Picture Quality HD Net Movies

[tornado]

Is it me, the particular movies I am watching, my hd monitor, or the settings I am using, or has the picture quality on HD Net Movies gotten way worse than it used to be? It almost looks blurry.

 

[dfergie]

I caught the end of Wayne's World this morning and it looked fine.

 

[Gentleman]

American Graffiti during the night had poor pic quality, realize it is an old movie but expected better

Bob

 

[ehren]

some of the HD transfers they have don't look so hot.

 

[r_childress]

Some of these ols movies are transfered from rough quality originals to begin with.

 

[dfergie]

Myself I am replacing many shows archived from other sources with HDNet Movie Versions... Higher Bitrate(judging by file size), OAR and usually look better...

 

[tornado]

I agree that HD Net Movies has been the gold standard for presentation, but I too saw American Graffiti and Waynes World and neither looked good. There was another movie today with Humphrey Bogart that did not look good. I have mainly noticed this in the past 24 hours. I bet this channel probably like many of the HD channels has been lowered in quality as much as possible in order to conserve bandwith. Maybe I am just noticing the overall situation with all the channels, they are being compressed and perhaps not even shown in full resolution, but I do not know. They are weak.

 

[tornado]

I caught the end of Wayne's World this morning and it looked fine.

Okay, okay I just tried turning Black Adjust and Dynamic Detail on in the settings on my monitor (they were both previously off) and there was a noticable improvement. So I can say at least some of the responsibility for the bad picture I was seeing was mine. Sorry. Thanks for helping to get me to question whether it could be something else beside Dish. It was looking really bad.

 

[dfergie]

I had Funny Girl on and compared between Directv and Dish and could see little or no difference this afternoon...

 

[Bobby H]

I'm not surprised about the fairly poor image quality of American Graffiti. The movie was shot on a low budget in Techniscope -a 2-perf 35mm format. Combine small original negative size with possibly cheaper film stocks and camera equipment for early 1970s era technology and it can make for one grainy, fuzzy movie.

 

[JEFFinINDY]

I'm not surprised about the fairly poor image quality of American Graffiti. The movie was shot on a low budget in Techniscope -a 2-perf 35mm format. Combine small original negative size with possibly cheaper film stocks and camera equipment for early 1970s era technology and it can make for one grainy, fuzzy movie.

No, no, no. It's because Dish suxx and they put OMG 7 channels per transponder and it's HD-Lite. Has this forum taught you nothing??


(kidding...)

 

[buckchow]

As of last night, HDNet Movies was still only sharing space with 3 other HD channels. If you're having a problem, bitrate can currently be ruled out as a significant contributing factor.

Dish could have changed how they filter the video on this channel before they recompress it, but I haven't done any "then and now" comparisons to see if anything has actually changed. If such a change were made, the situation would be the same as with most SD channels in that no amount of bits would be able to improve the picture quality because excessive filtering prior to recompression oversoftens and wipes out many details. Here's hoping the HD channels are never so badly mistreated, especially for the sake of HDNet Movies.

 

[Dr. Cool]

Audio dropouts?

Picture quality has always been fine with HDNet Movies. Even if not perfect, much better than the rest.
I'm having however frequent audio dropouts with HDNet Movies (and HDNet) when the show is DVR recorded. Some movies and shows are more affected than others.
For example, I decided to test it thoroughly yesterday, and watched "Little Big Man" at 9:30 PM, "Bonnie and Clyde" at 12:00 AM, and "Little Big Man" again at 2:00 AM, and recorded all three shows. I experienced no dropouts at all when watching them live. Nonetheless, when I rewound and rewatched parts of them, what were before dropout-free scenes had sometimes audio dropouts, although *only* with "Little Big Man," on *BOTH* time slots and around approximately the same places!
So it looks to me like these were problems with the "Little Big Man" stream originating from the HDNet source, problems that affect *ONLY* DVR watching. For example, if the problem was with the sat signal (which by the way is strong and perfect), I would not have had audio dropouts around the same scenes on both broadcasts of "Little Big Man" and no dropout with "Bonnie and Clyde."
By the way, I changed *ALL POSSIBLE* settings of my ViP622 and the dropouts wouldn't disappear.
How can something like this be happening?

 

[TNGTony]

I remember seeing American Graffiti in the theater... it was grainy then!

The "location" movies of the early 70's all had this dirty "gritty" look to them.

See ya
Tony

 

[DishSubLA]

One movie looks great on HDNET Movies, then the next looks bad. What are witnessing the averages catching up with HD transfers. More cheaper houses are offering HD transfers, and you get what you pay for. Some studios are unwilling to pay for the best HD transfer for many films, except some of the best blockbusters in history. A really good--proper--HD transfer of high bit-rate (at the house) with the extra expense of removing all the imperfections digitally and really adjusting each scene properly for transfer costs too much money for the studios who just want to take their inventory and give it a new life in the market as an HD film for broadcast with the least cost possible.

Be prepared for many more HD transfers of varying quality to come for many years. Usually the latetest movies have been mastered for the digital domain and will often result in a superior HD transfer simply because things have been done properly from the start. But transferring analog (really form the chemical medium) to HD is gonna take more time, labor and $$$$.

 

[tornado]

I realize I was helped to realize that there was more to the problem with the picture quality of HD Net Movies on Dish Network than the picture quality of Dish Network. After making the adjustments on the TV monitor all I can say is wow! I was too lazy to make adjustments until I posted. Thanks for helping me to get off my butt. The picture quality is now great. The adjustments I made really made a big difference. Sometimes now HD via Dish Vip 622 on my Samsung LN52A650 looks better than some Blu-ray and HD-DVD material, as incredible as that sounds. Adjust your TV.