Encoding problems (1 Viewer)

[vnisanian2001]

How could the most recent DVD releases of Rhoda (S4) and Mad About You (S5) suffer from the exact same encoding problems that plagued the S7 set of All in the Family? Because Rhoda and Mad About You were filmed shows, not videotaped ones.

 

[LeoA]

I didn't pay a ton of attention to that over at the Shout forums (Not a huge fan of All In the Family, and I detest most of Norman Lear's work), but it sounded like it happened during the DVD creation process when they were encoding the transfers they were provided for their DVD's. So it doesn't seem like how it was originally created, on film or tape, would matter since this happened during the DVD creation process long after the transfers were done and provided to Shout Factory.


Also, I wouldn't be surprised if those two shows you mentioned as being filmed utilized tape transfers for the DVD sets. It's not uncommon at all, especially for a more niche title like Rhoda, to not go back to the original film elements when doing a modern DVD release.


That's why Room 222 looked so horrible. It used old syndication prints that were already in poor condition when they were transferred to tape sometime along the line for modern convenience (1980's?). If they had gone back to the original film elements, I imagine Room 222 would've looked pristine if they had been properly stored.


And I recall them investigating the problem and uncovering the encoding issue. The vendor supposedly rectified the problem, so sets authored after the investigation shouldn't be affected. Those two sets you mentioned were done before the problems were uncovered and fixed.

 

[vnisanian2001]

To make myself a bit more clear, I was talking about framerate issues. The recent season releases of Rhoda and Mad About You both suffered from this, even though both were filmed shows, and the previously released sets didn't have any framerate issues at all.


And I thought they went back to the original elements for every season of Rhoda after the first.

 

[LeoA]

Maybe they did, I don't know. I was just pointing out that even a show that was originally filmed that you're watching right now from DVD could've still had it's transfers sourced from tapes.


But this issue you're talking about happened during the DVD encoding process, according to what I remember reading from the Shout forums. So the original medium or whatever source they're using for the transfers they're putting on DVD doesn't matter here from how I understand the issue.


It would be like hooking up your VHS player to a tv capture card on your PC to transfer some home movies over. The movies may be just fine on your computer when you watch them, but if the program you used to burn them to DVD-r's isn't doing things correctly and affects something like the frame rate as it's preparing the files to burn to your DVD-r disc, the product you watch from DVD on your tv is going to be screwed up. It isn't going to matter if the original source was a tape or not since the problem didn't happen when you transferred it from tape and had nothing to do with the medium it came from. It happened down the line preparing the files to put on disc.


The problem here, as I understand it from glancing at some threads around the turn of the year, happened when they were encoding the final disc to create masters to go into production with due to some faulty equipment at the vendor they were using. It has nothing to do with if a show was filmed or taped 40 years ago, they're using transfers that they were provided with,that have already been taken from whatever physical source they resided on (Original film elements, tape, etc.), which are computer files by this point when they were negatively affected in the encoding process as the vendor was preparing the masters.


At least that's what I gathered. There are lots of people here that are a heck of a lot more knowledgeable about such technical things that will hopefully correct me if I've got it wrong.