I picked up some Elegant Angel and Zero Tolerance titles this weekend only to find that when they were authored the guy didn't know how to do it properly.
Two titles in Question from EA are Flowers Squirt Shower and Anal Princess Diaries. The motion is jerky as a result of improper conversion. The trouble with movies shot in 24P is that in order to get the 30 frames for NTSC you need to add 6 frames to the original. The main problem is that it is converted from Progressive to Interlaced, which results in jerky motion. It needs to be kept as Progressive!
I've noticed this problem on ZT movies too. However, it only exists on some scenes (obviously where a 24P camera was used).
It's a shame that high profile companies like EA and ZT are putting out a poor quality product. Any DVD Author with any proper experience would know how to do these movies properly.
If it's to conserve bandwidth when shooting in HD because the DV codec can't handle it, maybe they should hold off on HD until better gear comes down in price.
Anyway, those companies aren't the only ones to deliver sub-par video quality.
Wicked's new-ish feature, Cuddly Pines, is 'shot and mastered in high definition' and it looks utter pants. But then Wicked consistently fucks up their video, and with Devinn gone, they're straight onto my no-buy list after this Cuddly Pines shite.
Even Pirates has some obvious compression problems, but nowhere near as bad as Cuddly Pines.
And Pirates doesn't have Cuddly Pines' ghosting effect, which looks like is it might possibly be another sign of a problematic frame-rate conversion. The ghosting effect is somewhat similar to the one in Comstock's first try, Marie & Jack. Perhaps Tony can explain what causes that.
And anyone who knows the difference between framerates, pulldown, interlace, editing, encoding and authoring would know that you don't know what you're talking about.
I have noticed that Zero Tolerance DVDs tend to be blurry during quick motion segments (like the girl furiously beating the stud's cock to climax). It's always puzzled me as to how a company that puts such quality and effort into their product has this as an issue.
Yet, 3rd Degree DVDs -- made by the exact same people -- are consistently cleaner.
In particular, the video quality in Who's Your Daddy? #1 is just awful. Blurry and pixelated to boot.
Is it possible that I've been viewing boot-leg product? I live in Central Florida. My understanding is that this area is particularly bad with boot-legged product. The stroke-shop I usually rent from was innundated with boot-legged VHS product. I was hoping this would get better with DVDs having taken over.
Excuse me? TonyC, I respect your knowledge, you know your stuff. However, the manner in which you dismiss my experience is quite insulting. I use to author my own DVD's, I know what i'm talking about. I actually edited my post, to remove the jargon...However reading it back now I realise I wrote it badly.
Technically, you are in no need of experience. However, may I suggest you work on your attitude.
Unless you're watching DVDs shot on a Sony 900, Viper, or similar, the video streams you're seeing are not converted. The camera lays the image to tape as pulldown/interlaced 29.97 video. No consumer camera, not the DVX100 or the Sony HVD camera, lay 24P video to tape.
Depending on the camera and what pulldown setting is used at acquistion, it is possible to extract 24P video footage from the interlaced, 29.97 video footage. That's an editor's job and has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with authoring.
Once extracted, this 24P footage can be edited at 24fps, and the resulting 24fps (23.98 really) footage can be encoded into a 24fps MPEG2 stream that is 100% DVD compliant. Again, this has absolutely nothing to do with authoring. There is nothing an author can do with encoded footage other than aranged it as an element with the program he is authoring. He can't change the frame rate, the interlace or pulldown, or encoding quality of an MPEG2 stream.
More over, unless you are watching a 24P disc on a system capable of displaying 24P material, it will be converted to 3:2 pulldown, interlaced 29.97 material on its way out of the DVD player and on to the television set. Very few people have such systems, so even a perfectly shot, edited, encoded and authored DVD will be seen as 3:2 pulldown, interlaced 29.97.
RE: Attitude
You're the fellow who said "Any DVD Author with any proper experience would know how to do these movies properly." Before you start throwing around what "anyone would know how to do" maybe you should spend a little time getting to know the process.
