Can someone clear this up for me about HD

Stewy

Stewy

When me and my friends get together, a topic always comes up about Movies and the Quality of HD to downloading a HD film on torrent.

I personally don’t download off torrent because I’m a filmmaker but I do go to my friends house and sometimes he throws a movie on his PS3 with a USB that has a torrent movie on it and he says this is Blu ray quality (he waits for Blu ray quality on torrent he says) I’m thinking to myself during act one this is not HD quality.

Then we have an argument, I think the torrent quality on your computer it looks good but on a big flat screen TV it looks not as good, just buy the DVD or rent it and you will see the difference I say.

I’m kind of lost on this topic because I really think if you download a movie on torrent if its 1080i or 1080p or standard the torrents look all the same to me it looks kind of shitty I know some torrents look really good but compared to when you get it from the source with no loss of quality maybe a little bit it looks better and sounds better.

I also had a question about HD flat screen TVs and the screen on your computer.

Is the screen on your computer HD I mean can I watch HD quality on my computer ?

Can some expert clear this up for me because I don’t really know?

Sorry about the stupid questions but I think every time me and my friends get together this topic comes up and I just need someone that has the knowledge to solve this conflict.
 
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I'm far from an expert...

The quality will basically be a combination of resolution (Eg. 720p for DVD quality, 1080p for Bluray quality) and bitrate. You can have HD (1080p) look like crap if the bitrate is low. If you have a low bitrate and the correct resolution, while it may be technically Bluray quality, it's far from the same quality of most original Blurays.

Not every monitor is created equal. Most monitors these days are 1080p (some higher - aka 4k, some less) so yes, you can watch HD material on your computer.

I'm not here to solve your conflict. It sounds like you two are arguing about a silly topic. If he's happy with his quality of viewing, who are you to say otherwise? It's not your job to show him the difference between crappy quality torrents and the real thing. The truth of it, so long as you hit a minimum standard, the majority of people just don't care or incapable of noticing the finer points of the video quality.
 
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To give you an idea, a 15 minute short I shot a few years ago ended up at around 22gb in Uncompressed HD QuickTime (4k RED Source). If you extrapolate that out, you're looking at 80gb+ per hour.

Most torrents are what - maybe 700mb for a 2 hour movie? Now, some compressors are better than others but the reality is that there's no way you're going to get that large a file that small without major quality loss. It'll look fine on a small screen, but put it in something big and it will look awful.

A large part of the reason DSLRs look a lot worse than other cameras that also record in HD is due in part to the average colour sub sampling and high amount of compression.

To make matters worse, most illegal versions are ripped from te Blu-Ray or DVD - so you're taking a movie which already has a decent amount of compression on it and compressing it even more to get it to a smaller file size.

A Blu-Ray holds around 50GB, so whilst the movies are always compressed, and generally have colour information thrown away, it's nowhere near as much as to get it down to a <1gn downloadable file.

In terms of displays, you should be able to view HD clips on any computer fast enough to handle it. Whether or not you're actually seeing it in HD really depends on the monitor itself - and simply having a 1920x1080 screen does not necessarily mean it's any better than any other screen.

A $6,000 HD production monitor will look 100x better than the $400 HDTV you picked up at a consumer electronics shop
 
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jax_rox said:
To give you an idea, a 15 minute short I shot a few years ago ended up at around 22gb in Uncompressed HD QuickTime (4k RED Source). If you extrapolate that out, you're looking at 80gb+ per hour.

Most torrents are what - maybe 700mb for a 2 hour movie? Now, some compressors are better than others but the reality is that there's no way you're going to get that large a file that small without major quality loss. It'll look fine on a small screen, but put it in something big and it will look awful.

A large part of the reason DSLRs look a lot worse than other cameras that also record in HD is due in part to the average colour sub sampling and high amount of compression.

To make matters worse, most illegal versions are ripped from te Blu-Ray or DVD - so you're taking a movie which already has a decent amount of compression on it and compressing it even more to get it to a smaller file size.

A Blu-Ray holds around 50GB, so whilst the movies are always compressed, and generally have colour information thrown away, it's nowhere near as much as to get it down to a <1gn downloadable file.

In terms of displays, you should be able to view HD clips on any computer fast enough to handle it. Whether or not you're actually seeing it in HD really depends on the monitor itself - and simply having a 1920x1080 screen does not necessarily mean it's any better than any other screen.

A $6,000 HD production monitor will look 100x better than the $400 HDTV you picked up at a consumer electronics shop
Click to expand...

Thanks Man!

you have just answered all my questions and it is all clear to me now.
 
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