Saturday, March 14, 2009

HD on the 'Net

I'm surprised by the picture quality of HD from, say, Joost.com, streaming live on the Internet. Even on a relatively big monitor. As long as there aren't too many programs running in the background. My laptop, unfortunately won't even play back the SD feed.

But the HD looks vastly better than an SD DVD. The compression scheme is of course much better than DVD's but the data rate must be a fraction, no?

So I've been watching a couple things:

The Blade series is... well... brilliant. It is very well written, with excellent dialog, a great storyline, looks great, and the bad guys are complex. How do you not love it?

Angel of Death looks great. I mean really great. There are some shots in it which are pretty stunning. There are some decent plot twists. But I do wish that more than one of the actors would work on their diction. (Not Ted Raimi though -- he has no lines! ;-)

One thing which doesn't work for me about Angel of Death is that they play the "what happened last week" (which they call the "Prologue") for 2 minutes at the head of each 7-minute episode.
Also, the dialog edit is OK but the mix is a little... well "low budget". On exteriors when everyone's clearly on wireless lavs they didn't really EQ the tracks so that the mics don't sound like they're under clothes.

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