Poor DVD's quality from major studios? possible, whether, better, movies

andy

Divx HD trailer (1280x720 3.5Mbit bitrate) plus cinema craft 2.7 gived me better final footage quality then 50% oryginal dvd's I've ever seen.
Does it possible? That sounds strange and means that major authoring studios don't make good products.

Sad, isn't it

Hmm, what's worse is the quality of movies coming from the major studios lately.  Forget video quality, where did all the good screenwriters go...

For some DVD Videos, this seems very true. I cant gauge whether that is subjective or done on purpose (by studios) to give out below max quality video info.

There must be a reason left for a special/superbit edition, don't you think?

There must be a reason left for a special/superbit edition, don't you think?

YES. This is probably correct answer for this question. If we don't know what's it about, it's about money

remember you're coming from a HD master (albeit a lossy compressed one with a fair bit of the noise removed).

most DVD authoring is done from (SD) digibeta tapes, and occasionally worse.  true, new movies will have been put on SD video via a Datacine machine which natively works in greater than HDTV.

i guess we're got a problem of subjective quality - for example if i were making a DVD, i'd put a vertical blur on my footage so it doesn't shimmer annoyingly on an interlaced screen (which, remember, 99% of the DVD watching world still has).  when comparing the filtered and unfiltered footage on a computer screen, obviously the unfiltered one will look better.

as for older movies (esp the '80s, as movies before then tend to get remastered more readily), well they can often come off analog betacam, LD or similar, and are usually transferred using mechanical telecine techniques which will have less dynamic range and much less vivid and accurate colours compared to what digital telecine machines will give you.

also remember that probably all the authoring out there is outsourced from the major studios rather than done in-house.  this means they have to work with what the studio sends them.  for example, in PAL land we're far too often sent a crappy NTSC master tape and expected to convert it ourselves.  deadlines and budget being what they are, this means there's simply no way of getting a really good copy before deadline (or if they send a quot;betterquot; copy, it turns out to be just as bad).  for some reason, retailers are VERY unforgiving when it comes to late release dates.

phew... well, that's all the possible reasons i can think of right now.

oh, another one:  CCE 2.7 is quite new and cutting-edge.  authoring houses will be using hardware encoders that are probably several years old, and so they wont be able to keep up with a software encoder that has the benefit of being able to work in less-than-realtime, on a source with the user's choice of downsampling algo and denoise filters.

Yes. That's probably true. If you have good source even in house you can make very good quality dvds.
But I'm still disapointed of many dvds quality. Even if they aren't made by major studies they should looks generally better. I think that quot;ultimatebillyquot; had right.well, i can't speak for the major studios, but the only authoring house i really have experience with barely thinks beyond the release date, let alone plans for some l33t special edition.

though for some titles, when a better master appears there'll be a special edition DVD (think Evangelion Platinum edition, or Ninja Scroll 10th anniversary edition...).  usually these are the decision of the studios.

i agree that there's a lot of crap out there.  my copy of Baraka is absolutely disgusting - letterboxed 2.35:1, and that transferred through some kinda analog composite, because it's blurry as f and full of rainbows.  soundtrack is plain old Dolby ac3.  also, Super Size Me is a little ugly to look at - shot on NTSC, transferred to film via blend-deinterlace, then telecined to PAL and sped up... makes me want to puke (well, that might be more to do with the content of the film...).

[edit]

Fewtch:  you summed it up, dude.  Hollywood sucks so bad these days... i can't believe the lack of imagination there.  quot;uuugh, let's get an ex-wrestler and some poor fat CGI geeks and make a billion dollars.quot;  (btw, i'm a skinny CGI geek).

not just hollywood but also some of these smaller companies from Europe that release dvds aswell.
heres an example, Studio Canal.

here in Aus they release quite a few older movies(such as from the 80's) and pretty cheap. thats good and for the price you dont really expect any extras, which is also good because the most you usually get is the original trailer. however they tend to also not have any subtitles or if they do its a foreign one. sorry but why the hell would i want the netherlands subs on 1 dvd and spanish on another and no english on either?

even worse they released stargate:the ultimate edition at a price more expensive than practically every new hollywood flick. good points, has both theatrical and directors versions on 2 dvd. bad points, colour is sometimes too light and sometimes too dark. and you guessed it, absolutly no subs at all. ye great quot;ultimatequot; edition.

before anyone wonders why i make a big deal out of the subs let me say that my wife is partially deaf in 1 ear and has been told that eventually  she will be fully deaf in that ear. at the moment she has the tv turned up pretty loud to watch things. subs will important to her and me in the future. with studio canal's policy quite a few older films will not be really watchable by her(easily at least) eventually.