Heroes is awesome, in more ways than one

I recently just started watching Heroes (through "certain means") and I must say, this show is fucking awesome. After only 1 episode, I was hooked, and after 4, I can't stop watching, though unfortunately my schedule prevents any marathoning. But anyway, this is a videophile blog, so I'm not gonna speak much for the show's creative qualities (which are there, don't get me wrong), but rather its technical qualities.

Someone's gotta tell me the budget on this, because for a TV show, it seems to have gotten a ridiculously good treatment in all stages of productions. It's shot on film for one, so you know they're not being cheap here, plus the level of special effects and compositing is pretty high for a TV show. Practical effects are even good looking, with some definite attention paid to the cinematography of the show. I'm willing to admit my pirating of this show for one reason, and one reason only: I bought the boxset even after downloading the high definition versions. I had downloaded up to episode 13 in HD, (which by the way, REALLY shows how awesome this show looks. The transfer is amazing, and free of any framerate shit that normal TV shows suffer from editing) and fell in love with the show. I've been saying it for years now, and I will continue to say it; if a product is genuinely good, I will buy it, and so will the general public. I will buy a movie I love, a video game I have to play, and a TV show that actually delivers.

Let me not get off topic though, the HD-DVDs are amazing, but I still only bought the standard def discs due to the lack of an HD player. Before buying the discs, I happened to do some experimenting of my own. Using a simple BicubicResize, I brought the 720p files (they were re-encoded from 1080p) down to anamorphic SD, and did not filter at all; I relied on the downscaling to take care of most of the noise instead. I compressed the episodes quite tightly, in order to fit on a DVD5 (only 3 eps per disc, but they're 43mins on average), so there was some blocking and ringing, but overall sharpness wasn't sacrificed much. The video was encoded with HC, and the audio was brought down to 384kbps AC3 (down from 640kbps). The results of the video were amazing to say the least. Due to the downscaling and compression, most artifacts and grain from the source were eliminated, but like I said, some smearing occured in the video, but nothing you'd notice easily on an SDTV.

Now you're probably wondering the obvious: "Won't you compare the retail DVD to your HD downscale?" Yes I will, but right now I'm writing this a bit before work, so expect pics later on.