Originally posted by: generalfrevious
I have a silly question, but I think it could clear things up for me, and its about the change in video technology. How can the best laserdisc transfer from the 90s end up being the most visually unwatchable DVD today? And, are the 2006 SW DVD's analog?

Very good question. I´m trying to elaborate on this:

First, DVD is a digital format. DVD´s can be mastered from analogue sources by digitizing them. VHS, Laserdisc and 35mm film are analogue formats.

Second: STAR WARS was never the best Laserdisc transfer back then. It was the best looking version of Star Wars, since they used new equipment to transfer the 35mm to video and then to the Laserdiscs. I have lots of Laserdiscs from the same year (1993) but from newer movies which look much sharper and more detailed than this transfer.

The biggest impact as to why these transfers are unwatchable now are the huge advances made in film restauration over the last 13 years. When the DVD format came out and became mainstream, the demand for equipment to do digital film restauration rose, since studios wanted to re-release their old films they had, but had to realize that lots of them were in really bad condition due to decades of wrong storage or very instable film material used back then. Before DVD, very few people in the industry were bothered by this.

It was during this time that huge advances were made in digital film restauration. When Star Wars OOT was restaured, they used a NTSC low resolution telecine transfer, which was then "restaurated" using 1993 technology, like using heavy DVNR noise reduction to reduce film grain and defects. This introduced lots of flaws into the transfer, like ghosting, smearing, etc. Since the transfer was NTSC-non-anamorphic, it could only be used for NTSC-non-anamorphic formats.

Nowadays, film restauration is done completely in the digital domain. Instead of telecining the material, it is digitized frame by frame into the computer, using modern film scanners which yield MUCH better colour, contrast and resolution than the old telecine machines back then. Since the last few years, nearly ALL transfers are usually done at HD (2k) resolution, sometimes at 4K resolution. You always have to remember that original 35mm film yields a much higher resolution than any comsumer HD format available now, not to mention standard television formats like DVD.

When the material is digitized into the computer in high resolution, the restauration team can relatively easily (compared to the non-digital age) change the colour and contrast of the film material to repair the fading of colours due to instable film stock used back then. When this is done, you can use automatic, semi-automatic or manual removal of film defects like dirt or scratches. This works by using an intelligent software which compares the whole movie frame-by frame and replaces destroyed picture information by dirt or scratches with picture information from the previous frames. Alternatively, you could correct those defects "by hand" which means you paint them out yourself. In 1993, all you could do was either leave the material as it is, or using noise reduction algorithms which decreased sharpness and introduced smeared movements, all what you can see in the OOT transfer. Since a few years now, this is no problem anymore and greatly enhanced the quality of film restaurations.

One you have a restaurated High Definition master, you can easily downscale it to 720x480 (NTSC), 720x576(PAL) or 1920x1080(HDTV) resolution.

Most people here at the forums don´t want a complete restauration. They just want a new transfer from existing film elements. Which means: standard procedure for every DVD movie released nowadays.

The result is that the OOT looks FAR WORSE than most DVD´s made by major studios and even small studios. The non-anamorphic nature of the transfer is not the worst aspect. The worst aspect is that it looks so bad because the quipment which was involved in the restauration is so heavily outdated by now. This affects everything. Ghosting, smearing etc.

Isn´t it a shame that my Flash Gordon DVD, which cost about 7EUR here, looks MUCH better compared to the OOT. It does not look better because they did a heavy restauration on it, it looks better because it was mastered using modern equipment. Equipment which has become more than affordable, even for small studions.