Dave Mack
Senior HTF Member
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2002
- Messages
- 4,671
I disagree. On a big screen, the first 2 seasons look pretty bad. They could look ALOT better. Even shot on 16mm, the transfers are pretty bad in the compression/authoring departments.
Here is part of DVDFile.com's review of season 2. I must say I agree...
Video: How Does The Disc Look?
The quality of the show's scripts may have improved with this second season, but the budget and production values did not change much. Still shot on 16mm film, night scenes are dark and grainy with weak shadow detail while day scenes are often flat and washed out. The image is occasionally fuzzy, and a few episodes (such as Some Assembly Required) have patches where the footage appears in absolutely horrible shape, looking like a multi-generation dupe print.
This is not to say that the series is poorly made or produced. Far from it, every dollar is put to creative use on screen and the direction is consistently tight and inspired. However, in the path from its less expensive cameras and film stock through to the editing and special effects that were completed in the video realm, the photographic image suffers from a chain of quality degradation prior to the show's broadcast masters. By necessity, these DVDs were transferred from those broadcast masters and cannot be remastered from the original film elements without redoing all of the post production work from scratch.
Exasperating these problems is the DVD's digital compression. Overall most episodes look similar in quality to those from the first season box set, which is to say pretty mediocre. There are also many instances when it looks noticeably worse. The entire first disc is just terrible, really. There are rampant problems with macro-blocking, pixel breakup, and smeared details. Some scenes, notably the very first scene in the very first episode, are so poorly compressed they look no better than a VCD. I'm not sure why the first disc caused such a problem, but things tend to even out after that for the majority of the other episodes. Compression problems are still noticeable and never entirely go away, but they seem less distracting in light of other visual deficiencies with the image. Then, unfortunately, things go wrong again in the final two episodes, portions of which are so soft and smeary they are indistinguishable from VHS.
The show's difficult photography, coupled with the need to cram four episodes to a disc with fancy animated menus (that are very repetitive and annoying), seem to have crippled the DVCC mastering facility, who have done better work with Fox's X-Files box sets. I don't think they took the quality of the source material into enough account when applying the video compression and the entire picture suffers as a result. This is very disappointing but again I must hold out hope for later seasons, when the show switched to 35mm film (in the third season) and underwent a significant budget increase (starting primarily in Season 4).
add to that all the combing problems due to these being flagged for fim mode, (progressively) when the show was edited on videotape...
but what do I know...
Here is part of DVDFile.com's review of season 2. I must say I agree...
Video: How Does The Disc Look?
The quality of the show's scripts may have improved with this second season, but the budget and production values did not change much. Still shot on 16mm film, night scenes are dark and grainy with weak shadow detail while day scenes are often flat and washed out. The image is occasionally fuzzy, and a few episodes (such as Some Assembly Required) have patches where the footage appears in absolutely horrible shape, looking like a multi-generation dupe print.
This is not to say that the series is poorly made or produced. Far from it, every dollar is put to creative use on screen and the direction is consistently tight and inspired. However, in the path from its less expensive cameras and film stock through to the editing and special effects that were completed in the video realm, the photographic image suffers from a chain of quality degradation prior to the show's broadcast masters. By necessity, these DVDs were transferred from those broadcast masters and cannot be remastered from the original film elements without redoing all of the post production work from scratch.
Exasperating these problems is the DVD's digital compression. Overall most episodes look similar in quality to those from the first season box set, which is to say pretty mediocre. There are also many instances when it looks noticeably worse. The entire first disc is just terrible, really. There are rampant problems with macro-blocking, pixel breakup, and smeared details. Some scenes, notably the very first scene in the very first episode, are so poorly compressed they look no better than a VCD. I'm not sure why the first disc caused such a problem, but things tend to even out after that for the majority of the other episodes. Compression problems are still noticeable and never entirely go away, but they seem less distracting in light of other visual deficiencies with the image. Then, unfortunately, things go wrong again in the final two episodes, portions of which are so soft and smeary they are indistinguishable from VHS.
The show's difficult photography, coupled with the need to cram four episodes to a disc with fancy animated menus (that are very repetitive and annoying), seem to have crippled the DVCC mastering facility, who have done better work with Fox's X-Files box sets. I don't think they took the quality of the source material into enough account when applying the video compression and the entire picture suffers as a result. This is very disappointing but again I must hold out hope for later seasons, when the show switched to 35mm film (in the third season) and underwent a significant budget increase (starting primarily in Season 4).
add to that all the combing problems due to these being flagged for fim mode, (progressively) when the show was edited on videotape...
but what do I know...
