Who likes SD?

[TheMonk]

I find sometimes watching films in HD (don't have 4K) I end up obsessing over plastic surgery scars or freckles or wrinkles or noticing irrelevant details up the back that distract me.
I honestly think a lot of the time I prefer SD. Enough detail to enjoy the film with a slight cloudiness that just gives films a certain touch of mystery for me.
Am I alone here?

[madhair60]

I feel that there are films/TV that lose something when they're pristine HD/4K, sort of like stretching 4:3 to 16:9 or whatever. Depends on the transfer and on the film.

[Chedney Honks]

My wife loves it, she said it's 'how films look' when I scolded her for buying some DVDs last week. While she's technically wrong, I understand what she's saying. She's a big movie fan and has hundreds of DVDs. Cogito ipso sum, that's 'how films look'. I expect this will become a bigger thing in the coming years, not as a contrarianism, but because of the subconscious associative comfort of standard definition.

I think the stuff is absolutely disgusting.

[JesusAndYourBush]

I don't give a toss about 4K, my screen isn't huge. Maybe if I was watching on a 60 inch screen/home cinema jobbie I'd care, but I'm not, so I don't.

If anything, it's a pain. As my dowload speed keeps increasing it makes it quicker to download video, but then they keep encoding higher quality so it makes it seem like I'm not benefiting from higher speeds. 60 f/s can fuck off as well.

[Magnum Valentino]

Nostalgically liking things in SD because "it's the way things used to look" is one I've heard before and doesn't hold up. You weren't watching films in standard definition in the cinema.

It's a limitation imposed by technology and we got used to it like good little boys and girls. Give me detail, give me darks, give me colour. Ironic appreciation of SD, which is due in the future as mentioned above, is going to do my fucking head in when the cunts get hold of it.

[ImmaculateClump]

There's definitely something in that.

I remember watching "in a glass cage" and it was some dogshit 360p rip encoded by an oaf.
Excellent film, very dreamlike, poetic and beautiful, in spite of the subject matter. Sitting there with the lights off late at night, during some of the dark bits, there were lots of artefacting and strange abstract shapes and colour shift and stuff.

It all seemed to work in it's favour. Like you say, I'm not sure how I'd feel seeing a pristine, HD version, it'd be a different experience entirely.

There are modern releases where they actively try to smudge out the film grain and stuff, aren't there?
You have to be careful you don't airbrush the soul out of things, you can definitely go too far.

There's a perfect line there, but it's gonna be different for every film and even every individual viewer.

[El Unicornio, mang]

I've mentioned before that I have a friend who watches VHS on her big screen TV, for nostalgia purposes. I was round there once and we watched Babe. At first it was unbearable, but gradually I got used to it. It just looks bad when you're used to watching everything in HD.

I've also noticed that (and this is just an observation, might not be generally true) my female friends/Mum watch things in SD all the time and don't seem to care if they're in HD or not, or notice the difference. I think men are more anal about that kind of thing.

[greenman]

Nostalgically liking things in SD because "it's the way things used to look" is one I've heard before and doesn't hold up. You weren't watching films in standard definition in the cinema.

It's a limitation imposed by technology and we got used to it like good little boys and girls. Give me detail, give me darks, give me colour. Ironic appreciation of SD, which is due in the future as mentioned above, is going to do my fucking head in when the cunts get hold of it.

For a lot of films you could argue I spose peoples expereince of them was on TV, VHS or DVD rather than the cinema but yeah generally I think those formats actually tended to remove character from films rather than add it.

One of the big attractions of UHD/HD releases these days for me tends to be that a lot more of them actually look like film, not the slick look of the DVD era were all grain was scrubbed out.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I don't give a toss about 4K, my screen isn't huge. Maybe if I was watching on a 60 inch screen/home cinema jobbie I'd care, but I'm not, so I don't.

If anything, it's a pain. As my dowload speed keeps increasing it makes it quicker to download video, but then they keep encoding higher quality so it makes it seem like I'm not benefiting from higher speeds. 60 f/s can fuck off as well.

x265 really seems to get the sizes down, I had a decent rip of something that was 1.5gb and running it through ffmpeg to convert to x264 with -crf 18 which is supposed to give enough headroom that the conversion isn't noticable and it ended up around 5gb. It also seems to not suffer with colour banding as well. Of course not every media player has hardware decoders for it (which is why I did the conversion after downloading in the first place).

