Mermaid compression

tttt · Post by **tttt** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 12:37 pm

Hi everyone. Ultimate Disney's review of The Little Mermaid dvd says the picture quality of the video is very good. Has anyone else found that there was a few compression problems? The opening logo of WDPictures is so compressed I can see distinct rings in the light around the castle. A few seconds latter, the skin of the dolphins show too much compression too. And what is this grey "noise" on the top of the screen when the ship appears? Sorry if this has already been talked. So many pages on Mermaid I lost patience...

271286 · Post by **271286** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 12:48 pm

Im not sure weahter it's compression or just BAD restoration...

dvdjunkie · Post by **dvdjunkie** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 12:55 pm

I looked and looked and can't see what it is you are seeing. Could it be you have a bad pressing of the disc? My disc shows a really fine sharp picture and I don't see anything like what you are describing.

Disneykid · Post by **Disneykid** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 1:09 pm

I did see some slight compression artifacts, but they were very minimal and not bothersome to me at all. I guess after seeing the compressed-beyond-belief transfer of Beauty and the Beast, everything else seems fine in comparison. What I did notice, though, was some chroma noise in Ariel's hair and on Sebastian. I also found some occasional ghosting effects. These are definitely DVD mastering problems rather than restoration problems. Still, I'm very pleased with Mermaid's transfer, and feel that many DVD reviewers who are harshly slamming it are simply drama queens.

dvdjunkie · Post by **dvdjunkie** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 2:31 pm

Don't know what you are talking about in the least...............Can you ever watch a movie without bitching about some little thing that might night be 100% right? Geez, you'd think that the whole world is going to end because of some little glitch.

Besides, I don't have any idea what you are talking about. I have watched most of my Disney movies for the past month that I have been laid up, off work, and I have a Blu-Ray DVD player that upconverts everything to near HD level and I don't see anything that you are talking about. Maybe you people just have cheap DVD players or bad connectors, or a bad pressing of the disc. Did you ever think about that.

Isn't France a different region than the U.S.?

Dottie · Post by **Dottie** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 3:06 pm

dvdjunkie wrote:Don't know what you are talking about in the least...............Can you ever watch a movie without bitching about some little thing that might night be 100% right? Geez, you'd think that the whole world is going to end because of some little glitch.

Besides, I don't have any idea what you are talking about. I have watched most of my Disney movies for the past month that I have been laid up, off work, and I have a Blu-Ray DVD player that upconverts everything to near HD level and I don't see anything that you are talking about. Maybe you people just have cheap DVD players or bad connectors, or a bad pressing of the disc. Did you ever think about that.

Isn't France a different region than the U.S.?

Someone had to say that!!! All this whining about itty-bitty compressio atrefacts,... etc really annys me!!! Enjoy the movie. If it looked perfect, everyone would start complaining again like they did with Cinderella and LatT!!

Yes, France is another Region, it's 2.

Flanger-Hanger · Post by **Flanger-Hanger** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 3:15 pm

I to noticed artifacts and grain (particularily durring the scene where Triton at the end, gives Ariel her legs) although I thought it looked far better than the LE. That being said however, TLM isn't the only platinum to have problems (I noticed lots of grain and flicker problems in Bambi).

Disneykid · Post by **Disneykid** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 6:34 pm

Dottie wrote:
dvdjunkie wrote:Don't know what you are talking about in the least...............Can you ever watch a movie without bitching about some little thing that might night be 100% right? Geez, you'd think that the whole world is going to end because of some little glitch.

Besides, I don't have any idea what you are talking about. I have watched most of my Disney movies for the past month that I have been laid up, off work, and I have a Blu-Ray DVD player that upconverts everything to near HD level and I don't see anything that you are talking about. Maybe you people just have cheap DVD players or bad connectors, or a bad pressing of the disc. Did you ever think about that.
Someone had to say that!!! All this whining about itty-bitty compressio atrefacts,... etc really annys me!!! Enjoy the movie. If it looked perfect, everyone would start complaining again like they did with Cinderella and LatT!!

