The HD DVD Experience: Xbox 360 HD DVD Review
The Set Up
1: 42inch HD Panasonic Plasma TV
2: Dolby Pro Logic Surround Sound stereo system
3: Xbox 360
As you can see, I had been ready for the HD movie experience. Actually, I’d been experiencing HD media since I purchased my plasma TV: Xbox 360 outputs videogames natively in 720p, one of a few HD standards. Suffice to say the games look incredibly sharp, with clarity that is frequently breathtaking. Their good looks have much to do with their true HD visuals, designed as such from the ground up. Talented programmers taking advantage of pumped up next-generation videogame processing power are able to flex their muscles, and it shows. But movies on HD discs - that is, feature length studio films - aren’t quite created equally. So it was with a little bit of trepidation that I added another piece of hardware to my home theatre:
4: The Xbox 360 HD DVD player
At only $200Cnd, it was a relative steal; I paid nearly $700 for my first stand-alone DVD player, and stand-alone HD DVD players start at $500. I was also encouraged to purchase as Nine Inch Nails, a prominent industrial/rock band and personal favourite, is releasing a concert disc on HD DVD and Blu-ray, both promising pristine HD visuals. The Nine Inch Nails HD DVD was actually filmed in HD, and therefore sports actual HD visuals. Otherwise, I was ready to be disappointed with HD DVD content. The reason: Most if not all films are not filmed in HD to begin with. HD DVD films are actually up-converted standard definition movies, processed through programs designed to clean up the picture. So, going into my purchase I was well aware that the films I’d be watching were basically cleaned up or pumped up versions of standard definition fare. I wasn’t expecting much.
Getting Started
Setting up the HD DVD player was a breeze. The player comes with an installation disc presumably loaded with drivers and a user interface update; once installed you simply plug in the HD DVD player via a provided USB cord and you’re ready to go. Operation of the HD DVD drive is done so through the usual Xbox 360 menu: the disc tray symbol at the bottom of the screen is now sectioned horizontally such that you can choose to open and close the 360 disc tray or the HD DVD disc tray, and play either the disc inserted in the 360 or HD DVD drive. It’s done seamlessly and works intuitively. Of course, you can also just simply push the tray eject button on the unit itself and insert an HD DVD.
The HD DVD player is nicely designed, looking as if it were a closed book.The ‘hard cover’ casing of the player is the same eggshell white as the casing of the 360, and the player’s tray is equally as sterling silver as it is on the 360. Overall, it fits in quite well, but clashes somewhat with the main 360 unit, what with the player’s dark grey centre, structured to look like the pages crammed between the hard cover casing. For that matter, the whole closed book design - while appreciated on a conceptual level, a device used to tell stories - is a little off-putting. Just as the 360, you can sit it horizontally or vertically.
Video Impressions
Besides a few HD trailers downloaded off of Xbox Live Marketplace, my experience with HD video and films was limited. The best in film picture quality I had seen was limited to DVDs. Mind you, regular DVDs look pretty fantastic on my set-up. Regular DVDs, however, cannot take advantage of the full settings on an HDTV; besides the obvious resolution limitations, generously turning up the TV’s contrast and brightness results in a loss of coherency, the picture seems to swim. My theory behind this: without enough information to fill every pixel on an HD screen, the DVDs’ barren portions of picture are exasperated with higher TV settings meant to bring out extra detail. In contrast, the games on 360, developed with HD in mind, do not suffer at all from full contrast and greater brightness settings. At the very least, then, I was expecting HD DVD films to allow for a generous application of contrast and brightness settings without much loss in visual quality.
The HD DVD player comes with Peter Jackson’s King Kong as a limited time promotion. I also rented Jarhead and The Chronicles of Riddick for the purposes of comparison.
Within moments of playing King Kong, my reservations were put to rest. This, I was not expecting. The very opening scene of a mostly gray monkey displayed an incredible amount of detail; all the hairs and whiskers were in stark contrast to each other, each individually discernable. Characters also displayed an incredible amount of detail, hair, texture of clothing, and facial detail popping out on screen. I also noticed in several scenes a remarkable effect I thought not possible: some scenes appeared almost three-dimensional. In particular, scenes with one or more people in focus in the foreground were so sharply detailed and delineated from the background they leapt from the screen. This same 3D effect was also prevalent in scenes heavy with computer special effects like the T-Rex chase and battle.
Jarhead was at times equally impressive. Jarhead was shot with washed out tones, accentuating the heat of day and desert settings. Still, the detail was often fantastic. Besides detail, there were a few other noticeable visual qualities. One very noticeable feature is an extension of the 3D effect in King Kong. That is, characters popping out from the background. In one scene, two soldiers are silhouetted against a purple sunset, their profiles absolutely striking. The other thing that Jarhead does quite well is display dark scenes. Blacks are incredibly dark on HD DVD, and this proved mostly true across all the movies I watched.
For all the preaching I have done about how HD TVs and HD content had a lot of catching up to do before it reached its full potential, I was now eating some crow. You could have fooled me that these were true HD visuals, despite that they weren’t shot that way. I found myself wowed more than I ever would have expected.
Checking Expectations
It’s not all unmitigated beauty, however. While very impressed, I wasn’t quite blown away. For that matter, quite a few of the limitations I had expected to witness, I did.
In all of the aforementioned movies, the contrast and brightness settings could be reasonably turned up without any degradation in picture quality, but too high and the picture suffered the same effect as DVD movies. That is, some scenes would suffer from that mildly pixelated or swimming effect. This supports my earlier assumption that these movies were not filmed in HD and, despite being cleaned up, cannot completely satisfy the demands of an HD display.
Also, some scenes and characters didn’t look as sharp as they did in others, approaching DVD quality clarity. The Chronicles of Riddick exemplified this, with many scenes covering a spectrum of clarity. Many close ups of the still kind looked fantastic. Vin Diesel has a few very tight close ups where beads of sweat, hair, wrinkles and pores stand out in great detail. But moving shots of the same actors don’t look as good, nor does the scene as a whole. Furthermore, real life actors filmed in standard definition are juxtaposed against digital backdrops that, given their digital nature, appeared much sharper. The real life actors looked blurry in comparison. That could be said of all the digital effects of all the movies; they were frequently more impressive looking than the live action shots. The sum of these observations is that the characteristics of any individual scene will more likely than not have a direct correlation with how good it will look in an HD DVD transfer; digital special effects and still scenes must understandably be easier to encode in HD than fast moving scenes filmed in standard definition.
Conclusion
Until movies are filmed entirely in HD, the quality of any HD DVD movie is going to be dependent on the characteristics of the source material and the quality of the encoding and transfer to HD DVD. But if these early examples in the infancy of the format are any indication, this format has incredible potential. With the improvement of codecs used to transfer film to HD DVD, and the move to increasingly digital and HD filming methods, the movies will only get better looking.
Regardless of what might be accomplished in the future (assuming Blu-ray doesn’t force HD DVD out of the market), the quality of HD DVD is fantastic right now. While HD DVD movies are not at this point a revolutionary leap, the positive step forward is akin to the leap from VHS to DVD. And that’s saying something. If you own an Xbox 360, the HD DVD player is a cheap hardware solution for viewing HD movies and worth much more than the dollars invested. If your favourite movie is out on HD DVD or coming soon, looking into a purchase could result in a wow experience of your own.
peachey @ February 9, 2007