Pioneer LD-909, Dazzle DV-Bridge, PowerMac G4 (1 Viewer)

[Anthony Hom]

HI,

I am trying to play a Laserdisc through the Dazzle bridge and capture in iMovie to make a DVD. The problem is everytime I do this, the images that get captured appear jaggied. I thought it was the DV-bridge or the Mac until I recorded directly to a DV-cam (Canon ZR70) and it appeared with the same jaggies there. Could the problem be with the LD player? it appears just fine when playing into the TV.

 

[Ken Chan]

If you mean the comb effect, that's actually normal.

 

[Anthony Hom]

No, that's not the problem. I'll give a specific example. I captured the opening sequence to Star Wars. When you look at the image of the Star Destroyer, the long edge on its side instead of being thin and skinny is thicker and jagged. The same with the front of R2-D2. Even the 20th century fox logo is jagged across the platform that holds the 20th logo. This does not look this way on a standard TV monitor.

 

[Ken Chan]

Just a little thicker and jagged? It could be that it's only showing one field, doubled up, partly so that you don't see the comb effect I mentioned earlier. If you make a DVD and play it back on your TV, it will look normal. If you have a DVD-RW, you can do a (relatively) quick check without wasting a disc.

I don't have a Mac handy, but you can check if this is still relevant. I forget how iMovie stores the movies it captures. If they are regular QuickTime .mov files, you can try opening them with QuickTime. There's a setting for "high quality" vs. "low quality" display of DV, described here, but you need QuickTime Pro to change it.

 

[Jeff Jacobson]

This thread has some screenshots of Star Wars LD captured to DV. Is that what your captures look like?

 

[Jason Borchers]

.

 

[Anthony Hom]

Jeff,
That image on that thread is similar to a problem I have with a Pink Floyd laserdisc, especially in the bright spotlights and lasers. The Star Wars problem is mainly heavy jaggied edges on log straight lines on images. In fact I can tell when it will happen. Whenever I see an image on the laserdisc on TV appear to start having a moire pattern, I know it will appear jaggied on the computer. But you are right, I will try and capture the movie again and burn a DVD and see if it actually looks that way on TV. But the problem is I have captured movies from VHS and DVD and have not had that problem.

 

[Jeff Jacobson]

I don't even remeber all of the info that was in that link. I just remember those screenshots and thought it might have useful info. I'm not sure what the cause is.

 

[Mike_G]

I got the Dazzle myself. I haven't done a LD transfer of anything worth any scrutiny yet (music videos...I'm not looking at detail on those) but now that I have my dual-layer burner I'm going to make damn sure everything works perfectly.

I read that link about the Canopus. I'm also confused by it. Is it supposed to be better or worse than the Dazzle?

Anyway, I plan on doing a transfer of something tonight and I'll see how it goes.

Mike

 

[Ken Chan]

The thread on videohelp.com affects any DV capture device. The problem is with the NTSC DV codec (minutiae: as mentioned, it uses a 4:1:1 color sampling; PAL DV uses 4:2:0, same as DVD).

 

[Anthony Hom]

Thanks everyone, you were right. It looks jagged on the editing program but looks normal after burning a DVD and playing it on a normal TV. No I can go convert other Laserdiscs that are not on DVD. So SW is finished, onto converting ESB and ROTJ. Now I have the originals on DVD.