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August 2005, Week 2

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Subject:
From:
Leo Enticknap <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Tue, 9 Aug 2005 19:37:48 +0100
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Jeremy Butler writes:

>(my favorite player: Cyberlink's PowerDVD, for Windows;

It's certainly not mine! It's a dreadful memory
hog, saps processor time and makes Windows
unstable, in my experience. More importantly (as
I have a AMD XP+3400 64-bit processor, 5gb of RAM
and 4 250gb HDDs in my PC, system resources
aren't really an issue for me), its 'colour
profile' feature seriously distorts the original
transfer, especially as it's set to a mode which
is euphemistically called 'vivid' by
default. Try watching a '30s 3-strip feature in
'vivid' mode and you practically need
sunglasses! Windows Media Player with a system
MPEG-2 codec installed (if you Google 'MPEG-2
codec', you'll find lots of free ones for
download), is just as good a player, it doesn't
bugger about with the luminance and chrominance
properties of the original transfer (well, not
any more than your graphics card and monitor
already have done), and it's free. If grabbing
frames is your main use for PC DVD playback
software, Intervideo WinDVD offers a far more
versatile interface than Power DVD, pasting the
frames to a visible clipboard interface rather
than leaving you to hunt for them using Windows
Explorer and then automatically giving them a meaningless filename.

Power DVD is also a ripoff: even the basic
version costs around £20, and if you want the
plug-ins for Dolby 5.1 or DTS playback, you're
looking at shelling out even more. If it hadn't
come bundled with a burner, I certainly wouldn't
be willing to buy it at anything like that
price. WinDVD is about half the price, and
includes Dolby 5.1 functionality out of the box.

Darryl Wiggers writes:

>An earlier recommendation to convert to dvd
>first is not recommended as dvd is a compression
>format and you want to maintain a high-quality file throughout.

Unless you're starting from DVCAM or Digibeta,
the lossy compression of the DVD standard won't
make the slightest bit of difference to the
quality of an image which started life on
VHS. You're still going to get 720 x 576
pixels. Just as long as you encode at no less
than an average of 4-5mbps (on a set-top
recorder, that's the option which gives you 120
minutes on a 4.7gb disc), that's as much
definition as you're ever going to get out of
bogstandard VHS. The only other thing to note is
that it's always preferable to connect your VHS
VCR to your DVD recorder or video capture card
using an s-video cable or Euroconnector which is
wired for y/c, NOT composite. If your VHS VCR
only has a composite output, then the best you're
going to get out of it is roughly equivalent to
23mbps on a DVD, which equates to the 'four
hours' setting for a 4.7gb disc using a set-top recorder.

Adobe Photoshop has a deinterlace function which
cleans up video frame grabs a little bit, but you
might decide that it's not paying £300ish just
for that. The bottom line is that VHS is a very
low quality format, from which any frame grab
enlarged to more than about 5cm square is going
to look fuzzy and nasty, however you capture it and manipulate it afterwards.

Leo

Leo Enticknap
Curator, Northern Region Film & Television Archive
Middlesbrough, UK
www.nrfta.org.uk

----
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http://www.ScreenSite.org

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