Feature Film DVD Transfers

[Michel Hafner]

According to Joe Kane there is no true progressive DVD mastering available for the time being.

Progressive DVD players have to do inverse telecine by either paying attention to the flags in the MPEG stream (which are often incorrect) or test the fields explicitly for the 2:3 pattern or do both. External processors can only test the fields. All material is vertically filtered. Full res 480p is not available from DVDs.

IMHO one of the main reasons why so many DVDs don't hold up to magnification beyond average consumer monitor sizes is that they are mastered on smallish studio monitors and there is not enough magnfication to see how ugly the edge enhancement looks, how the DNR screws the picture up and how the MPEG compression is lacking. There are other reasons too as mentioned before.

Edited January 7, 2005 by miha

[Mike Donis]

Meaning no disrespect, I believe Mr. Kane is incorrect. Check out DVXuser.com to find many people having successfully burned 24P native DVDs.

[Michel Hafner]

Meaning no disrespect, I believe Mr. Kane is incorrect.  Check out DVXuser.com to find many people having successfully burned 24P native DVDs.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

What DVDs? DVDs of Hollywood films? Which titles?

When Mr. Kane produced his "VIdeo Essentials" he could not find a shop that did what he wanted. That was some time ago. Has it changed since?

[Mike Donis]

I'm quite certain it has - I'm not familiar with Mr. Kane's "Video Essentials" - but I know that computers display many (all the Hollywood DVDs I own) in "true" 24P, with no 3:2 pulldown. I'm seeing the native frames played back at 1/24 of a second.

 

And I know that many of the DVXusers are creating their own DVDs that play on standard DVD players, with the source being a 23.98 fps MPEG2 file. The DVD player adds the pulldown automatically with those DVDs.

 

I would only assume Hollywood would be using this technology, it saves space on the discs, and if you're encoding a progressive image, it should be higher quality than compression artifacts on a 60i image with a 3:2 pulldown.

[Alessandro Machi]

.................

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

hmmm, why did lonedog delete the original topic question?

 

There are "automatic" DVD compression authoring programs that aren't as "effective" as the facilities that actually fingerprint each frame of the entire movie and decide how much data to allocate to that frame.

 

The big studios can spend $50,000 to $ 500,000 on authoring optimization and not think twice because the cost is amortized over several hundred thousand to millions of copies being sold.

 

The lower budgeted movies don't always have the same amount of money to compete.

[Michel Hafner]

I'm quite certain it has - I'm not familiar with Mr. Kane's "Video Essentials" - but I know that computers display many (all the Hollywood DVDs I own) in "true" 24P, with no 3:2 pulldown.  I'm seeing the native frames played back at 1/24 of a second.

And I know that many of the DVXusers are creating their own DVDs that play on standard DVD players, with the source being a 23.98 fps MPEG2 file.  The DVD player adds the pulldown automatically with those DVDs.

I would only assume Hollywood would be using this technology, it saves space on the discs, and if you're encoding a progressive image, it should be higher quality than compression artifacts on a 60i image with a 3:2 pulldown.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It's not about whether you actually encode 60 fields or only 48. The latter is possible and is done all the time. It's about whether you encode frames as a whole (not two fields) and also do not apply vertical filtering so you can get full resolution progressive images back. There are no DVDs out there that have unfiltered vertical resolution coming from whole frame MPEG encoded data. That is what Kane wanted and did not get.

[John Sprung]

There are several factors that affect the quality of the DVD, starting with the source material for the transfer, the equipment used for the transfer, the skill of the people using the equipment, the tape format the transfer is stored on, the quality of any downconversions if the transfer was to HD, and the quality of the DVD authoring and pressing, compression rate, etc.  Not to mention the quality of the playback and display device...

 

Pretty much what you'd think.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

The only thing I'd add to David's list is that we have a V.P. whose duties include Q.C. on all of the above, among other things. He tries to get the D.P.'s to telecine sessions if possible, and at least gets their input on any concerns they might have.

 

 

 

-- J.S.