"Into the Blu: A Visit with Sony Pictures Home Entertainment"

RobertR1

Pro
Legend
http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/feature_visitwithsony.html

A solid 10 for making stuff up, putting down consumers, being completely arrogant and deflecting to the maximum. I'll never be an Exec without these qualities :(

PLEASE do no start a flame war from this. This is purely for entertainment and for those who follow the next gen DVD format closely, this is about as good as it gets!

I won't even take the time to dissect his garbage. I'd need atleast an hour.....
 
Can you tell me what initially made Sony choose MPEG-2 over VC-1 and AVC/MPEG-4? What was the criteria the studio used to base its decision?

DE: First thing, is, what is the target use for the codec? Blu-ray is supposed to be the all-singing, all-dancing, no compromises picture representing the way the film was originally intended to look. Broadcast, for example, has certain constraints. Satellite and over the air transmissions -- they are bandwidth-limited. So it is a given that they are going to have encoding artifacts, and that is just tolerated. But when we encode our titles, our goal is, "We want as few artifacts as possible. We want the picture to be as sharp as possible. And we want the transfer to be as true to the master as possible."

Second, we select a codec that can deliver an accurate representation of the master.

The third issue is production efficiency. To encode in AVC/MPEG-4 or VC-1 – can take two weeks for a single title, because they are highly asymmetrical encoding process. That is not so good for us. Because if you find a mistake, you may have to go back and it may take you another week to re-encode it. And you want to avoid that. So obviously, the encoding tools have to be solid.

Lastly, how ubiquitous is the technology? MPEG-2 has been around for years and has been very well refined. So we know that there are tools that we can use to edit, to software encode, hardware encode -- whatever we want to do.



Ah, MPEG-2 is better because it's "well-refined".
 
Actually what he said (about this) is basically right. MPEG-2 encoders are more mature. If you have enough bandwidth to burn (as in case of BD-50), it can produce very good results. The same can be said for H.264 vs VC-1, where VC-1 tool sets are currently more mature than H.264. Of course, eventually VC-1 and H.264 tools will be as mature as MPEG-2 tools, and the computers will be fast enough to the extent that you just won't care about the encoding time differences anymore. At that time, everyone will be using H.264 or VC-1.
 
So, he's basically saying that Sony (the biggest promoters of Cell) didn't have enough processing power to encode using any codec more advanced than MPEG-2! :p

Surely they've had plenty of time to work on suitable encoders for VC-1/h.264 now? The h.264 specs have been defined for yonks haven't they?
 
Surely they've had plenty of time to work on suitable encoders for VC-1/h.264 now? The h.264 specs have been defined for yonks haven't they?

AVC/H.264 has been in the MPEG-4 spec since early 2003.

OP: Thanks for the link - pure dark comedy at its finest.
 
Actually what he said (about this) is basically right. MPEG-2 encoders are more mature. If you have enough bandwidth to burn (as in case of BD-50), it can produce very good results. The same can be said for H.264 vs VC-1, where VC-1 tool sets are currently more mature than H.264. Of course, eventually VC-1 and H.264 tools will be as mature as MPEG-2 tools, and the computers will be fast enough to the extent that you just won't care about the encoding time differences anymore. At that time, everyone will be using H.264 or VC-1.

And it's not just the encoders, but the whole authoring toolset.

I agree that if you have enough bandwidth, MPEG2 can be more than good enough. In the end, it means that you can get good quality movies for less. I saw a review of one movie that proved the point, by being one of the best quality movies available at the time of release (was it Click?)

Anyway, BD supports all three, so it just means one more option. And if MPEG2 appears to be the optimal choice for a certain situation, then that extra choice is worth it.
 
Well i was expecting a much worse interview than you introduced it as, Robert...

In the end, after you filter all the PR talk, it does come down to this:

The third issue is production efficiency. To encode in AVC/MPEG-4 or VC-1 – can take two weeks for a single title, because they are highly asymmetrical encoding process. That is not so good for us. Because if you find a mistake, you may have to go back and it may take you another week to re-encode it. And you want to avoid that. So obviously, the encoding tools have to be solid.

He said it's the "third issue", but in my opinion it's the main issue. Sony already have invested a LOT of money in converting masters to HD MPEG2 for thousands of movies encoded, and re-converting all of those to another format would take yet more investment and time.

Obviously he will try to spin it to make people think that they choose MPEG2 "because it's best for consumers". That's what PR is.
 
Since the OP expresses the laudable desire to avoid a flame war, I've changed the thread subject to support that goal. Ahem.
 
And it's not just the encoders, but the whole authoring toolset.

Yes. Encoders wise, both H.264 and VC-1 have quite good encoders out there. The VC-1 encoder from Microsoft is quite mature. However, although they already provided the movie producers a separate tool set for encoding (which includes many important features such as segment re-encoding), a professional oriented encoder is just released as a beta. In the case of H.264, the situation is even worse.

On the other hand, you can buy very good MPEG-2 encoders with all these professional features at a reasonable price, and the speed is good. With current dual-core computers, I think it's possible to encoder 1080i MPEG-2 video in real-time. However, H.264/VC-1 is ten times as slow or slower. This is bad especially considering professional authoring. For example, you may want to re-encode a segment because you think the quality is not good enough. In MPEG-2, a segment is about 0.5 second, and re-encoding requires maybe 1 second or less time. So you can adjust and see the result in real-time. You can't do this with H.264/VC-1 yet. Of course, if Sony starts selling some CELL based encoding workstation it may be possible, but IIRC there's still no such product.
 
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