JungleBird wrote: ↑Thu Feb 03, 2022 2:10 am
Actually, I just compared some episodes from different seasons and now am even more confused. It seems that even in one season there are many different levels of quality and sharpness between episodes.
(To be clear, I'm still talking about the british FF release here)
The DVDs are all over the place as well, not in just the way they look, but in how the DVD masters were made too. I'm in the process of encoding them all to h.264 files so that I can put them all on a single 128-GB USB flash drive to watch them on my TV (via a BD player that has a USB port that can play various media files directly) without having to mess with DVDs every few episodes. Part of the process when encoding DVD-sourced MPEG-2 files is to run them through DGIndex which creates a D2V file, which can be thought of as a set of instructions telling the encoder how to properly handle the frames/fields. As it generates the D2V file it gives a real-time display of the type of video it's dealing with, which can range from 100% video-source to 100% film-source, and any percentage in between.
With the MPI DVDs, most of the episodes are close to 100% film-source, with at least one episode so far actually being 100% film-source. However, there was also one that was 100% video-source, and several that have been under 95% film-source, and a few that were only around 70 to 80% film-source. In one case, the opening title sequence was 100% video-source and the rest was 99.xx% film-source. It's truly bizarre.
Now, having it show up as video-source doesn't necessarily mean the content was shot on video, and in the case of MPI, none of the episodes were shot on video; they were all shot on film. But it does mean that some video sources (hard-coded interlacing) were used to make the DVD masters, and that means that best practices of the time weren't being used. For example, a 2K master made from a film print would show up as 100% film-source, because it would just be pure 24 FPS progressive frames. If you then made a DVD master from that, it too would show up as 100% film source, because it would still have those 24 FPS (23.976 rather) progressive frames, and the interlacing that's required for DVD (bringing it up to 29.97 FPS) would be done in real-time by the DVD player, following the instructions from the pulldown flags, i.e., the interlacing wouldn't be hard-coded. When they made masters for LaserDisc and other pre-DVD home video formats, players couldn't add interlaced fields on the fly so the interlacing had to be hard-coded into the video. That was done with an old style telecine machine, using a process known as 3:2 pulldown. Those type of masters would show up in DGIndex as 100% video-source.
And I still have some hope left that the new US release maybe gets better, more consistent source material. Who knows...
I hope so too. Like I mentioned in a previous post, if they are properly-made BD transfers, I'd use them to re-encode to DVD resolution and have better quality than the official DVD releases. I did that with the Star Trek TOS BD release (which is good, and consistent, quality), and they look perfect on my standard-definition CRT TV, and they all fit on a 128-GB flash drive with plenty of room to spare.