[El Unicornio, mang]

Yeah x265 is really good, I usually aim for 4GB as a sweet spot of quality & not too big size, but will go as low as 2GB for a film.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Yeah I tend to vary depending on what the film is.

YIFY x264 rips look a bit shit which is fair enough as they are prioritizing size and with that in mind do seem to do a decent job even if they are (imo) compromising quality a bit too much, based on the file size you'd assume them to look much worse than they do.

Although blocking/missing useful details is rarely a problem I think not enough bandwidth usually results in a half-arsed dnr effect that smooths out all the grain, I like grain but it doesn't bother me too much if it isn't there and plenty of streaming services seem to compress things heavily enough to have a similar effect, with Netflix and Amazon being the main exception.

[Magnum Valentino]

I also feel like there's nothing wrong with watching what you like and don't take what I said up above as a personal attack or anything, I'm more just giving off about the inevitable wave of people jumping on the retro bandwagon as is always the case.

I seem to have no problem with watching stuff in SD if that's how it was originally broadcast, and particularly if the HD versions have been badly mangled like Curb Your Enthusiasm and Buffy. Getting to see The Twilight Zone in HD for the first time was nearly a religious experience though, so I don't know what I actually feel other than I definitely hate the "aahhhhh, but standard def is GOOD" cunts that don't properly exist yet. They exist, but they're not yet the pocket of shite they will come to be.

[Sebastian Cobb]

How have they mangled Curb? I seem to remember the SD sources looked a bit shit at the time and were 4:3 and fairly close up so wouldn't suit cropping (unless they kept a safe area), was it even shot on film?

[Magnum Valentino]

The HD version is just really badly upscaled, it looks strung out, full of bad artifacts. It looks like that Vivid setting that TVs have now, only you can't turn it off

[greenman]

Ironically I think actually modern digital scales down to SD better than film, I do have quite a lot of modern arthouse drama stuff on DVD, a lot of which has never come out any other way and most of it looks pretty decent.

Probably I spose because digital will tend to have higher sharpness with better defined edges were as with film the detail and the grain start to merge.

[Replies From View]

give me colour.

Specifically teal and orange please.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I can understand people getting nostalgic about formats like VHS and film, which have distinctive looks to them, but not so much Standard Definition in itself. SD stuff looks perfectly fine on my fairly big telly, but there's nothing about it to make me feel all wistful.

Surely, with 4K the big new waste of money thing, 1080p should now be labelled standard definition, leaving 576i substandard (and 480i a shrivelled N_uTS_aC_k).

[Chedney Honks]

Things were better when I was younger and they're worsening now I'm older.

[badaids]

Who doesn't love the Sicherheits Dienst?

[Glebe]

I'm fine watching old TV on YouTube and that in funky, lo-fi quality, but I'm all for HD. Watched The Matrix and half of The Matrix Reloaded on Netflix last night, never had 'em on Blu-ray so it was nice to watch them in 1080p.

[Replies From View]

half of The Matrix Reloaded on Netflix last night

Are the murky brown backgrounds and dreary grey Doctor Octopus things really crisp in HD?

[Glebe]

Are the murky brown backgrounds and dreary grey Doctor Octopus things really crisp in HD?

It's almost alive! Experience it... in HD!

[Noodle Lizard]

I feel that there are films/TV that lose something when they're pristine HD/4K[...]. Depends on the transfer and on the film.

This, pretty much. I like an authentic graininess which sometimes gets smoothed out in the transfer, but I also hate any kind of digital artifacts or banding you sometimes get with lower-res copies (Netflix is especially bad for this). I think standard Blu-Rays tend to strike a happy medium in most cases.

[PlanktonSideburns]

There's definitely something in that.

I remember watching "in a glass cage" and it was some dogshit 360p rip encoded by an oaf.
Excellent film, very dreamlike, poetic and beautiful, in spite of the subject matter. Sitting there with the lights off late at night, during some of the dark bits, there were lots of artefacting and strange abstract shapes and colour shift and stuff.

