It's not as if I've been losing sleep over this, but I'm curious about a few things concerning how a videotape becomes a DVD. Maybe someone who has experience can help me out with these quesions.
1)I assume that most studios contract out the mastering of their DVDs. Assuming, then, that everything is being done by "professionals" what's the biggest reason for such wide differences in quality between the DVDs released by competing companies? Are the big differences in hardware, skills, or both?
2) Some DVDs don't even have a time code, or working chapters. Short of untrained personnel, is there any other reason why this could happen? It would seem that if you're going through the expense of trasferring the image to DVD, it wouldn't be anymore costly to include the very basics.
3) Lastly, I've seen a lot of DVDs (particularly from Vivid) where the corners of the images are rounded off as if they were shot with a fish-eye lens. What causes that, and how hard is it to avoid?
I hope I haven't regressed into a rant, but I am curious about this kind of stuff.
Patience is a virtue, but who wants to be virtuous? 4283 Posts 4/00
Posted - Oct 29 2000 : 7:28PM
1) For all of the reasons you guessed and more... Some studios simply pay A LOT more and maybe care more about their product. It's hard to find a skilled DVD authorer who doesn't charge an absolute fortune (porn companies don't profit as much on DVD releases as most people think we do -- profits start as low as $3000. per title, and probably average about $5000 to $15000), not to mention a skilled authorer who will work on porn at all. Some of the other problems come about with replication... same story. Price and finding someone good who will work on porn. Many replicators have been told by their mainstream clients that if they start accepting adult jobs, they will lose their (more lucrative) mainstream ones.
The same goes for within the adult companies. Most of us who are working in the DVD depts. were part of the adult industry before DVD came along, and are learning as we go. Again, to find someone to hire full-time who's experienced would be way above a porn company's budget and/or not possible to find someone willing to take a job in our industry. I have done my best to talk to some friends here and there that I have met at some of the smaller mainstream studios when I come up against problems.
2. Same answer. I have NO idea why a DVD wouldn't show timecode.
3. To illustrate my answers to 1 and 2, same... Because Evil Angel hasn't had that happen on our discs, I wouldn't have had a reason to try to find an answer.
Believe me, I wish I could find a REALLY knowledgable person fitting the above criteria to help me troubleshoot and improve the DVDs I work on.
Tricia, thanks for all the information. I've always been curious. You definitely answered my questions. In fact, I suspected a lot of what you said was true. The technical side of things, I suspect, will be improved across the board soon enough. You would know better than me, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the DVD format makes buyers our of renters. During the vhs only days, for instance, I never bought adult tapes, but now I won't think twice about paying for an adult DVD. I'm not so sure why, though. Maybe it's because they're so shiney. At any rate, if DVDs start to sell better, then the quality, I'm sure, will keep improving.
Again, thanks for taking so much time to answer my questions.
DVDs are not required to have time encoding. It's good to have, but it isn't required- some regular studios will have it only during the movie itself, any trailers or other material on the disc will just display "PLAY" on Pioneer players. Artifacting is the biggest problem with smaller-operation DVDs. I've seen a few porn discs that look pretty bad (dancing pixels on the wall). This doesn't happen on all discs, but was one of the reasons I was a bit apprehensive about the format coming out. There's definitely a LOT more porn on DVD than there ever was on laserdisc, and at much lower prices too! Porn laserdiscs listed for $59.99, I bought a bunch of clearance ones at Tower for the unheard-of low price of $24.99 each! With that in mind I'll buy almost anything on DVD under $20, but some companies do need to watch the quality!
DVD Authoring is some hard ass shit.. especially considering the current state of the software..
i think by now.. there is better software.. but when it first started.. what was there? some shitty software.. it did the job.. but you had to put a lot of work into it to make it good.
if you do a search on mini-DVD
it is a format were you put DVD authored content onto a CD-R or CD-RW and you can then play them on your DVD player or DVD rom. So far I myself have made two mini-DVDs.. the first was a pain and doesn't comply to the DVD format standard.. ;( the second one took me awhile to comply to the standard and finally play on my player..
as of now. the software (DVD-ROM) has caught up to accept more non-DVD compliant standards.. as for DVD-players.. they handle alot.. some of the hardware can handle CD-Rs...but when i had made my mini-DVDs...the players at the time could only handle CD-RW...
but if you stick your DVD into a DVD-ROM drive!
look at all the .VOB files.. notice that almost all of them are the same size?
well to be DVD compliant..the size of your file must be divisable by a certain number! and the size of your file is largely dependent on bit rate..
higher bit rate.. the higher quality of the file.. (unless the source is of shit quality..then the higher bit rate is just wasted space/bandwidth)
so to answer your question.
tricia has done a good job in answering it.
a person willing to "tarnish" his/her reputaion and spend the time to make the porn look good?
rare.
Time codes? i hate that! i hate not being able to move to the spot on the DVD i want..
why doesn't it happen? probably poorly trained personal.. from what i remember from mini-DVD authoring... all you really have to do is click on one check box.. (allow time searching)
well thats all i gor for now.. anyone wanna disagree with me.. go ahead...
OK, here's a related question I've meant to ask from people in the know.
Why do so many VCA DVD's have this jerky-motion thing? When you watch one of those frame by frame, you can see that there are always two consecutive frames that are basically identical. This causes a noticeable jerkiness to fast movements.
This "feature" is in every Michael Ninn DVD I have, and in Café Flesh 2 and DMJ 6 also. But it is not in Raw, or what was it, Torn.
I don't think I have seen this in DVD's from other studios.
The issue you have identified is specific to an editing effect used by Michael Ninn and Antonio Passolini on the movies you mentioned. These effects are used to give the video a more "Film-like" quality. The net result is the strobe effect you have identified. This is not a DVD or compression issue, but a video edting technique.
All of Michael Ninn's movies use some form of "Cine-Look", but Antonio Passolini uses the effect intermitently, so you will not find it on BLISS or RAW or in the upcoming NEW WAVE HOOKERS 6.
In all the dual layer porno DVDs I've seen, the second layer is always put on a separate title (not chapter). This tends to screw up fast forwarding and rewinding around that point, as you can't fast rewind to a previous title.
None of my dual layer mainstream titles do this, so I am wondering why my porno ones do. Is it cheaper to stick the second layer on a separate title? Or maybe it is difficult to do a layer change within a title, and porno masterers don't know how?
