How do you know whether a movie is shot in HD or if its an upconvert?

[boston area dtv]

Title says it all. How do I know if the movie has been shot with the special HD equipment or if its just an upconverted movie?

Is it strictly by the date the movie was shot or is there some other marking on the movie box that lets me know?


Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[Paradox-SJ]

Most movies are shot on film (which has a high resolution than HD btw) Digitals masters of the 35mm film are created with something called a 4k machine...(4kx2k is about the resolution of 35mm film) Then from the digitals masters they are downcoverted to HD. THEN they they are compreseed with some sort software (i,e MPEG2/4, VC-1) and provided to us via some sort of distrubution method. (HDDVD, boradcast etc)

When you see movies or shows on say TNT that fill your 16x9 screen but look like crap...those are usually upconverted..meaining the above process above was not used. The master of such films was not of HD quality. (they can go from 35mm to 4k to 720x480i/p)

Hope that helped.....

 

[boston area dtv]

So lets say casablanca is out on HD DVD..that movie is not upconverted. Its true HD?

 

[mike123abc]

Yes it was done on film and would have been downconverted to HD.

Many TV shows are filmed too and are high resolution, so many old series if shot on 35m would do well.

Where you run into problems is where the 35mm film has deteriorated. With HD you can see every scratch and smudge on the film. One has to hope they find a well preserved master and take care during the transfer that the film is clean.

 

[charper1]

Maybe additional info; sorry I didn't read it:

http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/casablanca.html