HEROES Season 1 HD-DVD (OT rant)

[Jeff Kilgroe]

OK,

I kinda got into Heroes during its first season and I've been looking forward to season 2 later this month. I didn't get to see all the episodes last season, so I picked up the HD-DVD set...

All I have to say is that I'm seriously disappointed with the transfer. In fact, I'm totally appalled that they would release something that looks this bad. :angry03:

Terrible mosquito noise everywhere -- far worse than the HD broadcasts of the show. Add to that a hellacious amount of edge enhancement. WTF??? It looks like someone took the over-compressed HD broadcast versions of the show (1280x1080 no doubt) and re-compressed for HD-DVD with additional edge enhancement and a low bit-rate that fails to even preserve the original broadcast quality.

I'm only half-way through watching the first episode and I can't believe the amount of noise in the shadows, the white sparkles, the glaringly over-enhaced edges and contrast. It's a total travesty... I'm seriously tempted to return the HD-DVD set and just buy the DVD version. It probably will have its own share of issues, but at least I'd save the $20 difference.

So sad, I had high hopes for this DVD set. :waaa:

[Anders Holck]

Great, you just ruined my day as mine's on it's way from Amazon.
Well, there is always ebay....

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I'll post a follow-up tomorrow. I'm going to go watch another episode or two. I also find it curious that this HD-DVD set has been available for about a week now and I have yet to see a review of it anywhere in the typical online channels. I think NBC and Universal know that the transfer is crap and they didn't release any reviewer's copies -- and definitely none before actual release day.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I have to retract my statement about there not being any reviews out there... It seems there are now, but were none the other day when I looked for them.

I'm totally confused though. I have yet to see a review that actually analyzes the picture quality. So far, the available reviews give the release a lot of praise and talk about how good it looks. I seriously wonder if the reviewers even put the discs in their players and watched, or they must have did it from a player like the XBOX 360 with HD-DVD add-on to a 32" 720p LCD, where all HD-DVDs (good or bad) will have that same soft and muddy appearance. I'm watching on a 71" 1080p DLP fed by a Toshiba HD-A1.. The picture quality just plain sucks on this release.

I know I'm ranting and raving, but I'm actually mad over this. There is no reason a 1080p VC-1 encode should look this bad. I could have blindly encoded my own copies of the couple episodes stored on my DVR via its component output. And using default settings in compressor for an H.264 HD-DVD would have given me better results than this.

[Anders Holck]

I'll give you a report when I receive mine.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

A report after watching some more...

I'm still grumpy, but a bit confused. Much of the video, better than half of it actually looks very good (aside from some overzealous edge sharpening). The mosquito noise comes and goes, usually appearing in shadows. Some shots the noise is so bad that it has consistent pattern to it, sometimes the noise will have a strobing effect.

I still have two episodes of Heroes saved on my HD DVR, I will try to do a comparison between them and the same episodes on HD-DVD over the next few days.

[Kholi Hicks]

"Ignorance is Bliss".

Imagine how many people can't see what you see and are enjoying it. =P

I was about to go and buy the HD-DVD Heroes as well, after seeing an ad in the theater... looks like it's DVD for me.

[Craig W. Bickerstaff]

Just buy the HD DVD the DVD probably looks far worse

[Jason Murphy]

The reviewer at DVDBeaver mentions mosquito noise; it's a short review, and much less in depth than some of their other reviews, but they do point it out as being a problem...

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews32/heroes_season1_hd.htm

[Jeff Kilgroe]

"Ignorance is Bliss".

Imagine how many people can't see what you see and are enjoying it. =P


"Why is the picture so bad?" and... "What are all those speckles?"

-- My wife.

[Hrvoje Simic]

Soo...what you're saying (and correct me if I'm wrong) is that you are not really satisfied with the picture quality of your recent aquisition :whistling:

[Zack Birlew]

Actually, the DVD doesn't look that bad. No edge sharpening from what I can tell and I haven't noticed that much noise, probably due to the lower resolution. I'm watching it up-converted on a 65" SXRD Sony 1080P television. I'd love to have the HD quality of the broadcast versions but I'm not dissapointed with the DVD in the least.

Too bad to hear that the HD-DVD is blah. Just checking though, have you gone through and checked your TV's settings to see if the sharpness isn't cranked up all the way or anything like that?

[Anders Holck]

Just saw Hot Fuzz yesterday. Great Flick, and a lovely Transfer: http://david2k.orcon.net.nz/hddvd/Hot%20Fuzz/AnyC01563.jpg

No EE...

[Kholi Hicks]

"Why is the picture so bad?" and... "What are all those speckles?"

-- My wife.

lol. That must suck. Most of the people I know can't see what I see, and they also have no idea what noise is to begin with or what a RED ONE is.

Thanks for the SD DVD report, Felis.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Yeah, Jack, my TV is set fine... It's calibrated to ISF standards. It's a Samsung HLS7178W 71" DLP. Awesome TV. Most HD-DVD discs look stunning on it. I own about a dozen HD-DVD titles and plan to replace this Toshiba HD-A1 with the Samsung dual-format HD-DVD/BluRay player in the next month or so if the reviews are positive once its released.

FWIW, I've watched the first two discs and it's fairly easy to ignore most of the image problems when you're into the story. Sometimes there's things that jump out at me though and I just think "I have clients who would fire me if I delivered video that looked like that.".

