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The Royal Tenenbaums: How bad is the EE? (LARGE IMAGES) (1 Viewer)

Bjoern Roy

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Oct 15, 1998
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Vince,

the screenshots you posted are so terribly riddled with scaling artefacts, that the point you were trying to make is hard to appreciate.

If you email the original screenshots (720x480, BMP or low-loss JPG) to me and i will scale and process them to better highlight your intention.

Bjoern
 

PatrickM

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Watched it on a 27" TV last night and even on that the EE or haloing was obvious once I started to look for it. Luckily I'm not so in tune to it that it doesn't bother me everytime I see it.

Patrick
 

DaViD Boulet

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Isn't this title a Criterion? As they are self-described to be a "videophile" and "moviephile" oriented company...should we contact them to make them aware of artifical "ringing" (my new general term for EE in all of it's various forms) visible on this DVD and that they've essentially marred an otherwise nice transfer?

If THX and Criterion are releasing DVD titles in this manner, we really should do what we can to make them aware that as videophiles trying to enjoy our DVD movies on the largest-high-quality display systems we can afford, that they really need to stop mastering their "videophile" DVDs for 19" uncalibrated NTSC monitors!

Who's got some contact info?

-dave
 

Adam Lenhardt

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It'd be worth a shot, David. They are a smaller, company fufilling a niche market, so they're more likely to act on complaints than say Buena Vista.
Similar to the characteristic on the TPM transfer, the Tenenbaum has more vEE (vertical ringing, visible at horizontal edges) than hEE (horizontal ringing, visible at vertical edges).
Since both transfers supposedly have no EE and both show the same type of EE, I wonder if it's a default setting on a encoder that (much like Dialnorm) the DVD mastering people never bothered to adjust?
 

DaViD Boulet

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Very likely an encoder issue (not to be confused with a *compression* issue which this type of ringing certainly is not).
It's just a shame that the guys at Criterion and THX seem to be asleep at the wheel when the MPEG-encoded image is being reviewed. These things should be discovered before the discs go to print so they can send them through another pass on the encoder (if the encoder is at fault) properly adjusted...not after a million copies are printed and purchased by film collectors trying to recreate a film-like image on their large-screen systems!
-dave
p.s. I sent an email to Criterion at [email protected] and refered them to this thread. Let's hope they care more than THX does about the quality of their DVDs...
 

Han

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It's just a shame that the guys at Criterion and THX seem to be asleep at the wheel when the MPEG-encoded image is being reviewed.
You know, sometimes I wonder if some of these companies watch the post-encoded product on a 13 inch TV or something.
 

Vince Maskeeper

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Most importantly NTSC is not 30 fields per second, it's 60 fields (each made up of every other line of a frame). Secondly, if you consider DVD's 720x480 to be any other aspect than 4:3, then NTSC signal could just as easily by a non-4:3 ratio without violating the specifications. DVD offers only 30 frames per second- nothing more.

So from the info you posted there, I would say aside from the carrier difference of composite vs component- the two formats still are, in the rawest native form: the same frame rate, the same field rate, the same native aspect, and the same maximum resolution.

-V
 

Mark_Wilson

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Like I said above, Royal Tenenbaums is a Buena Vista film. Even the DVD is distributed by BV. Criterion's deal with BV is different than from the other studios they license titles from. Criterion puts together the extras and BV distributes the discs. They are at BVs mercy for extras, etc. I'm sure BV did the transfer and Criterion had no say in it. BV isn't the friendliest to deal with, look what they did to Anchor Bay with 'Watcher in the Woods'.
 

