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Info: Discussion on 80's cartoons on DVD....bad aliasing (jaggies)!

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Does anyone here own any 80’s cartoons on DVD?  I’m noticing terrible aliasing on G.I. Joe (shout factory) and Masters of the Universe (Mill Creek).  Is this actually on the source or is it something wrong with the way I’m displaying it through my PS3 / HDTV?  It’s very distracting at times!

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djchaseb said:

Does anyone here own any 80's cartoons on DVD?  I'm noticing terrible aliasing on G.I. Joe (shout factory) and Masters of the Universe (Mill Creek).  Is this actually on the source or is it something wrong with the way I'm displaying it through my PS3 / HDTV?  It's very distracting at times!

 is there a way to adjust the saturation on cartoons on dvd like if there's too much red where the red bleeds into other colors?

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Like many 80's programs, G.I. Joe was edited on standard definition broadcast videotape. And that's what being used for the DVD releases. Whether the film elements still exist is anyone's guess.

I think MOTU was edited on film, but all the current video releases come from older video masters.

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Where were you in '77?

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So nothing on my end, it's the video itself?

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Yeah, pretty much.

"Right now the coffees are doing their final work." (Airi, Masked Rider Den-o episode 1)

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Aliasing on cartoons is not a defect of standard def videotape, not even VHS.

I don't know about those series, but both Shout! Factory and Mill Creek (moreso the latter) have released messed up versions of other series I've bought. In some cases they look worse than TV broadcasts I have recorded.

Here is one where the web streaming version is not aliased while the DVD is: http://www.tvpast.org/forum/toons-superheroes/19844-more-incompetent-dvd.html

Is your screenshot really from a DVD though? It looks like an encode where someone has added a heavy spatial noise reduction filter, smearing detail in addition to the aliasing problem.

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djchaseb said:

Is this actually on the source or is it something wrong with the way I'm displaying it through my PS3 / HDTV?  It's very distracting at times!

 A little of both, maybe?

I don't remember noticing any jaggies on the few episodes of the Mill Creek MotU that we watched, and it was probably on the XBox with XBMC (so I have to manually choose my own de-interlace settings).

I have the Hasbo DVD Battles release of M.A.S.S. Device (taken from the actual broadcast master) if you need any comparison shots taken.

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Here's a screenshot from my DVD copy, Season 2 episode 66.  Some episodes are worse than others.....this one stands out as one of the worst!

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I was talking about G.I. Joe =) M.A.S.S. Device is the very first miniseries, season 1, if you can get any shots from that.

That MotU shot looks about how I remember my (pre-Mill Creek) Dungeons & Dragons set looking on an analogue TV. Lots of flicker.

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Just sucks that all these dated masters are ported to DVD with all the flaws 

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Yeah. You'd THINK they'd take the time to do a remastering or something from the original elements.

"Right now the coffees are doing their final work." (Airi, Masked Rider Den-o episode 1)

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Molly said:

Yeah. You'd THINK they'd take the time to do a remastering or something from the original elements.

That's what they did with G.I. Joe and several other cartoons, and they ended up with tons of errors that were corrected in the broadcast masters =|

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Because they went too far back, right?

"Right now the coffees are doing their final work." (Airi, Masked Rider Den-o episode 1)

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I don't know the details, really, there's not much info on the screen comparison site (or else I didn't dig very deep).

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Well I've found the best picture that I can get with these old sets.  I have an old Sony Blu-Ray player with component out.  I have it set at 1920x1080i to my Samsung plasma and it significantly reduced the jaggies. Upscaling these sets with HDMI through my PS3 wasn't cutting it.  

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djchaseb said:

I have an old Sony Blu-Ray player with component out.  I have it set at 1920x1080i...

Don't the old Blu-Ray players auto-install DRM firmware to disable HD output through component? Or did you bypass that somehow?

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Asaki said:

djchaseb said:

I have an old Sony Blu-Ray player with component out.  I have it set at 1920x1080i...

Don't the old Blu-Ray players auto-install DRM firmware to disable HD output through component? Or did you bypass that somehow?

 They may, but the DVD content works fine!

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According to what I'm reading, the He-Man & The Masters of the Universe DVDs do advertise themselves as digitally remastered.

Perhaps you could clip a small M2V sample from an episode using DGIndex or another MPEG-2 cutter so we can verify it isn't a playback problem. I'm looking at screenshots on another site that are fine.

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drngr said:

According to what I'm reading, the He-Man & The Masters of the Universe DVDs do advertise themselves as digitally remastered.

Perhaps you could clip a small M2V sample from an episode using DGIndex or another MPEG-2 cutter so we can verify it isn't a playback problem. I'm looking at screenshots on another site that are fine.

 Yes. I'll get a clip from one of the more offensive episodes.  Not every episode will display jaggies, so I am thinking it could be the transfers themselves

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Here's a clip I extracted from one of the more offensive episodes.  Some of them have the wrong aspect ratio as well.  Some episodes are stretched.  Pretty terrible transfer :(

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B479P8iAPfsqQTVzQmJwWnllcnc/view?usp=sharing

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Pretty sure that's a problem caused by the digital processing they did. Looks like they did a bad job of deinterlacing/IVTCing their source. Such issues can arise when watching or transcoding interlaced sources, but seems like here it's done by the DVD publishing company. Best you could do is making the issue less bad by filtering in avisynth, but the proper method of going about this would be working from source files you don't have access to. :/

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Figured as much, wish I could "unsee" it!  Some people don't even notice it apparently, lucky them!

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I can tell you that both the BCI and Mill Creek Filmmation DVDs suffer from a botched PAL-to-NTSC conversion.  The shows had already been remastered for home video in the UK.  When BCI opted to use those PAL masters as their source, they failed to slow them back to film-speed before converting them to NTSC.  So, everything is sped-up, the sound has a higher pitch than the original broadcast, and there are blending problems aplenty.

If you want to see a really ugly one, check out the DVD of Space Sentinels.  There appear to be double interlace lines throughout, creating a bit of a double-image.  If I had access to my copy, I'd post some screen grabs.  It's almost like BCI failed to resize the image from 576i to 480i.

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OmegaMattman said:

I can tell you that both the BCI and Mill Creek Filmmation DVDs suffer from a botched PAL-to-NTSC conversion.  The shows had already been remastered for home video in the UK.  When BCI opted to use those PAL masters as their source, they failed to slow them back to film-speed before converting them to NTSC.  So, everything is sped-up, the sound has a higher pitch than the original broadcast, and there are blending problems aplenty.

If you want to see a really ugly one, check out the DVD of Space Sentinels.  There appear to be double interlace lines throughout, creating a bit of a double-image.  If I had access to my copy, I'd post some screen grabs.  It's almost like BCI failed to resize the image from 576i to 480i.

 Thanks for the info! It's disappointing because He-Man is an all time favorite of mine, I did see on a blog someone came across the actual NTSC masters, but I doubt they'll ever get a proper transfer

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If these screenshots are to be believed, it would be nice if someone made a list of these botched releases. Especially since I'm looking into cartoons to get and I really dislike purchasing things like this and not being able to get a refund.

However, I am wondering if this is an interlacing issue or even if this is a real issue that can be fixed by our OT enthusiasts.

Thanks.