Jump to content

Upcoming DVD releases

AshC

By AshC
in UK Fan Forum

Recommended Posts

Sphinx Veteran

Sphinx

Posted
Posted
It would though.

 

The DVD MPEG-2 format compresses the footage in its own sweet way, which does noticeably reduce the quality of the footage. BLuRay's compression is a lot higher quality, so from the same original format, the Bluray will end up looking a bit better.

 

If the original footage was of a high quality, such as film stock or good broadcast tape formats, then the quality of the footage might actually look considerably better!

 

Film and tape are two different beasts though. When films get put on Blu Ray, a lot of work goes into transferring the original footage from (likely) a very large 35mm print. Old matches of Powers of Pain don't have that luxury - they were taped for television, not to be projected on large cinema screens.

Yes, but Loki's point is that the footage from the master tapes were still compressed on DVD in a way it wouldn't have to be on Blu Ray. They still wouldn't be anything resembling HD quality, but they could look better. In execution, I'm not sure if he'd be right -- I'm not sure how WWE's releases are authored, or what state the tapes from thirty years ago are in. But theoretically, the master tapes will look better than the DVD format allows. I think the real-world difference would be negligible. Archive WWE releases on Blu-ray are a rip-off aimed at people like Dillkid who thought all the WrestleManias were shot on 35mm film.

 

I noticed bad pixellation on Shawn Michaels' Heartbreak and Triumph DVD presumably because they tried fitting too much on. Either way, the compression caused that. With a BluRay, there's more space on the disc so they wouldn't have to compress it so much and thus you wouldn't get the pixellation. And that was the Cena vs. Michaels Raw match I'd watched when I noticed that, so not even old footage.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
  • Replies 1.4k
  • Created
  • Last Reply
Sphinx Veteran

Sphinx

Posted
Posted

The original file of the recording will be excessive of the 9GB that a dual layer DVD offers. Someone will know more specifically than me, but it'll likely be tens-hundreds of GBs as it will lossless. Much like an album at 320kbps MP3 compression may be 100MB whilst the FLAC (lossless - no compression) version may be closer to 500MB. That's why you can cram about 30 downloaded MP3 songs onto a single CD (700MB) but retail releases won't as they're ensuring you get the best sound quality.

 

In short, the video on DVD is compressed so you may experience minor imperfections whereas a BluRay has more capacity and thus less compression can be obtained and put onto disc.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Sphinx Veteran

Sphinx

Posted
Posted

The resolution stays the same regardless. What's being compressed, I believe though someone might want to chip in, is the bitrate. I think the bitrate is how smooth it runs and perhaps how fine the image quality is. Again, it's not a massive difference but I could notice it. Sometimes, if you pause whilst there are camera flashes, you can see blocky pixels. If you were to do the same on the BluRay version of it, I'd say you wouldn't see that so bad. It's obviously not just in that instance you'll see pixels. I think it also depends on how the disc was authored but I don't know much about that.

 

Edit: are you being funny italicising 'you'?

Link to comment
Share on other sites
hallicks Veteran

hallicks

Posted
Posted

Hang about. There's bound to be some monkey business going on when mastering NTSC footage for blu ray. Probably tape-to-film, then they can TK it and do a pan and scan to get in widescreen. Or some megabucks interpolater/upres-er that makes non HD stuff look more spangly. On Austin's DVD, the early 90's WCW footage they had looked very filmic.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
King Pitcos Grand Master

King Pitcos

Posted
Posted

I'd be very surprised if WWE were using a film intermediate or anything like telecine to create an effect on old videos. They'd more likely just slap a film look filter on stuff.

 

They do use pan and scan (well, tilt and scan) style cropping on old footage to make it look widescreen in the documentaries, but for the matches on the extras, I think they just put black borders on the sides.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
  • Paid Members
JNLister Grand Master

JNLister

Posted
  • Paid Members
Posted
Hang about. There's bound to be some monkey business going on when mastering NTSC footage for blu ray. Probably tape-to-film, then they can TK it and do a pan and scan to get in widescreen. Or some megabucks interpolater/upres-er that makes non HD stuff look more spangly. On Austin's DVD, the early 90's WCW footage they had looked very filmic.

 

Completely off topic, but does anyone else remember when one British trader had an NTSC convertor that made the PAL copies look like they were on film? Slamboree 94 and November to Remember 95 were both that way.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Loki Grand Master

Loki

Posted
Posted
Not to get into a battle of wits with you Sphinx, but compressed from what? See above. If shot 720 x 480, where are you expecting this extra data to come from?

 

I dont think you understand what digital compression is. It's got nothing to do with resolution, it's a way of making a data file smaller. That's what mp3 does, it takes a 25 meg wav file and compresses it to 3 or 4 meg. The samplerate/bitrate of the file remains the same, but you lose some quality as the compression works by looking for patterns within the binary file and replicating them. In practice, this means that the overall quality of the recording is decreased.

 

This is what mpeg-2 does for DVD. With Blu-ray, there is minimal compression to get the higher resolution video down to a size to fie on the disk. Therefore working from an identical original format video, a BluRay will always look better if created properly.

 

Admittedly, if the original footage is poor enough (or already compressed) the difference will be negligible. So if you took a DVD and put it straight onto a BluRay, it wouldn't look any better.

 

But even old analogue broadcast formats of the type most wrestling footage has survived on, is better than DVD. So a BluRay will look better, if that's what you're after.

 

 

 

...

 

 

What always interests me, is where they get their really high quality old footage from. There's a clip of a be-robed Ric Flair from the 80s spinning round, that they often use. It's really sharp - has to be from proper film stock. So in amongst all the WCW/NWA stuff they must have got some really good quality promo source material.

 

I'd love to spend a week in the WWE archives.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
hallicks Veteran

hallicks

Posted
Posted
I'd be very surprised if WWE were using a film intermediate or anything like telecine to create an effect on old videos. They'd more likely just slap a film look filter on stuff.

 

They do use pan and scan (well, tilt and scan) style cropping on old footage to make it look widescreen in the documentaries, but for the matches on the extras, I think they just put black borders on the sides.

 

Damn, they got me then. I was watching on Netflix, but it was on a plasma at the highest quality stream. The footage of Austin and Pillman in WCW looked really good. They didn't have the matches on netflix, unfortunately. You're probably right, it'll just be a regrain or something.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...