Yes, I got a little bit carried away with my post and as previously mentioned I was pissed with the quality I had spent my money on. My attitude, or your comeback attitude is the not the issue here however.
Re: Video
As you say, the video can be converted back to 24P. I'm not sure how things work in the porn industry, but I do my editing and authoring together so i see them as one stage. I know its not the correct terminology, so excuse my mistake.
I'm not disputing who has to do it. If thats the editor, then fine. The point is a IVTC stage needs to be added to remove the jerkyness (or correct pulldown applied). I'm more questioning how the quality control of movies is so poor nobody seems to notice.
New Sensations do a fine job of porting their work to DVD.
A question, Tony. I took a couple of screenshots of Squirtwoman 2 and Marie & Jack , that illustrate the problem: linky
Notice how, whenever there's motion (Cytherea's foot), there's a clearly visible ghosting effect. When the movie is running, it flickers like crazy. It can make a movie damn near unwatchable for particularly picky individuals like sanchez_1960 and myself.
I can't tell you about the Cyntherea footage. I can tell you about mine:
In the case of M&J, you're conflating two different optical effects, neither of which are a problem.
The first is interlace. Interlace is a normal phenominon of NTSC material. Every frame of NTSC material is composed of two interlaced fields. By interlaced we mean that the first field is every odd numbered scan line (1,3,5,7, ...477,479) and the second field is every even numbered scan line (2,4,6,8... 478,480). These fields are recorded once ever 1/60th of a second, leading some people to erroneously label normal NTSC video as 60i .
Because the two field that make up each frame are not acquired at the exact same instant, the difference between the position of the subject at the moment of acquistion will be rendered as different positions in the respective fields that make up the frame. The higher the motion of the subject (fast action) the greater the different. The jagged edges are sometime referred to as zippers. This difference between fields exists in all NTSC video that is shot 30i. If you post high resolution screen shots, the individual scan lines of each field will be readily apparent. (30p does not have this scan line phenomenon, but is seldom used because of it's unfamiliar motion signature.)
The second phenomenon you see on M&J is the result of a creative choice. By shooting at a high shutter speed, the motion signature is different from the motion signature of the standard 1/60th of second shutter speed. I like the look of it, and as the photography in M&J has earned almost univeral praise, I'm satisfied that it worked well enough. I take it that you didn't care for the look and that contributed to your 1-star review of the film. Well you know what they say about opinions...
24P footage, whether shot on film, HD, or the DVX100 confuses the issues futher. Somewhere between the moment of acquistioin and final display on the home viewers NTSC television set, the 24fps progressive image sequence has to be converted to 30fps interlaced image sequence. This process is called pulldown. There are different pulldown schemes, but the one used for presentation of film on tape is 3:2 and that's the one we're used to seeing. Other pulldown schemes, like the 3:2:2:3 pulldown that can be used on the DVX100, look slighly off – especially during high-motion sequences.
Expectation of motion signature is a tricky business. Video can now be shown as 30i, 30p, 24 w/3:2 pulldown, etc. Each one has peculiarities in how they need to be shot, and each one has a particular "look and feel". Quasar likes to shoot 30i, and has been both praised and savaged over the way his footage looks. I had to through out a bunch of early landscape footage I shot on 16 because my camera operator was panning and the wrong speed to mesh properly with the 3:2 pulldown and the resulting video footage was "judderty" (another fancy techical term).
The problem is that your presuming that the pulldown is the source of the problem that you're seeing. Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn't.
Perhaps there's no problem at all, as in Kperv's dislike of how M&J looks, but the blurring blending the IVTS applies to the film makes it more pleasing to your taste. (Like some kid using and an EQ to crank the base on his favorite tune to it rox hrdr.)
I will tell you this: interlaced material, whether originally shot 30i, or film that's been telecined with 3:2 pulldown looks like shit on computer displays, especially on LCD displays, especially if it's blow-up to full screen (which is larger than the source pixel array) and especially if it's high motion footage. In this case, it's the high resolution of the display showing the intrisic limitaton of the original delivery method. IVTS or other blending/bluring/scaling/interpolation may reduce the appearence of these limitations, but they're not adding any new information. In fact, they're reducing the amount of information.
