Live Free or Die Hard Batman Begins Ratatouille Meet the Robinsons I, Robot Apocalypto Cast Away Celine Dion Live at Las Vegas Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds Live at Radio City Music Hall Cars Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
I can almost guarantee that any of these titles kick butt for demo material! :)
Live Free and Die Hard looks pretty awesome on DVD too, surprisingly enough. When I showed 2001, Planet Earth, and Blade Runner to my family, they could very obviously see how HD helped. When I showed them LFaDH they thought it /was/ in HD, until I bemoaned the fact it would never come out as an HD DVD. We could "see" the HD in, for example, The Bourne Ultimatum, but only for the "ariel view of a city" type shots. The HD DVD's advantages had to do with the HDi extras and the sound, not the 1080p picture.
Worth pointing out that anything with a lot of movement tends to be a poor showcase for HD formats. If you can't see the detail, you don't get the HD. People will ooh and aah anyway, but largely because you're demoing the entire set-up, not just the HD player. This is why HDTV displays at stores tend to have still pictures of Southern European cities playing all the time. Lots of colour, contrast, and very little movement so the detail can stand out.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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My favorite demo pieces are:
Live Free or Die Hard
Batman Begins
Ratatouille
Meet the Robinsons
I, Robot
Apocalypto
Cast Away
Celine Dion Live at Las Vegas
Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds Live at Radio City Music Hall
Cars
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
I can almost guarantee that any of these titles kick butt for demo material! :)
Live Free and Die Hard looks pretty awesome on DVD too, surprisingly enough. When I showed 2001, Planet Earth, and Blade Runner to my family, they could very obviously see how HD helped. When I showed them LFaDH they thought it /was/ in HD, until I bemoaned the fact it would never come out as an HD DVD. We could "see" the HD in, for example, The Bourne Ultimatum, but only for the "ariel view of a city" type shots. The HD DVD's advantages had to do with the HDi extras and the sound, not the 1080p picture.
Worth pointing out that anything with a lot of movement tends to be a poor showcase for HD formats. If you can't see the detail, you don't get the HD. People will ooh and aah anyway, but largely because you're demoing the entire set-up, not just the HD player. This is why HDTV displays at stores tend to have still pictures of Southern European cities playing all the time. Lots of colour, contrast, and very little movement so the detail can stand out.
Show them Planet Earth. Show them 2001.