Dislike of HFR film/HD TV corresponds to vinyl preference??

[timcoalman]

Obviously the tube TV in living room from 1996 contributes - I have not grown accustomed to digital HD images as new sets have become prevalent. Watching The Hobbit in HFR was horrid, constantly denying the fantasy world with a look of the later Twilight Zone episodes that were recorded on VHS to save money, and now stand out whenever marathons are run on television stations for the New Year or such.

Hyper-clarity, and the lack of motion blur tells the brain everything is important, everything a point of focus, instead of a focal point, and the peripheral sights naturally receding in slight blur. Is this visual equivalent of of vinyl "warmth"? I completely understand the motion blur and soft edges were defects/artifacts in film compared to "reality" - but seeing/hearing everything would not seem to re-present reality but give us a different type of reality - hyper-reality.

This is a ramble... but curious the parallel ramblings of Tape Op members. Does the grit, room sound, reverb, bleed, errant noises of your tracking space have value to you? "Perfect sound, forever" - was that the goal?

A few nights later saw The Hobbit again, no HFR and felt engaged by the story, even though I traditionally don't see movies a second time; although my essential CDs have been heard hundreds of times of the years. (especially Swans: Soundtracks for the Blind).

[kslight]

I don't think that the theatre I went to showed The Hobbit at 48fps, but I did end up seeing it in 3D, and I know what you are talking about with HDTV picture in general. For one I really don't like 3D movies, I haven't seen many that this feature actually added something. More often than not it is a distraction, I hate the forced depth perception, makes everything look out of focus to me. This may in part because I have really good uncorrected eyesight, that I am used to seeing everything in focus and for someone to be forcing perception on me is unsettling.

I am also one of those few who still do not own an HDTV, but when I see them with the really "fast" feeling broadcasts, I also don't care for it. I'm not sure if this is to do with the natural frame rate, or what I would actually be seeing from my DVDs if I wasn't watching them on an old TV...the natural blur of the CRT masking that effect.

[Gregg Juke]

Yes, maybe we're all just a bunch of luddites at heart here. There are things that I like about digital TV, but a bunch that I don't (and don't get me started on 3D).

Picture quality is awesome, but I agree, sometimes "too awesome." Also, I like old b&w movies, and when I watch them now converted to digi/HD, I see a lot of wierd pixelated artifact-y elements in the dark space where appropriate gradiated shading used to be; it's very distracting.

Also-- What's the deal with "aspect ratio abuse?" I still have a CRT TV, but even when I'm watching at a flat screen-endowed friend's house, or something on the computer (with its much wider screen and closer to theater screen AR) I've noticed that people producing programs, commercials, and PSA's don't seem to care about quality control or viewability anymore; the credits, text, scroll, etc. not only no longer fit on my standard size screen, but they are often cut-off even on extremely wide AR TV's! What the heck? Don't they want people to actually read the messages anymore?

GJ

[Nick Sevilla]

The part I like about this super resolution crap,

Is that the actresses seem to have MAKEUP on.

Like Roman Orgy type heavy shit all over their faces.

You can totally tell in every single movie where they just slathered the "spackle" (their term for it).

I just laugh, especially when a naturally attractive woman is just destroyed by some heavy makeup crap.

Too funny.

[Snarl 12/8]

+1 to all the above. And all you kids get off my lawn!!

[Gregg Juke]

Yes... And hand me those bifocals (which I actually need now).

GJ

[JGriffin]

Also-- What's the deal with "aspect ratio abuse?" I still have a CRT TV, but even when I'm watching at a flat screen-endowed friend's house, or something on the computer (with its much wider screen and closer to theater screen AR) I've noticed that people producing programs, commercials, and PSA's don't seem to care about quality control or viewability anymore; the credits, text, scroll, etc. not only no longer fit on my standard size screen, but they are often cut-off even on extremely wide AR TV's! What the heck? Don't they want people to actually read the messages anymore?

We do, and we have title-safe, action-safe, and center-cut-safe guidelines that dictate where we put text on a screen. Not everyone follows them of course; some editors seem to take an approach to 4:3 compatibilty similar to Roger Nichols' take on mono: "if the listener is still listening in mono, they don't deserve to hear my mix correctly." It's the wrong attitude, but it's out there.

If text is sliding off the edge of 16x9 screens, though, you may want to look at your screen's magnification settings.

[supafuzz]

I was in a big box store with the initials BB and saw an HD movie being played.

It made me feel ill a little as it was difficult to focus on the main action. The lighting felt strange as well. It's the same when you see "the making of" on any film or tv show, all the fantasy goes away.
Rembrandt didn't use acrylic paint..which is the equivalent of video he used oil paint which is like film. It's the same difference with fluorescent and incandescent.


We record with digital which was a step forward and backward and we try to make it more analog by sending it first through classic analog tube and discrete transistor gear.
I guess we're doomed to move forward but this is not a good direction and hopefully will go the way of quadraphonic.

[ubertar]

This is why I prefer books.

