The Pianist DVD - bad PQ? (1 Viewer)

[Cees Alons]

Craig,

I understand all that logic, but what I'm getting at it this: it's technical nonsense. Each frame of the film is digitized, whether the DVD release is going to be PAL or NTSC. There's no difference in that (which could cause shadow images or the like, as the article suggested). Then the ordering of the frames makes all the difference of 30 fps or 25 fps.

The only real difference could be the higher resolution (more lines) needed to produce a PAL image, so if a movie were digitized for NTSC first and then "translated" to PAL, it would be less than optimal. But not the other way around!

And what's more, digitized with PAL in mind (so to say) is what usually happens (625 or 595 lines), so that would make no difference with what happens to lots of other films. Warner does it all the time.

Bottom line: I still don't get it.


Cees

 

[Jean-Michel]

(deleted)

 

[Brian W.]

Bottom line: I still don't get it.

I don't exactly understand it myself, but I believe it, because this video has some strange artifacts. It's movement onscreen that looks weird, it has nothing to do with resolution.

But it would seem that when you take a 24 fps film and transfer it at 25 fps, then take that and convert it to 30 fps, it would screw up the 4:3 pulldown of NTSC, since you're now dealing with an uneven 25fps rather than 24.

I don't know. All I know is in the Canadian version you get all these frames that sort of have two frames in one, and this creates "ghosts" or "trails" around some moving objects.

 

[Cahyo Wicaksono]

I have both versions and the Canadian version is just plainly unwatchable.

 

[CraigF]

"Unwatchable" is a little over the top...as I mentioned above, it was perfectly fine with my player, certainly as good or better than *any* TV series I've yet seen on DVD...I can watch it, but it ain't reference. And I can slo-mo it etc. and find glaring faults, as I can with many DVD's. And I can be very critical too. Other people mentioned in the "original" thread that it looked fine for them. Yes, believe it or not, the way your DVD player operates *does* affect what you see...

 

[Matt Butler]

Im bumping this thread to ask if this film is worth a blind buy.

I just bought Schindlers List and watched it again after many years (Love that movie); and someone told me I need to see The Pianist.

And I dont think I would consider the Canadian version after reading this thread.

 

[Andrew Bunk]

I'd say it is definitely worth a blind buy. To me The Pianist was just as good as Schindler's List. I'm sure it can be had relatively cheap these days.

 

[Max Leung]

The Canadian release of "The Red Violin" has the same problem. I see frames with ghost images of the previous frame.

I think it works like this: Basically, the PAL version of a 24 fps source would require that every 25th frame be a blend of one frame with the next. 2 frames superimposed onto each other. So, you have this PAL transfer with 25 fps, one ghosted frame every second. Now, downconvert this to 24 fps for NTSC...since the downconverter software is not likely to "know" to throw away the 25th frame, instead the NTSC conversion process will try to combine the ghosted 25th frame back into the 24th frame and you get a hellish mess.

I believe the PAL version would ghost the frames...if they didn't then you will notice a motion "stutter" because one of the frames out of 25 will be duplicated. It would seem like people are stopping for 1/25th of a second every second, and would be painfully obvious if you pan. So, instead you blend this frame with the next one to hide the effect.

I hope I am right...

(The Canadian Red Violin is unwatchable on a 65" front-projected screen IMHO)

 

[CraigF]

To me The Pianist was just as good as Schindler's List.

Since you brought it up...it's exactly what I was thinking after watching SL last night. Unfair to compare in many many ways, but I found The Pianist much more disturbing *as far as what was shown*, probably for the same reason that parts of Kill Bill had to be shown in B&W to get a lower rating. I would not say that it's a better movie than SL though, at least artistically speaking, but it's still pretty good.

 

[Mark_vdH]

I hope I am right...

I don't think you are.

PAL dvd's don't suffer from ghosting artifacts (unless they are sourced from NTSC dvd's). Instead of blending two frames each second, the 25th frame of the first second of a PAL dvd contains the first frame of the second second of the movie, speeding the movie up by about 4% percent.

 

[DaViD Boulet]

another example of an R1 DVD with terrible PAL-NTSC conversion artifacting is the R1 16x9 A&E version of Pride and Prejudice. You can see "ghost frames" and a general digital smear to the whole image.

Anybody know if there's a better NTSC version or if the R2 PAL version is superior?

 

[Max Leung]

PAL dvd's don't suffer from ghosting artifacts (unless they are sourced from NTSC dvd's). Instead of blending two frames each second, the 25th frame of the first second of a PAL dvd contains the first frame of the second second of the movie, speeding the movie up by about 4% percent.

If that's the case, why can't the PAL-NTSC conversion simply be a one-to-one transfer, frame by frame? Ack.

I've (tried) to watch the R1 Pride and Prejudice too...yuck.

 

[Mark_vdH]

If that's the case, why can't the PAL-NTSC conversion simply be a one-to-one transfer, frame by frame? Ack.

I don't know. It could be that a film isn't simply stored on a dvd frame by frame, and that that makes it hard to transfer a film frame by frame from one dvd format to another (PAL dvd's sourced from NTSC dvd's do have the same ghosting problems BTW).

I do know there are many people here with more knowledge about the technical 'fields/interlacing' stuff. Maybe they can explain....

 

[DaViD Boulet]

You could do a 1:1 frame-mapping to convert *if* you had software that could adjust the speed of the audio to match the shift in time (one fewer/one more frame per second change in speed). That's the complicating factor and why it is seldom done (but you'd think that given that a studio doesn't have to convert in real-time that it should be a standard practice nevertheless).

 

[Max Leung]

Ah that makes sense.

This will still be an issue when HD-DVD comes out. Maybe we can force the EU to adopt true HDTV signals (60Hz, hidef resolution, etc.).