The question is:
Film shot digitally. There's no physical film to scan at some stupidly high resolution. How are you gonna Blu-ray that? Do they leave it at the 1080 for Blu-ray and just downscale to 720 for the SD dvds?
Cause from what I read if the old physical film is very clean and scratch free you can scan it in at much better then HD (1080). But the digital footage is mostly shot at 1080 or 4x. 4x is from the number of columns across. And 1080 is like almost 2x. If I read it right. I'm not 100% sure.
SD resolution is 480p. 720p is a "lesser" HD resolution than 1080p, but in some situations 720p is indistinguishable from 1080p (more on that in a moment). In one of the articles I posted, they indicate that most digital footage today isn't shot in 1080p, but much higher. There are exceptions, like Star Wars: Phantom Menace. It was shot at 1080p and that's as good as it will ever get. That actually explains finally why it looked so grainy in the theater. No loss… what an awful movie.
But anywho… 1080p realistically is as good as you need for most home viewing scenarios. The level of detail that the human eye can resolve is dependent on the screen size and viewing distance. Every chart I've read says that for under 50" at a typical distance of 8 feet, you cannot tell the difference between 720p and 1080p. You simply can't resolve the additional detail. To appreciate resolutions higher than 1080p, you'd have to be sitting REALLLY close, or have a HUGE screen (probably 70" or greater). And the latter is why movies need to continue to be shot in resolutions higher than 1080p because those movie screens are quite huge.
If you apply what we know about pixel densities and the Retina Display, this should make more sense.