DaViD Boulet

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Didn't mean to sound antagonistic. I'll try and be nicer in my reponse than I may have sounded in my initial post (I just get so tired of the "DVD is NTSC" lines).
I'd like to address this point by point as some of your statements sound like I didn't make my point clear:
Also said:
DVD was conceived and designed to work with 2 distinct frame aspect ratios: 4x3 and 16x9.
DVD is indeed a component digital format rather than composite (as you state).
DVD is not limited to 480 interlaced, 60 field-per-second signals. One can encode 480 *progressive* data at 30 frames per second (whether the info is physically split into fields or not is irrelevant...DVD can store true progressive 480P image and, with a progressive-scan DVD player, play it back without loss). Also, DVDs can store film in 24 frames or 48 fields per second to minimize bandwith allowing the MPEG decoder to *contruct* the NTSC signal upon output by applying 3-2 pulldown.
It seems to me that storing film-based material in 48/fields-per-second which can be recontructed into true 480P images upon playback (and with the proper playback hardware...at 72 hz avoiding judder from 3-2 artifacts) is substantially different than something like the laserdisc format which had to have the 3-2 applies during mastering so that the disc was "hard coded" with 60-field-per-second video information.
All those things describe Standard Definition Digital video without exception. If you succeed in proving that DVD is no different than NTSC, then you will also prove that there is no difference between Standard Definition Digital video and NTSC.
-dave
 

Vince Maskeeper

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This to me indicates that the process is not as ideal as you have made it out to be. This sounds to me like a 480i format straight off the MPG, scaled into progressive.

The point is that if it stored in any other way than progressive- even if it comes with a 300 page guide to reassemble the frame- it's not a progressive format by nature. What's even more, if it requires an traditional scaling chip to accomplish the progressive output, then this would seem to indicate that there is still some guessing involved in the reconstruction.

-Vince
 

Mark_Wilson

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Vince, visit a few of the DV forums. I've heard people complain about some Sony DV cams that added artificial sharpening to the picture. If they're doing it then others may too.
 

Marc Colella

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Like I said above, Royal Tenenbaums is a Buena Vista film. Even the DVD is distributed by BV. Criterion's deal with BV is different than from the other studios they license titles from. Criterion puts together the extras and BV distributes the discs. They are at BVs mercy for extras, etc. I'm sure BV did the transfer and Criterion had no say in it.
Here we go again... the typical "Criterion can do no wrong" post.

Even if BV had done the transfer (which there isn't any proof of) there are 2 things to remember:

1. Criterion had no problem putting their name on the release. If they weren't happy with any aspect of the discs, they could have passed on licensing the film.
Either they were happy with the discs, or they weren't but still decided to be involved for financial reasons.

2. Wes Anderson approved the transfer, Criterion's sticker touts this. Your blame has to be with Criterion's quality control or Wes Anderson's eyesight.
 

Kajs

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My eyes just hurt looking at ALL the text in the movie. I first "sort of" noticed it with the "Cast of Characters" page. Then especially the instructions, in writing, to Royal to move out of the Lindberg Palace Hotel. It looked like a 3-D movie w/o the glasses.

Other than that text problem, I thought it was a flawless transfer for one of my favorite movies!
 

Adam Lenhardt

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Also, DVD offers more options than 30 frames/60 fields per second. I was telling the truth when I said that DVDs encoded from film ususally store the video as 24/frames or 48/fields per second to minimize the bandwidth needed and then flag the MPEG decoder to apply 3-2 pulldown to reconstruct a 60-field-per-second signal.
Judging by the encoding I've done with similiar MPEG formats in NTSC, (namely, SVCD), I'd have to say that isn't entirely accurate either. The SVCD specification allows for a frame rate of 29.97 frames per sec (roughly 30 frames per second) and 23.976 (roughly 24) frames per second. I'm assuming it's the same for SVCD. That said, your point remains accurate... in the case of SVCD, I encode movie trailers, etc. with a source frame rate of 24 fps at the latter frame rate, and flag it for 3:2 pulldown.
 

Vince Maskeeper

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I have a secondary question to David regarding the question of how it's encoded vs how it is output. If film is encoded at 24 on DVD and reconstructed into a 30 frame output by the player, why is it necessary to have a hard NTSC or PAL encoding (or a conversion on players which offer this feature).