It all seemed to work in it's favour. Like you say, I'm not sure how I'd feel seeing a pristine, HD version, it'd be a different experience entirely.

There are modern releases where they actively try to smudge out the film grain and stuff, aren't there?
You have to be careful you don't airbrush the soul out of things, you can definitely go too far.

There's a perfect line there, but it's gonna be different for every film and even every individual viewer.

Incredible turn of phrase

[servese43]

I mostly watch DVDs, and those 3gb "1080p" rarbg rips that are roughly equivalent to DVD quality (Australian internet). So to me SD just looks "normal". When I do occasionally watch proper HD content, I'm really blown away by how sharp and detailed it is. I basically only download proper HD stuff if I think it's a very good or visually exciting film that's worth the extra disk space and download time.

[studpuppet]

I went rushing out to buy The Prisoner when it came out on Blu-Ray, thinking it would be amazing as it was all shot on film, but forgetting to factor in how shonky some of the sets would suddenly appear. No one's fault - the sets had been designed to look great on 405-line TV, but a bit distracting when all the blemishes were brought into sharp relief.

[greenman]

This, pretty much. I like an authentic graininess which sometimes gets smoothed out in the transfer, but I also hate any kind of digital artifacts or banding you sometimes get with lower-res copies (Netflix is especially bad for this). I think standard Blu-Rays tend to strike a happy medium in most cases.

I mean if your looking for that kind of transfer then modern UHD/HD releases are actually much more likely to give it to you than the DVD/SD era was, VHS didnt have the resolution to show much grain even if it wanted to and DVD's and earlier BR's very often removed it and indeed tried to make the films look as close to modern trends as possible colour wise, loads of really bland looking blue/purple washed tranfers from the late 90's.

UHD and Boutique lables though tend to aim much more at the hardcore market which wants more film like transfers and indeed a lot of the appeal of UHD is that it gives you more ability to do that. If your looking to transfer from an analog medium to a digital one then having the maximum quality clearly helps.

I can see the point with TV shows I spose were they were never intended to be shown on film prints which were just a part of the production process so perhaps the production design was never intended to stand up to HD but everything shown at the cinema would have been intended to stand up to at the very least HD.

[Replies From View]

I mean if your looking for that kind of transfer then modern UHD/HD releases are actually much more likely to give it to you than the DVD/SD era was, VHS didnt have the resolution to show much grain even if it wanted to and DVD's and earlier BR's very often removed it and indeed tried to make the films look as close to modern trends as possible colour wise, loads of really bland looking blue/purple washed tranfers from the late 90's.

_{^{everything is 'upgraded' to teal and orange now}}

[Sebastian Cobb]

looks like we've moved past teal and orange and everything's unfeasibly blue/red now

[Noodle Lizard]

I mean if your looking for that kind of transfer then modern UHD/HD releases are actually much more likely to give it to you than the DVD/SD era was, VHS didnt have the resolution to show much grain even if it wanted to and DVD's and earlier BR's very often removed it and indeed tried to make the films look as close to modern trends as possible colour wise, loads of really bland looking blue/purple washed tranfers from the late 90's.

UHD and Boutique lables though tend to aim much more at the hardcore market which wants more film like transfers and indeed a lot of the appeal of UHD is that it gives you more ability to do that. If your looking to transfer from an analog medium to a digital one then having the maximum quality clearly helps.

I can see the point with TV shows I spose were they were never intended to be shown on film prints which were just a part of the production process so perhaps the production design was never intended to stand up to HD but everything shown at the cinema would have been intended to stand up to at the very least HD.

You're probably right. I'll be honest, I rarely watch anything on physical media anymore, and I think modern TVs have so much of their own baked-in "picture correction" that it's quite hard to get a good gauge on anything for what it actually is without some fiddling. I just know that some of the regular Criterion or otherwise "curated" Blu-Rays I own look a lot warmer than some of the UHD 4K things I've come across[nb]talking about transfers of older movies here, with current ones you may as well just be given a copy of the DCP[/nb], but there's clearly no hard-and-fast rule.