Yes, ofcourse I'm presuming its the reason for it. I've only IVTC'd one movie. I don't think its a dislike at all, to my eyes it looks wrong. The trouble is, i've shown this discs to friends and they couldn't spot a problem. It was only when I pointed it out that they went "oh yeah, that looks awful"
I suggest you pick up Flower's Squirt Shower and then you can comment on this yourself. KPerv refers to those titles, I know what he's talking about but the problem with Flowers Squirt Shower etc is different.
Yup, Tony, I'm well aware of the interlace problem and the awful 'zipper' effect it creates on PC displays. Those screenshots were both de-interlaced, and the results of the de-interlacing algorithms I've ever tried, while far from perfect, have never looked like those pictures.
The ghosting effect did contribute to my dislike of M&J. But only a little. The major issues I had with it were the jerky camera movements, close-ups and editing. All subjective things, reflected in the different rating I gave it compared to other reviewers. Yes, I do know what they say about opinions.
I would have thought my dislike for the ghosting more objective and/or universally shared. I'm a little surprised that it was intentional, and that anyone would like the effect. Ah, well. Opinions. And, anyway, it's your movie.
I still can't imagine it could have been intentional in Squirtwoman 2 , as it's use of very strong, almost glaring, lighting, made the effect very unpleasant to watch. Funnily enough, Squirtwoman 1 was almost the exact opposite, with its subdued lighting and dull, drab colours. Squirtwoman 1 had the halo/chroma shift problem instead though. I haven't seen any other newer Elegant Angel titles (I think SW2 was my very last gonzo), but it sounds like they've found yet another way to f*ck up a DVD with Flower's Squirt Shower .
As for Quasar's movies. The few I've seen have all had somewhat dull colours, similar to Squirtwoman 1's and several other gonzos. But apart from that, I can't recall having any other problems with them. If the Zero Tolerance titles, sanchez_1960 mentioned as having problems, are Quasar's, I may have just been lucky.
As I don't have a progressive scan TV, and don't watch movies on my PC, I like the 30i look. And personally speaking, he's definitely one of the best, possibly even the best camera man in gonzo today. That is, of course, strictly my opinion. Quasar's camera style has been slammed for not getting in close enough (for the gape?), by a couple of posters in the past.
The reason that the "ghosting" is not universally disliked is because the qhosting is a result of your attempt to de-interlace stills from high motion 30i material. There is no such ghosting on the DVD.
There was when I watched it on my regular TV. It flickered badly when the movie played, and when I paused the picture to see why, the ghosting was there.
I hav'nt seen those titled , but it's look like a bad encoding process. Before I opened Anarchy and Python, I used to author Redlight and Platinumx and alot of the major companies. The movie quality was extremely clear. On a fast moving scenes, smoke and running water we always encode it in a high bit rate (5.5-6.5)or double encoding(The movie was encoded twise) to give the high quality. The problem is authoring, since we all use the same replicator and I never had a complant about video quality or replication (unless it was a bootleg copy)which now I have four lawsuits pending in Greece, Canada, Israel and italy. Sadly, some studios will pay the standard price for authoring. You can have the hottest babes in a movie, but if the authoring is bad, it means shit!!!!! But than again, you have companies that sell 4-hr for .55 cents and major New Releases for $4. How about raising the price that they can afford good authoring. Just as a note I am not familiar with ZT or EA product so I can't comment on their quality.
Your TV is soft. Put the DVD in a computer. Grab a frame. Don't de-interlace!
For example, if you look at this frame from the same passage where you grabbed your, you'll see those zippers around ever thing that has changed position between the scan for the first field and the second field.
linky again. While the double JPEG compression hurts the image, I certainly can't deny the ghost effect fits perfectly with the de-interlacing. I stand humbly corrected.
