Not really HD Blu-Ray

[Radioguy41]

I know it's a little late in the season to bring up a Christmas movie but here goes. I purchased the Blu-Ray version of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. It says it's in 1080i format. Well the output signal is 1080i but there's no way it was mastered in 1080i. It has the same grainy look of my standard DVD upconverted to 1080i output. Has anyone else experienced this? I'm pretty sure I know the answer but is there any way of telling if it is truly HD before buying?

 

[msajeff]

Look at the reviews before buying catalog titles. I've saved myself some money by doing so. USUALLY you don't have to worry about the big new releases getting a top notch transfer.

 

[Ramy]

The only reason I got that movie on HD-DVD was because it was $3 from inetvideo.com

 

[diogen]

It has the same grainy look of my standard DVD upconverted to 1080i output.

Grainy doesn't necessarily mean low quality...

But this is a 20 year old movie.
And most likely uses the same master as was used for the DVD.
Based on the reviews of both, HD DVD and Blu-ray, it is a low quality master (it fit on a SL HD DVD, i.e. under 15GB size).

But it's Warner and VC-1/1080p and that most likely means one encoding was done for both hidef versions (the stream specs were corrected for the BD version).

Diogen.

 

[dfergie]

Yeah the version on the premiums isn't that great either...

 

[TheForce]

I think diogen nailed it. Older telecine transfers were mastered to D5 tape at 1080i and depending on the year vintage Panasonic D5 could have been at 1440 or 1920. The expensive part of the process from film to video is the telecine process so if the BluRay was not expected to gross much at the office they could have used an old 1080i x 1440 master. From that, converting to 1080i x 1920 is just a matter of creating "dead" pixels that are replicated from active ones. The grain in the image is NOT a certain indication of image quality but it could be. Some films are just done grainy for effect, but I don't believe this title was.