Oh. My. God.
I installed QuickTime 7 the other day, and found Apple’s HD Gallery page where they’re showcasing a few HD trailers and video clips. The trailer for Serenity is available in both 720p and 1080p formats, and even though my system (a dual 2.0Ghz G5 with a 64Mb Radeon 9600 video card) technically doesn’t meet the requirements to playback 1080p, I downloaded both to see how they behaved.
Beautiful. Not a stutter on either one, and the video quality is amazing. What amused me, though, is that my screen (which I run at a slightly non-standard 1152×870) isn’t big enough to display them at full size! The 720p trailer just loses a little bit off of either side, but the 1080p trailer? I can only fit about half of it on my screen at once. Wow.
Just for grins and giggles, I decided to download all the different Serenity trailers available to compare them. I grabbed all four “normal” versions from the Serenity trailer page (small, medium, large, and full screen), the two HD versions from the Serenity HD page, opened them all up at once, and paused each one at 1:02.
(While I was doing this, I started them all playing at once just to see what would happen. Even with all the other versions playing at the same time, the gargantuan 1080i trailer still kept up a very watchable 18fps average framerate!)
Here’s the end result:
| version | size (MB) | fps | size (pixels) | data rate (kbits/sec) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| small | 4.8 | 8 | 240×104 | 288.78 |
| medium | 8.45 | 12 | 320×136 | 505.18 |
| large | 20.98 | 24 | 480×208 | 1259.23 |
| fullscreen | 40.4 | 24 | 640×272 | 2363.67 |
| 720p | 108.33 | 24 | 1280×544 | 6406.26 |
| 1080p | 138.36 | 24 | 1920×816 | 8182.54 |
Pretty damn impressive.
“Tell Me Why” by :Wumpscut: from the album Bunker Gate Seven (1995, 4:11).