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Mediocre quality DVD's
Musicman103
Posts: 2,238 Forum Member
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Has anyone updated a VHS title with its DVD counterpart and thought that the latter is not really any better, in terms of picture quality?
I recorded some tapes on a top notch unit with time base corrector etc and the commerical DVD version looks no better.
I recorded some tapes on a top notch unit with time base corrector etc and the commerical DVD version looks no better.
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Is it 1999?
I took it as meaning that there were a lot of mediocre transfers when DVDs first came out in the late 90s, and this wasn't really the case nowadays(?)
I do know that some of the early DVDs were nothing special. Mastering technology was probably less advanced then, and they probably weren't as experienced at it. (Some of the early DVDs compared unfavourably to Laserdisc due to obvious compression artifacts and stupid things like it being squeezed into a single layer 4.7GB). But I'm guessing there was also some rush to get product out on DVD, and later on they had the time, proven market and better technology to justify doing a better job.
The first release of Blade Runner on DVD was apparently very poor, whereas the more recent remaster was much better.
Well I am more of a TV than movie person, so am replacing stuf that I taped off the TV or bought on VHS. Old series and comedy shows will not be given the makeover treatment because it isn't cost effective.
I made the mistake of discarding VHS tapes before checking the DVD's and in some cases found that the latter to be no better or even slightly poorer looking. Still, it has cleared some shelf space!
I was genuinely puzzled as to how a DVD transfer from a BBC master could look no better than a recording off analogue TV onto VHS and then dubbed to DVD-R
old films are generally recorded on film and the quality is pretty good. old tv shows i guess are recorded on tape, though not vhs, so the quality isn't always great. and worse all that noise is difficult to store digitally and uses up valuable bandwidth.
are seen as no better than modern day transmission by several women watchers..
The close ups of the Horses..the uniforms and the Brass instruments are hardly different to HD broadcasts from my HDDs this year at 12 feet away from 42Inch Pan TV..
I did not tell the watchers which was which because i was genuinely interested whether it was just me that thought that the VHS DVDs were in parts 'Superb'
I was going to input that possibly it is to do with the Upscalers in the Panasonic equipment?..What ones do the BBC use or have they their own patent i wonder?
Equally I suspect that the music into a cheapo PAN cinema system equally helps to fool the brain that it's real good stuff:D
My 'better looking' VHS DVD's v commercial DVD's are played back on a CRT and also my PC LCD screen, so no upscaling is taking place.
Not all of them look better than their commercial counterparts but in the vast majority of cases, there's very little difference. DVD is not really blowing me away.
This begs the question....are DVD's poorly mastered or did VHS technology really become formidable in its latter years?
On paper the specs quote VHS 240 lines. DVD 500. The (subjective) reality is somewhat different
The original UK transfer was in 4:3, and looked for all the world like it was taken from the RF out of a VCR at the mastering plant.
truly dreadful
Sadly we never got a really clean RF signal (always some slight ghosting) so home taped material is 'just OK'. That said, I have given up with buying DVD's of older TV shows as the quality of those DVD's is disgusting - I'm looking at you Bergerac series 1.
I know with audio, I've heard Vinyl that makes CD's sound detail deficient (and I'm not from the 'Vinyl is better than CD' camp)
I didn't watch Bergerac myself, but IIRC stuff like that was almost always shot on film. So in *theory* they could probably get quite good quality with a modern transfer of the show.
However, I'm guessing it's possible (and indeed likely in a lot of cases) that DVDs and present-day transmissions of some shows simply use the old/original film-to-videotape transfers made years ago. I've seen shows on ITV3 that this would explain- you can tell they were shot on film, but the picture quality has a "mediocre analogue" feel.
From what I've heard, the quality of film transfers years ago was much lower than it is today (e.g. colour balance, bleached highlights, general quality), probably a combination of available technology and the fact that people weren't as obsessive with picture quality back then.
With shows that have obsessive fanbases (e.g. Doctor Who) it's probably worth their time re-transferring the original elements and tidying things up, which they do. But I doubt this would be cost-effective for things like Bergerac and Last of the Summer Wine (which is a mix of video and film on the older shows anyway).
Of course, it's also possible that the original film wasn't that great in the first place. Some quickly-shot 16mm location footage for a run-of-the-mill show probably wouldn't have been Hollywood cinema quality anyway. (And wouldn't have had to have been if it was only intended for transfer to SD PAL videotape for consumption on a 24" wood-grained late-70s colour set or whatever...)
And maybe the original film might have deteriorated or been lost. But my gut reaction is that the Bergerac DVDs were done from old, mediocre transfers.
Given that (from what I've heard) Highlander 2 is so awful that even fans of the original- and later sequels- totally ignore it, the transfer quality is probably the least of that DVD's problems!
Also the '2 Entertain' company that brings out the disks seems to be content to issue edited versions so sometimes the stories don't even make sense.
About VHS, I was astonished to see that my recent VHS recording of an HD broadcast showed transmission artefacts - blocking on backgrounds, showing that 240 line resolution lossy and analogue tape is still outclassing HD in some respects.
Or that a modern big screen TV shows up what you could not see before.
Well, the irony is that sources with a lot of noise and analogue artifacts to start off with are going to suffer more from digital compression. This is because noise is (in effect) high-frequency detail that varies with every frame and ends up grabbing a lot of the bandwidth to digitise it, leaving less for what we actually want to see.
So you get a double whammy of noise looking bad in itself *and* its detrimental effect on digital compression on top of that.
Also, the kind of DVDs that are using low-quality sources are probably putting less effort into mastering the DVD too.
Do you mean it was actually recorded from a downscaled HD broadcast? Obviously, if it was recorded from a standard SD transmission (e.g. non-HD Freeview), the fact it was also available in HD would say nothing about the quality of the SD transmission.
Also, I'm not convinced that this says as much about the quality of digital HD (or SD) as you think. Blocking is a different style of artifact to the softening/low-resolution of VHS so less likely to be obscured by the latter in the way that (e.g.) a slightly soft HD transmission's defects would be covered up by the much greater softening of VHS.
To be honest I was suprised that VHS showed any issues from HD - but VHS is quite revealing in that respect.
I think you may be right.
I also think that Freeview is looking more and more soft these days (and I always though analogue was better). It couldn't be an attempt to flog everyone HD could it?
You would be wrong as the later is a greater jump in resolution.
How do the artifacts appear on the original transmission (i.e. before downscaling and recording)? AFAIK, VHS sharpens edges to compensate for its low resolution, but I would assume that this also enhances the hard edges of block artifacts in a way that it probably wouldn't do with analogue softness.
Well, yes, but we all know that digital TV uses block compression, and that it can be made visible if you (e.g.) sharpen or modify the picture enough.
The question is how the *original* transmission looked under normal viewing conditions before it was recorded to VHS. If the problems you described weren't clear there, then VHS isn't really showing up a deficiency of the HD transmission per se.
Froma technical point of view it is - but just from watching I find a bigger change from VHS to DVD than DVD to Bluray. I think this is because when DVD came out it made films look so much better than they were on VHS and then they now upscale well which is why a lot of people are not interested in getting Bluray
I think DVD can vary a lot, probbaly more so than VHS.
DVD's of cinematic film can look great and push the limits of the technology. DVD's of TV material (especially old stuff) is often just VHS quality (minus a bit of noise) on a plastic disc, to my eyes.
No 'TV' DVD's have impressed me. I still buy them though because I no longer want to own VHS.
Interesting....I didn't know that.