Just a thought. By putting over 2 hrs. of footage & extras in the DVDs, aren't they sacrifying quality vs quantity? There seems to be a lot of pixelation in some scenes of their recent releases.
Not with a dual layer DVD. A single layer DVD will hold 2hrs 13 minutes with average compression. A dual layer DVD will hold nearly double that with no problems.
Anabolic/Diabolic used to do their early DVD's on single layer (but dual sided) discs. Their 2hr 19min movies were a little overcompressed. They would put all the extras on the flip side.
It's usually overcompression. But pixellization can also be caused by poor encoding. I believe that good encoders go through multiple encoding/compression processes to ensure a good picture.
A "cut-rate" encoder may not go thorough as many processes or they may not have state of the art compression software.
I think like tomcat14 that it is a quantity problem. They put to much footage and extras on the disc, and therefore must go down with the compression to put all material on one disc.
I have a DVD player which shows the actual bitrate. On Anabolic or Diabolic discs the rate is mostly between 3000 and 4000 Mbits/s, but to get a really good picture you need a rate which is permanently over 5000 MBits/s. If this is not the case you will see pixelation especially when there are fast movements or cuts in the movie.
Look at Jules Jordan's WOAD #3 and Invasion: There are two discs with the movie on the first disc and all extras on the second disc. From the total length of both discs together, Evil Angel could simply put all extras on one disc. But if they are doing that, they must go down with the compression and finally end in overcompression which results in pixelation.
So companies who really care about the customer put the extra material on a second disc, when the movie and the extras together are more than 3 hours long. Until approximately 3 hours you can put the footage on one disc without ending in pixelation. That's the experience I've made over the years with both mainstream and adult DVDs.
depending on the encoding algorithm the more you compress an object the more original data is lost. (Seriously, English is my first language) The data is replaced with approximations and consequently the image doesn't look as good.
Patience is a virtue, but who wants to be virtuous? 4283 Posts 4/00
Posted - Oct 15 2004 : 12:39AM
Frigo - I know that you can look at the bitrate on Sony DVD players, as well as some other brands. I just like Sony's display, so when I want to look at the bitrate or layer change information, I usually look at the discs on a Sony player.
camaban - i like your analysis of compression rates and encoding. You're pretty close about the amount of minutes we have on our discs. Unless the source material picture quality is amazingly good, we try to never put more than 3 hours 15 minutes on our discs, give or take a couple of minutes.
A Harman Kardon DVD-21. Nice Player. Very good picture, very good audio (there's a Wolfson DAC in it), useful features (like showing the actual bitrate) and a real NTSC to PAL-50 converter, not only PAL-60.
Youre right Camaban. I just got Vertigo's "F to the A" & the picture is superb & the bit rate is over 5000Mbits/s. Diabolic/Anabolic's bitrate is half of that. There's a clear difference in picture quality. Please producers/authorers, can you get more quality in your DVDs?
most modern mpeg-2 codecs that should be considered for commercial use rarely, rarely "fail", it's usually human error responsible somewhere else on the chain. you could probably get hired being some kind of resourceful ape to mix audio and video streams-people who know what they're doing aren't hurting for work and are probably snatched up by mainstream studios.
still, i think it's hilarious that bill could tell pxp how to fix their qc issues. what's not hilarious is that after repeating it for 6 months, consumers never saw any benefits from the advice.
Showpiece 2 - review by Captain Jack
Posted - Oct 9 2004 : 4:55PM