Review screenshots (1 Viewer)

[JosephMoore]

I wonder if anyone else would appreciate seeing full res screenshots accompany Ron's reviews?

Personally, I'd rather see fewer larger shots than more small shots because the down-sampled shots serve to hide any flaws (and many strengths) of a transfer.

 

[Andy Kim]

Link Removed usually has nice screen caps with their reviews. They also have a screencap of the day.

 

[LukeB]

Even a full-size screenshot will not be a very accurate representation of a DVD's video transfer.

 

[JosephMoore]

Luke,
Why not? A pure grab from a computer-based DVD player can be pixel-for-pixel what is encoded. (Excepting for any processing the player might do, and any compression done to the image prior to posting.)

 

[Kyle McKnight]

bandwidth and storage is an issue with full size shots, especially with a membership as large as this forum has.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Joesph: If the DVD is anamorphic, the player (or the end user) has to do the resizing, which introduces artifacts to the screenshots see the AOTC phantom edge enhancement. And then, as Kyle posted the servers are overtaxed here as it is.

I do my own reviews for special titles from time to time, and the screengrabs that DVD Profiler makes never approach the quality of the source I'm watching on the monitor. My solution is to set it to take straight grabs of the horizontally compressed 720x480 source video, and then upscale it myself in Photoshop. This produces results much closer to what I see when I watch the DVD itself, but I wouldn't call it representative of the transfer by it's very nature.

 

[LukeB]

Well said, Adam! Even if it's not anamorphic, the screencap would be in the 1.5:1 ratio (720 x 480, still) and would need to be resized to 1.33:1.

Either way, you get involved with means that you're altering an image that isn't right on with the video quality anyway. But I suppose the last step depends on what DVD-ROM player/screen-capturer you have.

 

[Paul Penna]

I'd prefer there be no screenshots at all in the body of the review, but instead provide links for them to a separate page. With a dialup connection, it takes forever for the review to load and display. Quite frankly, it's why I seldom even attempt to read a review unless it's something I'm extraordinarily interested in already. Making access to the screenshots optional at reader discretion would be a plus from my point of view.

 

[JosephMoore]

Good Lord, people! Do we need to take every comment to some illogical extreme? ;-) The very simple point is that larger snaps would be more likely to either show-off the strengths of a transfer, or highlight the weaknesses. Certain artifacts are nearly impossible to notice in a single still, but others (such as edge-enhancement or cosine transform blocking) are clearly evident. I'd rather see two representational shots than a myriad of small, interpolated images.

If the DVD is anamorphic, the player (or the end user) has to do the resizing, which introduces artifacts to the screenshots see the AOTC phantom edge enhancement.

Any anamorphic source has to be manipulated to be viewed in its OAR - either by the player, the display or optically with a lens. The scaling that a decent software DVD player does is no less "representational" than any other quality scaler.