That was my post. I was also the one to ask what the the poster wanted the collection called.

The Avid system is the de facto standard editing system now used for editing motion pictures. Check out www.avid.com for more info.

would you be posting these?

Is there going to be an EDITDROID official thread? I'm never sure where to post comments or questions on this awesome edition.

I just noticed the isolated score on ESB... does this essentially negate the need for the ISOMIX editions?

Probably. Although a good presentation, the ISOMIX version's picture quality is a bit lacking.

Although the picture quality of this version is nicer than Dr Gonzo's in a lot of ways, the fact that it's not anamorphic makes it almost useless. The drop in image quality from zooming on my TV renders non-anamorphic DVDs unwatchable for me

Still, it IS a nice capture.

I've watched this disc on a friend's widescreen TV and it looks great. Could be the problem is with your TV. Is every non-anamorphic title you watch unacceptable?
The whole "convert letterbox to anamorphic" debate has gone on elsewhere in this forum and on the net. I stand in the "leave it alone" camp. Encoding noisy laserdisc material is hard enough without wasting good bits on the bad pixels you get by expanding the image.

Yup, mine, and all the other 16:9 displays I've ever owned or used.

Hey, I'm not dissing the set, it's a great transfer. But images zoomed on a 16:9 screen look awful to me. All the 16:9 displays I've ever seen look rubbish on zoom mode, to me at least. I live in the UK, 16:9 has been common here for a long time. I've had 3 different 16:9 TVs over the last 7 years (oh god, that makes me sound really old!). The latest one looks better than the others did on zoom, but still awful by comparison. In Widescreen mode, anamorphic DVDs look fantastic. Crisp and lovely. Maybe it's something to do with PAL enabled equipment (although obviously the DVD player and the TV are operating in NTSC while watching these disks) or maybe it's the fact that the RGB output from my DVD player is so sharp, that it really notices when it's not quite right. America never really embraced RGB as far as I can tell, but don't you guys have that new thing with a whole bunch of wires that looks just as good?

So to me, on my setup (and the 3 other 16:9 setups I've watched these DVDs on), Dr Gonzo's disk just looks better, hands down. On a standard 4:3 screen, I'd say EditDroid is noticably crisper, but not on any 16:9 display I've seen it on.

Bottom line is for me: A DVD which is not anamorphic is not as watchable as one that is. Unless it's a 4:3 presentation of course. It's not a bad disk, in fact a very good one. But certain "deliberate creative decisions" (ie, making it letterboxed instead of anamorphic) have been made which render it not as good as Dr G's to me.

My problem, not EditDroids. Personal taste comes into this as well. Some of my friends don't mind the drop in quality. One guy I know watches all his DVDs on a PS2, with all the attendant sound synch issues and he claims not to notice. 2 or 3 people I know refuse to watch DVDs at his house because the synch drives then insane, but it doesn't seem to bother him one bit.

Diffren' strokes I guess...

Gee, that's kind of a vital piece of information you left out of your original post. Duh, of course it won't look that great, playing a letterboxed NTSC disc on a 16x9 PAL monitor in zoom mode. Not only is the video getting scaled up from 480 lines to 576 for admittance into PAL-land, but then getting scaled up again to fill the screen.

OK, I am being melodramatic I suppose. Sorry. I don't really mean "unwatchable", I actually mean "not as good". Looking at (for example) the original release of David Fincher's Se7en in it's non-anamorphic ickyness next to the more recent release, the difference is remarkable. The Anamorphic version looks sharper, crisper and all-round better. The letterbox version looks fine until you see what you're missing. Watching Dr G's anamorphic DVDs just looks better than the zoomed EditDroid version. Watch both on a 4:3 display, and yeah. EditDroid DOES look better, but that's lost in the zoom.

That's not actually true.

