Is there really going to be a noticeable difference with older films that werent shot using high-def equipment?

I had the same question and found this:
"Film offers much more compared to the limited resolution offered by High
Definition Video. P. Swinson in this article dwells on the potential resolution of
35mm film and what are the determining factors for maximum resolution of film."
Link To Article

cheers

There is, without doubt.
But if you read some reviews of current released HD DVD and BluRay titles, you probably will be shocked what they did to the movies and content. I was at least. It's a shame what parts of the industry doing again with new tech.......

i agree...just like it was a shame to colorize all the old black and whites when that technology came around.

just because you CAN doesn't mean you SHOULD.

i have a feeling we'll get a lot of old movies with a LOT of useless extras on the discs that were made halfassed to fill up the 25-50GB as some kind of marketing gimmick.

There will be a place in Hell reserved for the individuals responsible for this travesty...And for those who provide pan and scan versions of 70MM films...

i thinkthe best use of blur ray or hd dvd for old movies would be not to change them at all, but isntead offer them as collections.

on a single disc get the "film noir" series or something and include five or six of the classics rather than load up a disc with a billion useless features or ruin the integrity of the original format.

but corporations aren't going to go for that...not when they can sell those five or six movies separately on the new format and try to squeeze as much money as they can out of it.

Actually, an old film can easily be re-mastered in 1080i/p video and produce beautiful video that will surpass any DVD-quality transfer. However, except for companies like Criterion, don't expect to see this happening. Also keep in mind that you may well not SEE the differences on any screen smaller than about 60". Also keep in mind that most DVD's tend to run at about 1/2 the potential bitrate most of the time. So there's a lot of room for improved video even on a DVD if you remove the extra audio streams and extras. It's always about bitrate, whether it's a DVD or BD disc.

More often than not, I expect to see HD discs with DVD-quality video on them. I don't expect to see any studios doing expensive new transfers to get true HD quality, except for promotions and special editions.

Another thing with HD-DVD and BD is that mostly only the movie itself will be in hi-def format, anything else like extras, making of etc. will be in SD format like on "normal" DVDs....

Some of the extra space will no doubt be used to 'force' you to watch even more crap before the actual movie starts. Probably lots of trailers for other movies too, as was common on VHS tape. Lots more language sub titles and audio streams as well.

It depends, that's my understanding of it.
The "user limitations" that we already have within DVDs is creepy enough...

A. Most of these studios already made 1080p transfers when they made the dvd release. They find it gives a sharper image when you use the higher res to capture it then shrink it down to the dvd res in use. They just need to encode the video which can take time because they need to have it perfect with 0 artifacts but also take up the least amount of space as possible.

B. Yes old movies can look excellent at 1080p but you have to know the limitation of film as well. It isn't as sharp as high def digital video cameras. This is also a reason why not a lot of movies arn't transfering over to digital because it will capture every imperfection on an actors face/skin. With film that is usually blurred out by just the film being the film it is. Also you still have tons of grain and noise produced by the film that can only be cleaned up so much. Will High def dvd relases look better then DVD's yes but don't expect miracles.

I agree wholeheartedly with the "collections" concept. How convenient it would be to have, for example, an entire television series (my mind goes immediately to TWIN PEAKS- because that's just where my mind goes) on one disc in standard DVD bit-rate quality.
But as you said, this will not be in any entertainment executives business plan for either new format.
And, yeah, DON'T PM me either! Particularly the women CDFreaks out there. If you do, I'll, I'll... do what reasonsnotrules does when people do that to her.
I'm sick and tired of women wanting to hang out with me and pretending to be interested in "burning strategies" and "compression algorithms" and things that I know nothing about.

I'm going for HD DVD cause all blue ray did was jack up the price of the PS3 anyways, but then I am a major microsoft and nintendo fan so what do I care. I'm just drooling over the though of Shaun of the dead in Complete HD. Oh and The Posseidon Adventure (Orginal).

Yeah, the original POSEIDON ADVENTURE with Shelley Winters in 1080p. Now that's scary!

Rubbish in, rubbish out...You can't make a silk purse out of a pigs ear.
Most of this high definition is hype, it’s just an excuse for Sky TV, the BBC and the rest to get on the bandwagon and to bump up their revenues.
Go in to a TV show room and the plasma TVs are usually separated from the traditional CRT tube TVs so you cannot compare the picture quality.
Also there is usually a non- suppressed high definition DVD playing on the plasma to impress the potential buyer.
When you get them home and watch an ordinary digital broadcast, I mean the ones that are compressed to bits which are grainy, have picture blockiness and a low refresh rate making a nasty shimmering effect you will be back in the real world.
If you want to see a good picture tune into BBC4 on freeview on a Thursday at 19:10 BST.
The Avengers (The Diana Rigg era) beginning in 1965 and ending late 1967 early 1968ish were shot onto 35mm film.
They appear to be broadcast only slightly compressed and the picture quality is exceptional.

Just a matter of time before the bandwidth allocates your television provider to send a less compressed signal. This happened with regular Digital Tv on sat's as well. Fades would always come out tons of boxes because it's one of the toughest things for them to compute with such a low bandwidth. When I saw Digital Tv signals at first i thought i was viewing a VCD it was that poor. I believe cable provides a better digital signal though because they can reach 10mbps (that's about 1Mbyte per second which is plenty of headroom for HD content and high end Standerd def digital tv). With the impending Fiber Optics broadband (in America atleast I know Europe has had this for awhile) rollout we are bound to get better and better pictures.

_Haha, you cannot simply compare sat (dvb-s) content and quality with the one from dvb-c (cable). There are so many resolutions and bitrates and formats that can be used............. it will not work.

True I havn't really seen a sat on a standard tv in awhile and I believe they might of improved quality since then.

It's like a jungle...
There are even hdtv channels which send out content that is (quality) more terrible than a ten year old VHS tape. It's sad.

...And while mugs will keep paying for it, the providers will keep supplying it!

Absolutely. As cited in other threads I found a night and day difference between the DVD and HD-DVD release of battle of the Bulge. Mutiny On The Bounty was beautiful as well. All of the lines and original artifacts that still appear on the standard DVD vanish on the HD-DVD version. Not to mention the colors are amazingly sharp. I agree that it would be a travesty to colorize the old black and white films but for the older color films I actually find that this is where HD really shines. Not necessarily because they are the best possible example of HD quality, because newer films still look better, but because of the night and day picture quality comparison between the standard DVD (even using a high end up-converting player like the Oppo Digital) and the HD-DVD.