Eurovision 2011 - 10/12/14 May 2011

Where could we find this blog?

Well I didn't really want to put a link here at this stage as it currently contains nothing to do with Eurovision, and no-one will want this Eurovision Song Contest 2011 thread derailed with comments about what is currently on there (roller coasters and water slides). If you're that keen to check it out, here it is.

I will read in more detail later. Very thorough though.



Och well. Can't have everything.

*snort*

I agree. I hope they are able to encode native HD source footage for all the national performances next year.

But, if SD masters were all they had access to this year for the national performances, was encoding them upscaled to 1920x1080/50i (as they did) the best way to give the best quality for those videos (where the source they had was SD)? As well as being efficient so they didn't take too much bitrate from the rest of the disc (eg. for Semis 1 & 2)? eg. Just for picture quality would upscaling SD PAL to 1920x1080/50i AVC be best or would 1280x720p50 AVC be better (or just as good) at the same quite high bitrates they used (or could you get the same quality for SD upconverts using a lower bitrate at 720p50 than you would need to use for 1920x1080/50i) - and allowing the player/TV to do the final upscaling to 1920x1080? Or even encoding as 720x576 AVC at higher bitrates than DVD (or even at the same high bitrates as they used - if that's possible on Blu-ray at that low res)?

Even though the national finals are SD upscales, they've used quite high bitrates with AVC for them (eg. around 10-26 Mbps, even going to about 35 Mbps sometimes - eg. at the end of Sweden's NF).

Do the people doing the authoring have higher quality upscalers than is in any consumer HDTV or Blu-ray player? And would they use standalone software/hardware for it or would it be part of other software (eg. like editing/Blu-ray encoding software)?

Chances are that any upscaling done in mastering - whether software or hardware - is likely to be better than that in most consumer HDTVS. Even low cost broadcast upconverters do a much better job than most consumer HDTVs.

Suspect the EBU request and distribute 576/50i masters of the country promotional videos, which they usually distribute on a couple of DigiBetas to each competing country every year.

Better for the upconversion to be done before the mastering than in people's HDTVs I suspect.

It would be nice if the few countries that do their pre-selection shows in HD, or make promo videos in HD, could be sourced for the Blu-ray in HD, but I suspect this is pretty tricky to engineer and wouldn't be cost effective?

I'd avoid scaling 576i to 720p for mastering, as most viewers will then have a further scale after this to either 1080 or 768 lines? (There are very few native 720p displays out there) I'd ideally avoid scaling in a consumer display if at all possible.

As for the SD upconverts on this year's BD - I suspect Sweden, having originated in 720p will have a lot of HF detail (as 720p oversamples when downconverte to 576i, delivering more HF detail than a 576i native capture), which will mean it could need a greater bitrate to encode than the same scenes covered in SD. (I.e. HD downconverted to SD often looks better than SD native - if the downconverter is a good one. Downconversion is non-trivial)

And MF is a very fast cut, dynamically lit show with lots of fast moving cameras - so would be a lot more demanding than some of the single camera promos.