Hi guys,
here's a big screenshot comparison for you:
http://home.arcor.de/madshi/serenity.html
Doing this has consumed many many many hours. I've compared 26 frames of the movie "Serenity" between:
- NTSC DVD
- PAL DVD
- USA broadcast
- SkyHD broadcast
- PremiereHD broadcast
- HD-DVD
The comparison can be controlled by keyboard. Press the keys "a" to "z" to choose a specific frame. Press the keys "1" to "6" to choose a specific format. Of course you can also use the mouse, if you prefer that. The comparison is realized by JavaScript, so your browser must have JavaScript enabled, otherwise the comparison website won't work.
Software configuration:
(1) DVDs were decoded by ffdShow, deinterlaced by the "Decomb" AviSynth Plugin and scaled to 1080p by ffdShow's Lanczos scaling (default settings). I've not applied any noise reduction or sharpening because I haven't found any "optimal" settings for that. After reading a lot of threads about sharpening (e.g. on Doom9) I found that everybody seems to prefer different settings. So I simply didn't do any sharpening.
(2) USA broadcasting was decoded and deinterlaced by DScaler with IVTC mod.
(3) The h264 broadcasts were decoded by CoreAVC and not deinterlaced at all (not necessary due to correct flags).
(4) The HD-DVD was decoded by Microsoft's own VC-1 decoder. Deinterlacing isn't necessary here, of course, cause HD-DVDs are encoded progressively, anyway. Btw, I've compared the European and US Serenity HD-DVDs and they are bit identical, as far as I can say.
Two of the broadcasts (USA + PremiereHD) were not OAR but for the biggest part 80% cropped/OpenMatte. I've resized these with Gimp Bicubic, so we can fully compare them to the other sources.
I'm looking forward to your opinions! Here's mine:
(1) The DVDs are (unsurprisingly) very soft und low resolution in comparison to any HD source. Generally the PAL DVD has (again unsurprisingly) a bit of a resolution advantage over the NTSC DVD (most frames, e.g. "A", "I", "J", "Z"), but it also sometimes has some more compression artifacts (frame "H"), probably due to the lower bitrate.
(2) The USA broadcasting has ugly artifacts in many scenes with heavy motion (frame "C") or lots of detail (frame "J") and it's generally somewhat softer and has less detail than the other HD sources (frame "R"). Also grain seems to be artificially reduced in many frames (frame "V").
(3) The SkyHD broadcasting has a much too strong contrast. This adds a bit of pop in some scenes (frame "E"). But in many other scenes dark image areas and any shadow details are totally lost (frames "B", "M", "O"). Grain is much too visible (frame "G") and looks very unnatural. In scenes with strong motion (frame "Y") and especially in scenes with lots of grain (frames "T", "U") there are extremely ugly artifacts. Overall I have to say that this is by far the worst SkyHD broadcast I've ever seen. Usually SkyHD does a lot better than this.
(4) The PremiereHD broadcasting generally has a quite good quality. In some frames it's hard to say whether PremiereHD or HD-DVD is better (frames "L", "O"). But overall HD-DVD has a little bit more detail and pop. E.g. HD-DVD shows more stars in space scenes and the stars are brighter and sharper (frame "D"). The biggest disadvantage of the PremiereHD broadcast is that it's 80% cropped/OpenMatte most of the time. That means: quite a bit of image content was cut left and right to get rid of the black bars (almost all frames, e.g. "D"). There are some artifacts in some scenes (frames "C", "J", "X", "Y"), but much less so than the other broadcasts. Even HD-DVD shows some artifacts now and then (frames "A", "Y"), but it's hard to say whether these artifacts were caused by VC-1 or whether they already existed in the original master.
I should add that I've intentionally chosen frames which artifacted in one or more of the sources. Often I've chosen the first frame of a new scene (that makes life a bit harder for the compression, cause there's a lot of change in such frames compared to the previous frames) or frames with lots of motion in them. So don't fret, most of the time all sources show less artifacts than demonstrated in these chosen frames.
