Is my 8mm film to DVD going to look as good as 8mm film to Blu-Ray DVD?
May 8th, 2009In some cases, transferring 8mm film to DVD will only show a marginal decrease in quality compared to transferring 8mm to Blu-Ray DVD. The type of transfer or scan will determine how close the 8mm film to DVD and the 8mm film to Blu-Ray DVD are in terms of video quality.
In terms of pure resolution, Blu-Ray DVD has 50% more than DVD. But, there are two factors that can make the DVD look almost as good as the Blu-Ray DVD. The first is the 8mm film to DVD transfer process. A high definition film transfer will yield video that is as close to the film as possible. It would have all the definition and details the film has. When you scan the film at high definition and then down-convert the video to standard definition, even those you’ve lost 50% of the resolution, you only loose about 15% of the visual quality. This is just because the film was scanned in at high definition to begin with. When the video is re-encoded for standard definition video, it has more to work with and produces a better image quality than if the film was scanned in at standard defiinition to being with.
The second reason DVD can look almost as good as Blu-Ray is that Blu-Ray players upconvert the DVD to high definition. Now, you can’t completely make up for resolution that isn’t there, but because the video was originally high definition, the upconvertion will turn out better because the amount of detail was maximized.