Cactus

As I managed to get a hold of a laserdisc player, I did a comparison of The Secret Of NIMH (remastered second edition laser disc) and found some interesting differences in the image.

Let’s start with getting the widescreen / fullscreen debate out of the way: As you can see by the image below, you gain almost nothing in width. It’s pretty much a case of open matte full screen. The R2 widescreen release isn’t anamorphic either, so there’s no gain there unless you want OAR, which is fine. The laser disc however, is full screen and is just positioned a tad bit higher than the R1 DVD, and I’ll keep it that way. The R1 and R2 DVDs are identical in image quality, and is obviously from the same source.

http://img47.imageshack.us/my.php?image=01r1r2zf6.png

All right, on towards the laserdisc transfer. Have a peek at these comparisons:

** SPOILER ALERT ** (new work-safe image links)

Full size image (1455x11637, 1.5MB): http://img291.imageshack.us/my.php?image=02fullbv7.jpg
Resized image (800x6398, 700KB): http://img291.imageshack.us/my.php?image=02800pf2.jpg
 

To me, it’s obvious that both the LD and the DVD have it’s good sides. The DVD is of course sharper, and generally cleaner (but not very much so), but a lot of the lighting effects come out very differently. The writing in the first scene looks a whole lot better on LD, but later effects such as the Great Owl’s eye and the reflection in the “sparkly” look better on DVD. The colors vary greatly in some scenes, such as Nicodemos’ door opening, and take a look at those sparks in the end!

I’m going to transfer my LD and I’d like some input from you guys. It’s my first laserdisc rip, and though I’ve done VHS-rips through my DV-camera before, I’ve noticed I get a whole lot cleaner and less grainy video through the VIVO of my Geforce 7800. I’ve already transferred the LD (thus the screen grabs) but I might’ve done it the wrong way.

Using the composite, I capped a THX test image from my DVD player in a few different resolutions (720/640/480/384x480) and found 720 to give the best detail, meaning my card rips natively in that resolution. (I think…) I capped the entire film in 720x480 with HuffYUV in VirtualVCR, resulting in two .avis at 23 + 16 GB.
I captured at 30 fps flat - was that a mistake? All this NTSC business makes a PAL head like mine hurt. I gather I should IVTC afterwards? What’s the best way? I can handle AVIsynth if I have to. =)

My goal is to use the AC3 sound off the R1 DVD (syncing and so forth is not a problem, done things like that before) and slap some subtitles on there (also not a problem) onto a DVDR. Any and all help is greatly appreciated!