As I recently posted, I bought my first HD tv recently. It’s nice and one of the cool things is that it comes with apps, including Flixter. Now, I bought the DVD(not the Blu-ray) of the Hobbit movie back in November and it came with a streaming copy through Flixter.
I read that it would be in HD, which means that I kind of got a “streaming Blu-ray” for the price of DVD. Fine with me. Kind of neat, actually.
Anyway…it looks weird. Oh, it’s not pixelated or low-resolution like a DVD(even upconverted ones look poor). It’s…foggy. Or…out of focus. Or…like…everything looks like a green screen effect.
It’s clearly kind of HD, but it is very odd. It’s not 3D or anything, it’s not that out of focus. It’s just…washed out and kind of odd looking. Like shot on video but slightly better.
Did Flixter somehow land the high-frame rate version? I want to turn it off and just watch the 24FPS 1080p version.
Anyone else watched this? It’s the ultraviolet copy that comes with the DVD.
Note: I do not advocate the below course of action, but I did take it.
So, considering I own the DVD, I went ahead and pirated a 1080p copy of the movie from the internet to see what it looked like. I made sure it nowhere said “HFR”(high frame rate) and put it on a flash drive.
It was crystal clear with no weird glowy out of focus effect.
Anyway, the note here is that the Flixter copy you get when you buy the DVD is very odd indeed.
Since it’s a new TV, are all the settings good on it? Does everything else look good? There were a lot of complaints about The Hobbit and the high frame rate, but most of them were about it being too clear, not about it being foggy. Here’s a summary of critics’ take on The Hobbit’s frame rate.
I do hope it’s just a problem with The Hobbit Flixter version, and that everything else looks okay on your TV, it just sounds strange.
Both streaming and digital download versions of HD movies frequently have a heavy dose of noise reduction applied to reduce the network bandwidth needed to download. This Digital Noise Reduction (DNR) eliminates most film grain and reduces background detail while maintaining the sharpness on edges, creating a very “clean” image. This image can have an “unreal” or “3D” quality to it, if you are used to looking at the unfiltered version.
Your TV, no matter the model, does not support 48hz “HFR”. What you watched was either 24hz or 60hz (using 3:2 pulldown). Whatever you were seeing from Flixter it wasn’t HFR causing it.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, but not sure. So current TVs are still limited to 23.976, 25, 29.97, 50, & 59.94 fps? Is that a DVI/HDMI limitation? Something else?
But if it can handle 60fps, or, better yet, 120 or 240 fps, it would be possible to use a different pulldown rate to make it work. It’s unlikely they would bother doing that, but it is possible.
I never quite understood why anyone would film in 48fps. If you want to raise the framerate, either go for the standard 60 fps or don’t bother. Any pulldown is just going to reduce the quality.