I guess it was futile of me to end my post with "Still, I'm very pleased with Mermaid's transfer, and feel that many DVD reviewers who are harshly slamming it are simply drama queens."

my chicken is infected · Sun Oct 29, 2006 6:50 pm

Little Mermaid, like most DVDs, uses VBR MPEG-2 compression. The Walt Disney Picture opening logo has a very low bitrate of about 2-3 MBPS, but most of the movie has a high bitrate, around 5-7 MBPS.

dvdjunkie · Post by **dvdjunkie** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 9:48 pm

Okay, and the English translation for the rest of us is............................

thatartguy · Post by **thatartguy** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 10:24 pm

They made the video file for the intro smaller so the movie video file could be bigger.

Jules · Post by **Jules** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 8:45 am

[quote="thatartguy"]They made the video file for the intro smaller so the movie video file could be bigger.[/quote

Since when is the opening logo not as important as the film? It's still part of the cut isn't it? If it's meaningless, then the movie without it is just the same. I, however, don't want to think of Mermaid without the opening Walt Disney Pictures Logo. That means the logo is important.

Barty · Post by **Barty** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 10:24 am

Hehe, just had to reply to this thread to clear up some things.

- tttt has an region 2 LM, with a PAL video encoding, and therefor the video quality can never be 100% the same as the NTSC (region 1) dvd. Sometimes the quality will be better, sometimes worse, and sometimes very comparable. In the case of LM, i know the video encodings are pretty comparable. So that means the same problems occur in the R1 as well as in the R2 dvds.

- About a possible bad pressing of the disc, that never happens. Of course, in a rare occasion sometimes all the first pressings share the same problem on the dvd, and are possibly later replaced by updated dvds in the stores. In the case of a scratch on the dvd, that would NOT lead to more compression artefacts, rather, corrupt video or audio.

- Disney did NOT decide that the intro is less important than the rest of the movie. All they did was run the video data through an mpeg2 encoder, and the mpeg2 encoder decides which scenes need more bitrate (more data) than other scenes. As the intro probably seemed (to the mpeg2 encoder) like an 'easy' scene, it got less bitrate than other scenes. Of course someone can influence this process of the mpeg2 encoder, but it's obviously not the case that disney just decided that the intro was less important or something like that.

- About the LM video quality, I guess when you are not really into video and audio analysis, but rather just an average dvd-viewer, you won't notice many problems with the video transfer. But in fact there are lots of things wrong with it, like grain, too much DNR applied (which causes the 'ghosting'), the unsharpness of many scenes, among others. Disney used another restoration studio for the Little Mermaid, and the result is that the LM dvd looks much worse than many previous disney dvds. Lots of those previous platinum editions got restorated by Lowry Digital, or DTS as they are now a part of. DTS/Lowry is probably more expensive, but they did a much better job.

Jordan · Post by **Jordan** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 10:26 am

dvdjunkie wrote: Isn't France a different region than the U.S.?

Indeed my friend, as in the rest of Europe, France has PAL Region 2 DVDs. But the quality is only better than the US DVDs. There are (they have always been) more frames per second in PAL than in NTSC which, among other reasons, results in a clearer, crisper image quality on DVDs.

I have both Regions for several Disnet movies and the Region 2 has always the best image quality (even though, it's almost pratically the same, you can still notice a small difference for the better in Region2)...

That's the same for HD. High Definition in Europe has a bigger higher resolution than the higest US resolution in HD, and the image looks better.

Barty · Post by **Barty** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 10:36 am

Indeed my friend, as in the rest of Europe, France has PAL Region 2 DVDs. But the quality is only better than the US DVDs. There are (they have always been) more frames per second in PAL than in NTSC which, among other reasons, results in a clearer, crisper image quality on DVDs.

I have both Regions for several Disnet movies and the Region 2 has always the best image quality (even though, it's almost pratically the same, you can still notice a small difference for the better in Region2)...

Yes there are more frames per second on PAL dvds, but that does not mean there are actually more frames in the movie. No, it just means that the whole movie plays shorter.

It also does not mean that the PAL dvd image quality is per definition better than the NTSC dvd, but it CAN appear smoother, but as a matter of fact the reason that an NTSC dvd appears probably appears less smooth is because of improper NTSC handling on your setup. But you're right, PAL can appear a bit more smooth, but the question is if you want prefer that above the PROPER movie running time, and the correct audio pitch of the NTSC dvds.

The actual image quality of R2 (PAL) is sometimes better than R1 (NTSC), sometimes worse, and sometimes comparable as I mentioned earlier.