[supafuzz]

This is why I prefer books.

well said and succinct!
I was talking yesterday with a local judge who was bemoaning the current state of youth. It made me realize that because people can google answers they no longer feel the need or desire to learn subjects in depth. You can just look up the answer you will never have in depth or working knowledge of anything. This promotes laziness and a false sense of knowledge.
We used to have to go to the library and look things up and follow the trails laid out in footnotes and discover that way.
I can't tell you how many musicians pass through my studio and have no idea of the history of music. It's astonishing and worrisome.

Of course this is nothing new and you have always been able to find people who drift through life doing the bare minimum. They only want to know what they need to function and nothing else. Once I stopped watching TV my brain functions have slowly returned and books are once again the centerpiece. Vegging out now means cooking with vegetables outside on the grill.

[ubertar]

I don't know if I'd go as far as that... I think easy access to information is a good thing. People who are passionate about something will dig deeper. Following links isn't that different from following a trail of footnotes, other than being faster, easier and more convenient. I wish the internet had been around when I was a kid.

When I said "I prefer books", it was in the context of fiction, in terms of the written word vs. film. Books vs. the internet is a whole other subject. One apparent disadvantage of easy access to information is it seems to weaken memory... there's no need to remember things if you can easily look them up again. Then again, maybe that just represents an expansion of memory to storage facilities outside the brain. It's not that different from having a shelf of books, I don't think. It's probably just a matter of time before typing on a keyboard and looking at a screen will be archaic, and our brains will connect directly to some shared database. What that will mean for individuality, I don't know. Whether or not it's ultimately a good thing, I don't know. I suppose that's for our grandchildren to find out.

[Gentleman Jim]

I seriously thought I was the only one who felt this way about HD tv's. Which is weird, because I'm not a vinyl guy. Heck, I have very few problems with mp3's if they're 160 kbps or higher. But most of my listening is in less-than-ideal settings; if I was sitting in a control room listening to 2" tape on high end monitors all day I'd probably want to wear earplug when I wasn't at work.

But... after about 10 years with a 27" CRT, my father in law asked to park his 51" LED at our house while they have extensive renovations. It's a decent model from a few years back, and I have to say, when you turn off all the awful processing, it's pretty easy to get used to. Until you watch something that's not broadcast in HD.

The problem with shades appearing pixelated or banding is a compression problem. It's because cable systems have to downgrade the signal to avoid using too much bandwidth.

[tjcasey1]

I love these TVs and the HD signal, but only if most of the processing is turned off and only if the creator of the content knew what they were doing (that's not much different than it always has been for any technology). I have a 60" LED, and old movies finally look great on it, though it took about three days to figure out how to shut off all the processing crap.

I have to agree, though, that most of what you see on them, whether in a showroom or in some non-techies' living room, is awful. Squeezed pictures, films that look like they were shot in video instead of 35mm film, etc.

Also, an awful lot of techie people think that Netflix and other web-based sources are putting out HD 1080, and therefore should look better than upscaled DVDs. Yeah, it's 1080, but it's an extremely compressed signal with a lot of info missing, so there's a lot of pixilation in it. It reminds me of the new high definition audio downloads. I thought that would be great - 96kHz, 24 bit audio that I could play from my computer. But they're FLACs or other data-compressed signals. Why bother?

Have I drifted enough in this post?........

[Patanjali]

Pure analog is just too much detail for our body communication systems to deal with, so they encode it digitally in a more compact form right at the eyes and ears.

Basically, we just need to build our audio and video systems to be subliminal to our bodies' systems to resolve. Remind you of something 'retina'.

Just have to make sure there are no aliasing artefacts that betray the processes.

Therefore, 'analog' is an illusion to us!!!


I think the problem is that we tend to block out a lot of information that is going on around us. That is, we are directing our consciousness to focus on what we are particularly interested in.

For example, at a live gig, we tend to block out a lot of the sounds/activities around us and focus on the group or whatever. When we listen to a recording or video of it, because we are not really immersed in it, we tend to notice all the information, sometimes some of it becoming quite distracting.


Now, in a movie, especially 3D, there are many things that you could be looking at. With animations, they can make everything sharp so that it is easy to look at anything clearly. With 'real' stuff, cameras, being optical, only get some things in focus. Those details that are out of focus tend to look worse in 3D because it is hard to spatially place them. Add to that the tendency to 'overdress to impress' 3D with just too much going on! Sort of trying to put the eyes on speed.


Now, we have 5 year old Full HD 40" Samsungs that stood out from almost every other TV on display at the time as looking almost real. They still do, so it wasn't just the shop display settings!! Maybe some posters just need to get decent equipment.


I think early CDs got bad press among audiophiles because they were short of the mark as far as resolution goes because DACS were only 14bit and 'magically' made to be 16bit. The digital production processes leading up to it were not that much better.

For most listeners, many not capable of noticing when their radios were not quite on the station, CDs were a step up.

[Scodiddly]

Wow - you guys are still watching TV? I ditched mine a few years back, and now think that it was a great choice though it took a little getting used to.

I did like ubertar's response a lot.