Frame rate and smoothness of Pan/Zoom effects

[Igor]

Just my thoughts on smoothness of Pan/Zoom effects.

HD-DVD and Blu-Ray provide high resulution 1920x1080, but there is a problem with frame rate.

If you live in USA you have to encode video at 60 frames per second. And 50 FPS if you live in Europe.

Yes, 50 or 60 frame per second quite enough for smooth playback of animation. And it will play ideally on TV display. What wrong? The problem with playback on PC.

If you encoded NTSC HD-DVD/Blu-Ray disc with 60 FPS, but your display has 75 Hz refresh rate, Pan/Zoom effects will not look ideally smooth.

Why it happens? You computer should transcode one refresh rate to another one and add absent 15 frames. This problem like playback of PAL DVD film on some locked to 60 Hz NTSC TV displays.

Refresh rate of display should match frame rate of video. 60 Hz for 60 FPS NTSC video, and 50 or 100 Hz for PAL video.

EXE file with slideshow don't have this problem at all.

Because PicturesToExe's v5.xx slideshow detects refresh rate of your display and dynamically renders slides with exact synchronization of display, producing 50, 60, 75 or 100 frames per second.

In other words, on my opinion HD-DVD/Blu-Ray ideal solution for playback on Television and EXE file for PC.

[sanewcomb]

Personally, I've never thought any of the standards designed for Television were appropriate for viewing video on computer screens, and the videos never look as good as on a TV set. The main reason is the resolution of the computer monitor has far exceeded television standards for a long time. I don't understand people talking about making HD videos to play on their computers with P2E. It will always look better in the P2E EXE computer file format.

It seems the problem you are referring to is the failure of HD movie software to set the computer monitor at the refresh rate of the video. On multisync CRT monitors, this should be easy to fix since the monitor can be set to any frequency within a range. It's different physics I think for LCD monitors, which don't have a scan rate to produce the image. But the video card probably still produces a frame rate, particularly if it's connected with the analog connector. So the video card output should be synced to the frame rate of the video, similar to CRT situation. I don't know if the same is true of digital connections with LCDs, and that's about the limit of what I know about LCDs.

Are there software movie players that have the option of using full screen and setting the monitor to a particular refresh rate? If so, those should play pretty smooth PZR effects, at least as smooth as seen on TVs or HDTVs.

Steve Newcomb

Tucson, AZ USA