My TV (like almost all the TVs here) runs native NTSC when it gets an NTSC signal. They're cheaper to build that way, and I wouldn't buy one that didn't work like that, since 90% of my DVDs and videogames are NTSC native. And the DVD player outputs NTSC as well. PAL DVDs look just as crap as NTSC ones when you zoom in, as do videogames, broadcast etc etc...

Ah, my apologies. I inferred from your original post that the quality was much worse than you actually say it is now, so I was thinking in terms of PAL-60 possibly contributing to the issue. Sounds like you have an ideal setup (I wish our TVs and players were as flexible as ones in the UK). That being said, 16x9 TV zooms I've watched have been excellent, results which seem to differ from those of your experience. As for the reason...who can really say? <shrug>

To be honest the zoom probably isn't THAT bad, (objectively speaking) maybe I'm just spoiled by the crispness I get from anamorphic? I really do see quite a difference in picture quality. It might be related to the way RGB signals work vs the connection you guys use. I assume the majority of folks in the US use SVHS? Or has component taken off properly? My DVD player is REALLY optimised for RGB, and looks awful by comparison is I use SVHS. A friend of mine has an imported panasonic from the US, which she uses to play her Region 1 NTSC stuff. That looks great with SVHS, but does not support RGB at all. But non-anamorphic stuff (like EditDroid) still looks ropey to me on her rig. Or at least, not as good.

But then I can taste thing like if milk has been stored in plastic, glass or cardboard containers. So I'm probably just uberpicky

That's because it's an entirely different transfer. That is a very bad example. And I haven't seen either the Dr. Gonzo or EditDroid set on a 16:9 TV, but I have both and have seen both on 4:3 ones, and the EditDroid blows Dr. Gonzo out of the water. If there were no dot crawl, or greatly reduced dot crawl, I'd say it is perfect DVD quality. But the thing is on my Toshiba setup in my room there isn't any dot crawl at all, but that may be because that's the only TV I'm running with component cables. But if anyone can point me to a way where I can take the original m2v file, run a dot-crawl filter on it so it ends up in a new m2v file and NOT an avi file or anything else because I still have problems converting avi to m2v, please tell me so this would look as good on any TV.

D.O, that sounds like a pretty damn cool setup to me.

Just curious: What's the "full" zoom mode, as opposed to the "wide zoom"? Is this the usual thing where one is the 16:9 mode you use for anamorphic DVDs and videogames, while the other is a stretched and distorted image where the edges of the picture get squished out? It's interesting that you don't have either 14:9 or what a lot of European TVs call "subtitle zoom". 14:9 is a halfway house between 4:3 and 16:9, kinda chops a bit off at the top and bottom and doesn't fill the screen all the way horizontally. We used to have a fair amount of stuff broadcast in that ratio, but that seems to have stopped now (at least, I don't see that because I have digital TV which is broadcast in 16:9). Subtitle Zoom is the same as 16:9 zoom, but the picture is moved up so that if you're watching a 2.85:1 letterbox DVD, the top of the picture is at the top of the screen and all the black is at the bottom. That way, if there are subs in the black, you get to see them. It's telling that the whole time I had a TV that did that, the only thing I ever watched on it that benefited from that was the original trilogy. Newer TVs appear to be able to mimic this by letting you move the 16:9 image up and down, which is how I watched the Phantom Edit DVD. Neither mode really gets a lot of use these days to be honest though.

As far as I can tell, what you're saying is that an anamorphic DVD viewed on the Widescreen mode is the same aspect ratio as a non-anamorphic DVD viewed in 16:9 zoom?

That's what I would expect.

But do me a favour and try this, hopefully you'll see what I'm getting at:

1) Get any anamorphic DVD. Preferably a well mastered one (Hellboy for example)

2) With you DVD player set to 16:9 display mode, watch a couple of minutes of it in Widescreen mode, taking advantage of the anamorphic-ness (I'm assuming this is how you're usually watching anamorphic DVDs)

3) Stop the movie and set you DVD to think you only have a 4:3 display.

4) Start playing again, with the TV set to 16:9 zoom.

Tell me you genuinely don't see a difference?