Recent content by Eric Stewart

I'm trying to convert a friend's PAL DVD to NTSC for her. I’m doing this on a Mac. What's a good way to do it? I have tried using Movavi Video Converter 6. It took several tries, but it has finally produced a folder containing several .vob files. These files seem to contain the “actual video...

Christopher, I too have read that the vertical resolution of interlaced 1080i/30 video is filtered by some 30% or more of potential vertical resolution in going from progressive scan to interlaced. This is a point that has been made many times by Joe Kane in articles written for...

Josh Steinberg ... George Lucas in his interview in Sound & Vision magazine seems to convey the general impression that he thinks digital projection is the wave of the future, because it has none of the (ahem) "negatives" of using film prints. If it does not "look remotely filmlike," Mr. Lucas...

Robert, I imagine the hard information we desire concerning the Star Wars trilogy on DVD will eventually be forthcoming. Meanwhile ... ... It looks to me as if we're being asked to make a mental or ideological "paradigm shift." Here's what I mean: in his interview, Mr. Lowry...

Michel, I stand corrected. Cheers, Eric

Christopher and Michel, It looks (from the S&V interview with Mr. Lowry) as if maybe the 1993 transfer was indeed the basis for the new Star Wars DVDs ... ... because it's the only thing that explains why Mr. Lowry started with RGB (i.e., digital video) data yet complained about...

Robert, On the subject of what Mr. Lowry at LDI did with the Star Wars trilogy ... I considered the Sound & Vision interview quite ambiguous about the role of the onegs and other extant film elements. For those who are interested, here's the URL of the Lowry interview again ... it...

Friends, I know the following will become a huge topic soon enough ... but to broach it perhaps prematurely ... ... The upcoming Star Wars Trilogy "restoration for DVD" by John Lowry gets coverage in the current (October 2004) issue of Sound & Vision magazine -- see especially p...

RAH, Yes, your essay in response to Michel Hafner is very clear, very helpful, and absolutely right on! I'd like to break out the phrase "what the original looks like" and set it alongside your earlier formulation, "Film doesn't lie." There has to be something in the long chain...

ChristopherDAC, I for one would like to know more about the MTF or Modulation Transfer Function. Poynton (p. 190) says it's "a one-dimensional plot of horizontal or vertical frequency response," by which I assume he means it's a plot on two-dimensional axes of the magnitude (but not the...

RAH, Thanks for the correction. I'm going to edit my post above to change "Once fixed up and transferred to digital video, they'll last forever" to "Once fixed up and transferred to digital video, they might in concept be thought to last forever". Cheers,

David Grove, You're absolutely right about the analog image (that is, the image on film) not being real either ... ... except ... ... it does give you a "hard copy," or more than one (the oneg, the interpositive, the dupe, the release print, etc.) that you can hold in your...

I don’t know if anyone in this thread is up for yet more beating a dead elephant — uh, horse – but it occurs to me that we ought to recognize this truth … On DVD, or in any other form of digital video transmission or storage, there is actually no “image”! There are only sets of...

All, Another issue that's been only lightly touched on in this thread: How could respected journals like Widescreen Review give the Cold Mountain DVD a score of 4.5 out of 5, saying it has "pleasing images with satisfying sharpness and detail, though some scenes have a slightly blurry...

Greetings, all. RAH … let’s hope Ron Epstein doesn’t think this thread has — chortle — “elephantiasis.” Ted … what exactly is a PNG file, anyway? Ed St. Clair … what’s wrong with “made in Mexico” (as long as it’s not bootleg)? Or did I miss a joke somewhere...