So it's back to the shutter speed. How does it give that flicker I noticed, and loathed, on M&J (and SW2 if it's the same cause)?
I still can't figure out is why the de-interlacing of my regular DVD player doesn't give the same visible ghosting, when I pause a flicker-free movie (porn or not) while there is fast movement on the screen. Any ideas? I'm honestly curious.
To explain this, the first thing I'd ask you to do is go have a look at the battle footage in Saving Private Ryan and some of the combat footage from Gladiator . You'll see the same "strobey" look. So then the question is, why does a faster shutter speed do that?
Under normal circumstances, film is shot at 1/48 of a second. This exposure length is caused by a 180 shutter passing over the gate every time a frame of film is stopped, which happens 24 times a second. See the relation ship? 180 is half a circle; 1/48th is half of 24. Video is normal shot at 1/60th, which has the same relationship to the video frame rate of 30fps. If you look a a still frame shot at this speed, you'll see quite of bit of motion blur in moving objects, because 1/48th (or 1/60th) is not nearly fast enough to freeze action.
We're accustomed to the "look" that this degree of motion blur produces, and accept it as the way that things 'should' look. But it's not the only shutter speed at which film or video can be shot. Using a different shutter speed gives a different degree of motion blur, and that gives the footage a different look and feel.
So then why would a DP choose a different shutter speed?
In the case of BoB, the shutter speed was choose to mimic the look of the Eyemo camera, a 35mm combat camera used on WWII. The distinctive look of the Eyemo's narrow shutter angle contributes to the feel of authenticty and intensity in SPR. The same look was used Gladiator , and while it doesn't really make the footage more "authentic" it does give it a feel that contributes to the overall effect of the combat sequences.
I like the effect in those movies, and mimicced it M&J by ratchetting up the electronic shutter of the video cameras we used because I wanted the sex scene to have a distinctly different 'look and feel', especially as compared to the interview. It has the added benefit of forcing the camera's apeture wide open, which helps control depth of field on 'prosumer' cameras, which have such tiny CCDs and correspondingly short lenses.
In Xana and Dax I went the other direction. I shot 30p, but slowed the shutter to 1/30. That gives the sex scene in X&D it's own look, distinct from M&J. Now we're shooting sex on film, with a pure 24P image chain for both the film and video interviews. Now, even though the sex and interviews are sharing the same frame rate, they're distinguished by the look of film (the sex) versus the look of video (the interviews).
Of course everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I would respectfully suggest that your one-star assessment of M&J is based more on how far the film is from your expectations of what porn is, can be, and should be – both creatively and technically - than it is on any shortcomings (which is not to say the film is not without its shortcomings) in either respect.
Aha! [insert light bulb blinking on] So that is what you're really getting at when you say, 'film' look.
Thanks for taking the time to spell it out. It really is much appreciated.
I hope I haven't delayed the release of your next movie. Loraine would have my head.
Most definitely. My reviews are entirely based on my personal opinion of what constitutes 'good porn'. Also, I always read any review (movie, book, ...) with an implied great big "IMHO" on the part of the reviewer. Doesn't everyone?
M&J simply happens to be about as far removed from my porn tastes as I can imagine any straight, non-rough, non-fetish porn movie could get. It's not just the technical visuals. I just don't care for mixing the interview and 'action' segments. Can't get more subjective than that. No biggie. Other opinions of M&J are readily available. And didn't you say my review apparently sparked a surge in sales?
So, you're using different looks for each of your movies? Cute. Have you had any feedback on the currently released ones, as to which look is most popular?
Side note: I've seen neither Saving Private Ryan nor Gladiator . None of their trailers appealed to my tastes.
I bitched about this a while ago... I don't like it at all, and when played in slo-mo it's horrible. I've seen worse examples of choppy porn but that was in mainstream cable porn.
I can say with a good deal of certainty dear Kperv that I will not be the only one coming after you if you distract Mr Comstock from his higher calling life - namely to make me stroke material -- the momentum behind the Damon and Hunter fangirls is quite energetic to say the least. You were warned