If the player can take the stream at x frame rate and y resolution and use flags to output something other than how it started- then could any given film sourced disc be forced by the player to output PAL or NTSC from the raw 24 frame info on the disc?

And if so, what is the need for players that perform an analog PAL>NTSC conversion, any player on the market should be able to create a different signal if the encoded info on the disc is in fact stored as 24 progressive frames.

Just curioous about this as well as the other questions above.

-V
 

DaViD Boulet

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Vince,
Good questions. I've been reading alot of posts over at AVS learning about just this stuff!
The difference for PAL and NTSC "intended" DVDs (my word, "intended", since as you are wondering and correctly so...there's really nothing inherently anchoring a particular encoded DVD to a particular type of analog output) are 2 things:
PAL DVDs have (I think this is the right number) 576 lines of vertical resolution (pixels) whereas, as we all know, NTSC "intended" DVDs have 480. This is because the PAL TV standard has more lines of resolution than ours...so the DVDs are digitized with that level of resolution so that no scaling needs to be done to convert for analog PAL output (the same reason why we have the 480 vertical resolution for DVD). Of course, you have scaling when downconverting from 16x9 to 4x3 but that's beside the point.
Ok, the other real difference with DVDs mastered for PAL is that they are sped-up. This is because since PAL TV has a refresh rate of 50 fields per second...and we can think of film as natively being 48 fields per second (a double of the 24 frames per second)...you can see that if you just sped the movie up a tad you could make that an even 50 and then not have to worry about any type of asynchronous gimic like the 3-2 that we apply to convert 48 to 60 for NTSC display.
The basic answer to your question about outputing one "intended" type of DVD in another analog output is what you are probably thinking...yes...it's just a matter of having a digital decoder do it for you. In fact, you can by a nice region-free Malata DVD player for about $299 that does a supurb job of outputing PAL DVDs in NTSC (or 480P) and vice versa.
I'm not sure what happens with the "speed up" in these cases. You see, that's hard-coded at the mastering stage as the audio has literally been "sped up" when the DVD was mastered and the frequency response modified according (this is why many people, despite the better resolution of PAL discs, prefer NTSC DVDs for musicals). I'm not exactly sure what the MALATA player is doing to digitally convert the "PAL" DVD to NTSC. It might be pitch-controling and slowing down the audio, taking the original 24 fps video and applying 3-2 to output it as a 60 frame-per-second 480 progressive video. It might be doing something cheezy by leaving it in "50 field per second" form and just repeating every 5th field (interlaced scan) to bump up to 60. Sortof a "5-2" pulldown if you will. Maybe someone at AVS knows for sure.
The other think the Malata player does (just using this player as an example of what we're talking about) is downscale the 576 vertical-pixel image to 480. When some "NTSC/PAL" players do this the image looks squished, but the Malata let's you control the X and Y axis scaling feature independently to proportion the image to your tastes.
BTW, in regards to how most film-source DVDs are being encoded...according to Craig Eggers (from Toshiba) and the guys at THX that I've talked to, most mastering facilities are doing the 24 frames/48 fields thing and then flagging the player to produce a 3-2 pulldown for NTSC playback. It's really not complicated as the DVD player doesn't even have to know "which" fields to repeat...it just has to know to repeate every fourth (is it every fourth or every third? Oh this gets confusing).
Technically, a DVD mastered this way should also be marked as "24 progressive scan" in the encoding. This is part of the MPEG system. What this means is that each pair of "fields" that has been encoded on the disc are flagged in such a way that marks that they go together to form a "field". In this way, yes, the current DVD standard absolutely supports 24 progressive frames per second...a properly encoded disc may have the stored split into 48 fields, but they can be flagged so that a DVD player could recognize which fields combine to form a frame of video.
The answer to your excellent questions has a real world application here. It's called progressive-scan DVD players.
There are basically 2 types: Those that have standard MPEG off-the-self MPEG decoders which are "hard wired" to output a 480I component signal and those that can actually read this meta-data to reassemble the frames prior to MPEG decoding.
On the surface it would sound like the latter would be better...let the MPEG decoder actually *make* the 480 progressive-signal right from scratch from the data on the DVD.
Turns out this is not the best answer.
The reason is that many DVDs out there are mastered poorly and thus may not have been encoded in 24 frame/48 field form (some achor bay titles I have are clearly sourced from composite masters which no doubt have already had the 3-2 applied when it was converted to 60 field-per-second for laserdisc). Others are encoded in proper 24 frame/48 field form but have the field's marked wrong so the decoder would pick and pair the wrong fields when trying to reassemble the original frame! Can you believe that Titanic...that stupid THX 4x3 lbxed transfer...is an example of a DVD encoded with the progressive-field-pair flags off-synch!!!!
So it turns out that in the real world, the best way to reconstruct 480P is to let an old fashioned MPEG decoder give you 480I digital component video...and then let a chip like Faroudja look at it to analyze it for 3-2 sequencing. If it is found...then it applies...all in the digital domain...the 3-2 reversal and reasembles the proper fields back into frames with no loss as it's working with the original decoded signal (the procesing is to determine which fields go together...not actually changing any data in the video signal).
Some DVD players, like my Panny rp91, are sortof a combination of these techniques. My player will trust a DVD if it has the fields marked for progressive-playback pairing(so it would screw up Titanic) but if it sees an "interlaced" flag it then will analyze the video for 3-2 and apply proper 3-2 reversal if it sees a film-cadence.
It's film-cadence detection is slower than the faroudja chip, so it works out best this way. Often trailers or 'promos' at the beginning of a DVD are marked as "interlaced video" because they've been mastered on video gear despite their film origins. My Panny often combs for one or 2 frames until it sees the cadence and then locks into perfect 480P playback until the next sequence.
Whew! Hope that answers some questions. Hope it also helps illustrate why I feel so adamant about the "DVDs aren't NTSC" thing :)
-dave
 

