigger factor would have been resolution. If 4K transfers of a film exists, I'd guess a HDR version exists.

Edit: But again I feel the difference not only would be tiny but most likely, due to projection process, a HDR Blu would be unlikely to reflect what was shown in the cinema and the intention of the film. Projection and silver screens would result in a different look and yet one that is also limited in dynamic range, I reckon. That said, I know less about actual film than I do digital formats. It's like how comics were coloured for newsprint versus what they look like with those same colours digitally printed on to thick shiny paper.

[Brad]

So, HDR in photography is more HDR than HDR on HDR TVs then really. Makes sense. Boris's statement regarding games being where it's at makes sense too because there isn't a film/digital sensor capture limitation.

[QualityChimp]

So in this new version, is Luke less of a whiny douche?

[Dogg Thang]

No, you get the full range and detail of his whines.

[Brad]

The dynamic range of the Tosche Station/Power Converters whine is something to behold in this version.

[wakka]

So in this new version, is Luke less of a whiny douche?

You take that back.