[Anders Holck]

Ouch, haven't recieved my box set from Amazon yet, but I just saw some framegrabs from the PowerDVD:
http://david2k.orcon.net.nz/hddvd/Heroes/AnyC02551.jpg
http://david2k.orcon.net.nz/hddvd/Heroes/AnyC02627.jpg
http://david2k.orcon.net.nz/hddvd/Heroes/AnyC02610.jpg

Horrible post processing.....

[Craig W. Bickerstaff]

Those first 2 look just fine it's just the 3rd one that looks suspect due to the compositing job but for a TV show with such epic special effects this is actually pretty good work.

[Craig W. Bickerstaff]

What exactly is mosquito noise anyways, Maybe someone can put a box around some in photoshop.

[jbeale]

I see some edge enhancement effects in those stills, although I've seen worse :-/. The first shot of Hiro looking up, looks like there was some skin-tone detail reduction?

[Anders Holck]

I don't know:
1'st pic: excessive grain removal.
2'nd pic: massive edge enhancement, massive grain/Musquito noise.

Inconsistent allright :-(

[Tom Lowe]

Hmmm.... I saw this on bit torrents the other day and was thinking of DLing it, but it's like 34GBs... which would take a helluva long time.

Is this a good show? I've never seen even a minute of it. One of the only shows on TV I do enjoy, though, is Smallville. Is it kind of similar to that?

[PaulClements]

Hmmm.... I saw this on bit torrents the other day and was thinking of DLing it, but it's like 34GBs... which would take a helluva long time.

Is this a good show? I've never seen even a minute of it. One of the only shows on TV I do enjoy, though, is Smallville. Is it kind of similar to that?

Tom,

I found Heroes a bit dull to be honest. Had some good ideas, probably worth a watch but it just seemed like it didn't quite meet it's potential personally. Worth a watch.

Paul

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I've watched all the HD-DVD episodes and have to say that the image quality vastly improved after the first disc and a bit more after the second disc. All looking pretty good -- a bit better than their broadcast versions, by the time I got to the end. Obviously the problems with the encoding on the first few episodes was noticed, so some effort was made to fix the issues with subsequent encodings.. Too bad they didn't go back and fix the first ones.

That said, the stills that Anders posted are a good representation for most of the show. Excessive edge enhancement, grain removal and smoothing -- overall it's some pretty poor post processing and compression work. I don't have a way to take screen grabs of an HD-DVD, or I would to show the real problems. I have yet to see anyone post grabs of real problematic segments of the show or a review that honestly critiques the image quality and problems shown in some of the episodes. OTOH, I haven't been looking for the reviews now in the past week or so, so they may be out there now.

Paul, I thought the same thing about Heroes the first couple times I saw it. But I actually don't watch much TV and find most of it to be pretty dull. However, I got hooked on the show after watching some of the various story lines unfold. I didn't care for two aspects of the ending of season 1, but I suppose we'll see how it all plays out in the new episodes.

[CVB]

Save the resolution, save the world.

[Cail Young]

Save the resolution, save the world.

Save the data, save the shoot. I really should put that on our DMT machine...

[PaulClements]

Paul, I thought the same thing about Heroes the first couple times I saw it. But I actually don't watch much TV and find most of it to be pretty dull. However, I got hooked on the show after watching some of the various story lines unfold. I didn't care for two aspects of the ending of season 1, but I suppose we'll see how it all plays out in the new episodes.

Hi Jeff,

It just didn't seem to have the gravity I expected it would by the end of the first series. I think one of the biggest problems for me though isn't so much with Heroes. It's this DVD sales issue. The success of TV series is meaning that the stories are being dragged out slowly in order to make huge profits from the DVD sales. As such the stories are suffering in my mind.

Lost is probably the best example. I really got into it but after watching for about 15 episodes and not being given any answers for something that happened months ago I soon began to tire of it. I've completely given up watching it now because I know it'll be a long long time before it reaches any kind of conclusion; and that'll probably be a huge let down!!!

If these things were a single series ala Band of Brothers they would have a great deal more impact as far as I'm concerned.

Paul

[Jeff Kilgroe]

It just didn't seem to have the gravity I expected it would by the end of the first series. I think one of the biggest problems for me though isn't so much with Heroes. It's this DVD sales issue. The success of TV series is meaning that the stories are being dragged out slowly in order to make huge profits from the DVD sales. As such the stories are suffering in my mind.

I do agree with you there, Paul... But DVD sales are only one factor, more of an end goal these days. But those sales need to build on a successful series that can run multiple seasons and attract strong viewership numbers and lots of advertising / sponsor revenues.

I often felt that with Heroes (and with most other such programs), the stories and sub-plots often drag along more than they should. With Heroes, I get the impression that the writers and/or network were unsure of themselves and the show, often not having complete confidence in the story's direction. The show has gathered an audience and I have high hopes for season 2. I just hope they deliver and NBC doesn't pull up lame... If season 2 is more of watching Peter plod along without a clue (not realizing that he's possibly the most powerful man on earth), not developing his abilities... And more stressing over Sylar and following him around or avoiding him... Then I will say that the writers and/or NBC are seriously lacking vision. But I'll reserve judgement until we see where it's going.