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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...

To one and all, We have proposed in this thread several possible explanations for how ringing/edge enhancement intrudes on DVD images like that on Cold Mountain, and also for how there may be a loss of the high-frequency information which encodes fine detail. The all have one thing...

David Grove, Again, thanks for all your discussions re: digital signal processing. OK, Gibbs is not the only bogey man ... that's established now, and it's important. But one thing I'm not clear about is whether the digital processing of which you speak ... ... is an intrinsic...

RAH, I think it would be wonderful if a certain well-known film restorer/preservationist with ... (a) eagle eyes (b) technical smarts, and (c) impeccable credentials for having resurrected films like Vertigo, Lawrence of Arabia, and My Fair Lady ... were to be invited...

Cassy, EE is being added: (1) following the HD transfer (2) prior to the video-format downconversion ... (3) which precedes the MPEG compression. That seems to be the asumption here. I don't dispute it. Not for a minute. Not for a nanosecond. But then...

Christopher, Amen to your emphasis on the complexity of the "transfer-to-pressing chain." And let's not forget the "encoded-bitstream-to-display chains" in our homes. I mentioned in another post that one such chain in my home corrects the "color haloes on faces" problem I've been...

RAH, Did you mean by "the element turned over to the post facility" the one prior to the so-called HD master of which Mr. Maloney spoke, and from which the HD master was derived? I assume in the case of Cold Mountain that this was not a film element but a video element, right? A digital...

Ted, I thought you might like to know ... ... I've discovered that the North by Northwest "chroma shift" problem is not evident when I play the DVD via the DVI interface between my Samsung DVD player and my Samsung display. Using this interface, the player apparently does...

Mike Maloney, I'd like to express my personal appreciation for your contributions to this thread. When you are less swamped or would just like to pop up for air, I hope you'll rejoin us. And when you do, it would be nice if you could answer Michel Hafner's concern point blank: "if...

David Grove, "Muchas gracias" for your essay on the Fourier Transform and the Gibbs Phenomenon, a.k.a. "ringing." The "moving graphs" on the web page you referenced are a "must see." They show a "square wave" -- which is much like a pair of sharp edge transitions in an image, say a dark...

And to all concerned: I hope all my nattering about "chroma haloes around faces" hasn't obscured one of the major thrusts of this thread, which is to try to figure out why recent Miramax DVDs like Cold Mountain have the sorts of problems Mr. Harris spoke of in his recent column. It...

Christopher, Your explanation of the DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) used in MPEG-2 compression was helpful to me. Thank you very much. I'm especially interested in the edges that develop rings around them "from the first few low-amplitude components which got left in." I'd now...

Ted, On the topic of chroma misalignment vis-à-vis luma, a.k.a. chroma shift or chroma delay, leading to “color haloes around faces”: There is indeed a possibility of variable color fringing from IB (imbibition) Technicolor matrices, or similar separation masters in other color...

Ted, First, thanks again for your input re: “color haloes on DVDs” (see post #86 in this thread). Alas, I’m not really much of a “digital video theory uber geek” yet. Actually, I think of you, ChristopherDAC, and several others in this thread as much farther along than I am. All I...

Ted, Thanks a million for your analysis of "chroma delay" on the DVDs I cited at: http://home.comcast.net/~epstewart/Test_Web_Page_1.htm I want to digest what you said before responding in detail. But a question: The "chroma delay" of which you speak is a sort of...

Ted, Your input will be most appreciated. Here are the elapsed time stamps in question: North by Northwest: Chapter 16, elapsed time approx. 45:06, Cary Grant tells Eva Marie Saint the police are after him because he has “Seven parking tickets.” The Producers/Special...