DVD - Observations.

[Michael Slowe]

I am glad that film makers at least are realising that DVD's are not the answer
to all our prayers. Convenient they may be and certainly, if one could be
sure that every one would play on almost every machine, we might
be prepared to suffer the slight quality loss from DV tape for the sake of
convenience. The problem is that people think that DVD's that we have done
for our films (or burnt ourselves) are going to be as good as the commercial
ones that we would rent of feature films, which do look perfect. The process
used for creating these DVD's is a totally different one and quite unavailable
to us. As for archiving I keep my films on DVCAM
mastered from the computer, as well as on Mini DV tape. The professionals
are relying on Digi Beta tape but are I believe concerned as to it's longevity.
Even film has caused concern with the Kodak Eastmancolor of the 50's and
60's losing it's colour. As a matter of interest Albert, I have had many
of my 16mm prints transferred
to Digi Beta and the DVCAM and Mini DV tapes that I have taken off the Beta
look brighter and sharper when
projected than the 16mm piints!
However, let us hope that the DVD position is clarified and improved fairly
soon so that for us, as regards
submitting and lending our films is concerned, it becomes standard. That
is of course until the ultimate is available, namely
a plastic card requiring no moving machinary to be read, contains all our
films!

Michael Slowe.

[Peter Thomlinson]

It seems to me to be an organised scam by all of the manufaturers of hardware,
consumables and software. They try and convince us that all of this technology
is perfect, when the truth is that it is all being rubbish. They don't want
the equipment to work, and they want your films, DV tapes and DVD's to pack
up as soon as possible, so you will spend more money and make them rich.
If the equipment and the discs were any good they would offer a lifetime
money back guarantee. But then they would be bust in ten days!!

Peter

[Michael Slowe]

No Peter,not for the first time you have mis understood the motives behind people's actions.
The current suppliers of both hardware and software are hamstrung by the decisions taken some time ago in an attempt to standardise the DVD format. They thought it important that a full commercial movie should fit on to a DVD disc and in order for this to be achieved a considerable degree of compression was required, hence the agreed MPEG2 standard.
With commercially made issues of films the encoding is done in a completely different way to the method used by us and the people who offer to encode our films. The resultant quality of the commercial "movies" is very good, ours very much less so. It is true that they are much better than VHS (thank goodness!) but not as good as DV tape. My earlier point was that the convenience probably outweighed the downside. But you are saying that the fact that they don't always play properly on all players is determined on purpose by the trade. No, the system was designed for commercial films, expensively encoded and manufactured, not for home encoding and burning of DV taped material. Mind you most of the DVD's we do are OK but it is the doubt that is so frustrating.

Michael Slowe.

[Colin Lamb]

Lets get real Guys!

We still watch the DVD on a standard TV with limited resolution and a DVD player bought at Asda (etc)and costing less than £50

A DVD still has a present maximum capacity of c9Gb and the encoding of a movie is still going to highly compress a 2 hour movie + the rubbish "extras" they keep sticking on the disk

I for one have seen many, many commercial movies whoses video quality is way less than those I produce.

Col Lamb

[Michael Slowe]

Colin Lamb, having just noticed your post of 23rd. December, can I ask what
MPEG2 compression software you use to give such good results? How can it
be superior to the multi multi scanning and sampling that is used for the
commercial DVD's produced of feature films?

Michael Slowe.