Blu-ray picture quality

54kroc

While watching Blu-ray movies I find the picture during the movie to be very grainy but I get a great picture from the video in the disc menu,BBC HD and from HD video from the pc.
I guess I have some settings wrong as I don't have much experience with Blu-ray so any tips would be appreciated.

Calibos

If the Bluray Menu itself and all the other sources looks fine then its more than likely fake grain added to the picture by the director for artistic effect. This drives me mad. You don't see grain digitially added to menus or documentaries or sport or indeed for a lot of movies, but some directors like the slightly grainy celluloid look from the days(up till 10 years ago) when they used actual film cameras and not Digital HD cameras. They prefer the celluloid look because they are stuck in the past or they feel the grainy celluloid look suits certain films. I didn't buy High Def so I could look at pristine sharply rendered....fake film grain .

That said, there are some that say that HD can make stuff look like Video. What I mean is this. You know the way Coronation Street has a different 'look' to a feature film shown on the same TV. This is because the movie was filmed with 35mm film back in the day and Coro was filmed with 16mm film or video cameras. A kind of analogy that I witnessed the other day was when I was in DID and happened to be looking at the Philips 21:9 ratio plasma showing spiderman3. I don't know whether it was the encoding on the Bluray disc or the picture processing in the TV, but it was very off putting that SPiderman looked like a scene in Coronation Street and not a blockbuster movie if you catch my drift. The 'Look' was wrong and disconcerting. This is a danger with High Def. That it can look more like Coro than a feature film in terms of 'Look'.

So its actually probably a good idea for the movie director/editor to fiddle with the picture to give it a more 'Film' type look but sometimes they go way over the top with whatever processing they do to make it more 'Film Like'.

Idleater

cork45 wrote: »

While watching Blu-ray movies I find the picture during the movie to be very grainy but I get a great picture from the video in the disc menu,BBC HD and from HD video from the pc.
I guess I have some settings wrong as I don't have much experience with Blu-ray so any tips would be appreciated.

Sometimes the grainy picture is intended - ie it is to replicate the 24fps film reel "as the directors intended", and sometimes you might just have the wrong settings on your TV

I suggest everyone to borrow a Calibration disc to ensure that they set the settings correctly for their own viewing room(s).

I have two settings done for mine one for "daylight" and one for "indoor" lighting. Generally all the "features" used to sell tvs (100hz, 10million:1 contrast, blah motion sensing blah) are useless for BR and HD content and it is best to switch as much processing off.

They have uses for improving SD content, and generally people switch them or leave them "on" because either the bigger the number the better, or because "I paid for this feature so I'd better use it".

rednik

Films contain grain but it can be removed by process like DNR. Too much dnr in a movie then causes a loss of image quality and depth of field. I prefer to see a movie as it was meant to be seen and as it was shown originally.

54kroc

Thanks for taking the time to reply guys, I went out and picked up a copy of Casino Royale and it was perfect so I guess it was fake gain or something.

rednik

Just out of interest what movies gave you the problem ?

54kroc

rednik wrote: »

Just out of interest what movies gave you the problem ?

Public Enemies and Adulthood.

Rsaeire

cork45 wrote: »

Public Enemies and Adulthood.

I recommend you try one of the CGI movies, e.g. Cars, WALL-E, Up etc, since these movies were created digitally and contain no grain.

54kroc

Cheers Rsaeire will do.

rednik

cork45 wrote: »

Public Enemies and Adulthood.

I have Public Enemies and thought the picture was quite good, if you don't already have it try Zulu with Michael Caine and for a film of its age the picture quality is stunning. It was filmed in 70mm.