Escapay · Post by **Escapay** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 11:11 am

dvdjunkie wrote:Okay, and the English translation for the rest of us is............................

I'll do my best...

The quality of the video on the disc is determined by how much space is used on the disc for the film itself. The more amount of space used for the disc gives greater amount of quality to the video.

When a movie like...Titanic is put on one disc (like in the original non-anamorphic single-disc), it's a slightly lesser quality video to fit 3+ hours on one disc. When they separated the film into two parts for the re-release, with only about 90+ minutes on each disc, it's a much better video quality for the disc because, as many aptly put it, it's more room for the film to breathe on the disc.

That's why the BATB video has compression issues and is generally not as good as it could be. Three versions of the film are squeezed into the disc, which leads to less quality of the video in order for it to fit completely on the disc.

It's usually not something everyone can see or worry about, but the technophiles with home theatres devoted to the best presentations are justified in their complaints. They invest so much into getting the best presentation possible, and studios know this, so if a studio puts out something that's not as good as it should be (Star Wars OOT, BATB PE, Cinderella PE), then there's gonna be some complaints.

Escapay

Jules · Post by **Jules** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 12:03 pm

Firstly, I have to enquire what "ghosting" is.

Thanks!

Secondly, I think Mermaid's transfer is not quite as crisp as the other PE. However, it is still very, very good. True, there's some light grain in some scenes, but it's not very bothersome.

Something else I'd like to share: (Note that I have a regular CRT TV, so the defects in the video presentation probably show up much less than on these modern LCD and Plasma TVs, on which defects in the picture are normally amplified) A scene I didn't like was the one very near the beginning of the film where Ariel goes up to the surface to speak to Scuttle about the things she'd found. On my TV, that scene had very bright and saturated colours, but the blue of the sea and the red in Ariel's hair had a strange flickering quality which reminded me of VHS...really! Has anyone else noticed this? (I have the Region 1 NTSC of Mermaid, but my TV is PAL. It, however, supports NTSC, as all other European TVs do since 2000)

Disneykid · Post by **Disneykid** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 12:09 pm

Julian Carter wrote:Firstly, I have to enquire what "ghosting" is. Thanks!

Ghosting means when the character or object leaves a trail behind them for a few seconds. For example, if you were to watch a ghosting scene frame by frame of a person moving their arm, you'd see the person's arm, then a slightly fuzzy version of it where it was in the previous frame, and an even fuzzier version of it where it was two frames ago. Basically, it's leaving a trail during movement. Ghosting isn't the official name for this, though; I just like calling it that. I think the videophile name for this is aliasing, but I'm not sure. It happens a few times during Mermaid, but off the top of my head, I can only think of the dolphins during "Fathoms Below" and Louie during "Les Poissons." I can't remember which specific frames, though.

Beastboyravenz · Post by **Beastboyravenz** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 1:00 pm

Hey DisneyKid, I have always wanted to know, what they mean when reviewers say " edge enhancement" and color banding?

dvdjunkie · Post by **dvdjunkie** » Mon Oct 30, 2006 1:12 pm

I think that you guys are getting way too technical for your own good. Nothing is ever going to be perfect and you have to learn to live with it. Why not just sit back and be grateful that you can even watch some of these classics instead of only being able to see them bastardized on television with commercials and editing.

If you are all so dang technological about this stuff, why not go get a job at Disney and show them how to do it. I doubt most of you are old enough (there is that age thing) to even remember when mom and dad would bring home an 8mm rental, in black and white no less, of a badly edited Disney short and you would pop popcorn and sit back and watch all 7 to 10 minutes and cheer when it was over, and boo until dad got it rewound and started it over again.

We should all just be thankful that we can see these movies on DVD (or for those who still live in the dark ages, VHS) instead of having to wait every six or eight years for Disney to put them back in the movie theater. Then where or where would those direct-to-video sequels that we all, for the most part, hate, go? There would be no sequels unless Disney wanted to work a little harder and spend more time on them to make the palatable to the movie going audience.

Why not just put the DVD on, and sit back and just enjoy it for what it is. A motion picture full of entertainment value for the whole family. That is what Walt Disney is all about. Entertainment for the whole family. At least that is what is was when I was a kid - some 50 plus years ago.

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