Jeff Kohn

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I'm curious if this flagging can so faithfully instruct the player to recreate the progressive frame natively why the average progressive DVD player sports a traditional scaling chip like DVDO, Genesis or Faroudja to do the math for recreating a progressive frame. Even if it's done in the digital domain- if it were as simply as processing flags, why spend the money on a scaling chip??
Because not all DVD's are progressivly encoded. Some contain video content such as concerts or anime that are not stored progressively. It's also possible for film material to be incorrectly flagged or not flagged at all (although this is pretty rare nowadays, it happened more often when DVD was in its infancy). In these cases, the DVD player can "fall back" to using DVD/Genesis chips to do video deinterlacing.

Since film is at 24fps, storing 60 progressive frames per second would be wasteful and is completely unnecessary. But that doesn't mean that the DVD player can't exactly reproduce the original progressive frames in the digital domain.
 

Sean Patrick

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I have a progressive scan dvd player (rp91) and an hd 16:9 tv, and i usually understand most of the technical issues with progressive/interlaced pictures, but this thread has me scratching my head!!!

Is the Royal tenenbaums dvd misflagged or improperly encoded for a progressive signal? I guess i don't get what the problem is here other than the fact that it might have some EE issues.

Will my RP91 play this disc properly??

sorry for the ignorance, i'm just really confused.
 

Vince Maskeeper

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Sean,

Apologies. The question of encoding and how DVD works was really a side conversation to the issue of the RT disc. The disc is fine, encoded properly and resonably nice looking in the video department.

Again- the second page of this thread has gotten a bit futher into how DVD is authored and how compression works-- but these things were inspired by the RT disc have little to do with that title.

-V
 

Sean Patrick

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cool -

thanks vince...guess i'm still learning!

i find the Rushmore criterion disc to have a very edgy feel to it, so i am expecting a similar look to the RT disc after reading this thread. Too bad we can't elminate EE altogether.
 

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