When DVD Spells B-A-D
Some Great Films Suffer in Transition To New Format
November 12, 2003
By FRED KAPLAN
The New York Times
a great article about things that drive us nuts about the dvd industry/format and why we are not giving up on our laserdisc collection any time soon…
for instance, here he adresses a great example of some of the issues at the very heart of the matter…
Digital technology seems, on the face of it, a preposterously inadequate medium for storing movies, and we should gape in wonder that DVDs yield coherent pictures at all, much less the gloriously sharp, detailed images they churn out under the best of conditions. Consider: A DVD stores only 17 gigabytes of data. A two-hour film, transferred to digital data and otherwise untreated, would take up more than 150 gigabytes.
So the data must first be massively compressed, mainly by digitally sampling a frame, then sampling only the information that changes in subsequent frames.
This is no big deal for a scene of someone standing still against a blank wall. But it’s a major challenge for a scene of someone running through traffic surrounded by dozens of flashing lights and moving objects.
while ld video definitely has its own issues, it is NOT compressed and cav laserdiscs even store actual individual frames of film, something no other format does even today…
If a film is old and damaged, the compression machine will “read” random dirt and scratches in the same way it reads motion. If the machine’s operator doesn’t pay attention and make adjustments, or if the machine is subpar, the digitized image will be full of waves, zigzags and other distracting distortions.
Similar problems can plague color or, if it’s a black-and-white film, the gradations of gray. When transferring film from a negative to a print, someone has to practice the fine art of “color timing.” The same thing has to be done, though electronically, when transferring it to DVD. The job can be done well or it can be done badly.
“The main reason a lot of DVDs are so bad,” says Robert A. Harris, president of the Film Preserve, one of the top film-restoring companies, “is that the people making them don’t know what they’re doing and don’t care what they’re doing.”
well, why should they care??? they are going to price these things to sell to any shlub, so, they will not bother… dvd regularly cheaps out, while makers of ld knew they could not sell them at the prices they were asking unless they threw in GOOD extras… Boogie Nights is a great example… criterion paid for the john holmes documentary the film was based on, but when the dvd came around, new line was not willing to pay for it… the dvd was around $30, the ld was nearly $100… but, you get what you pay for… and, right now, many ld collectors are selling off their discs at insane prices, therefore, now is a great time to buy…
Doing a DVD right takes time and money. A good Telecine machine, which transfers film to an image suited for television, costs about $2 million. Use of an outside lab’s Telecine facilities can cost up to $1,000 an hour.
The Criterion Collection, which produces some of the finest DVDs of classic films, routinely takes months to make a digital transfer. Lee Klein, Criterion’s chief technician, says: “If there’s a scratch, we draw it out frame by frame. When there’s 12 pieces of debris on each frame, it takes a long time.”
Most studios don’t bother.
Some simply take the master that was made for laser disc, or even for VHS videotape, and transfer it to DVD. This was an especially common practice in the infancy of DVD, four to six years ago.
and he gives a few good examples in the article of lousy dvd’s, showing the widespread apathy of dvd makers… their attitude is getting better, so, i hope by the time hd-dvd is the standard, they will have learned and can offer a consistently worthy product…
i am NOT saying that laserdisc is necesarily better in every way to dvd, my point is that laserdisc is still a viable format today, for those willing to pay, and should not have been discontinued so early (the last u.s. laserdisc release was in 2000)… many ld collectors out there are already regretting selling off their collection when they are left with substandard dvd’s, or even no dvd release available, such as the theatrical cuts of close encounters and star wars… and those two are great examples because there will NEVER be a dvd release of them…
laserdisc is a format for the serious film lover, dvd is the next vhs, the format for the masses…
what hd-dvd will be remains to be seen…
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