Disney DVD = bad compression

[FatCow]

I don't know where to post this but I need to vent.

Disney DVD used to mean quality picture and sound. Some of them are reference material such as Finding Nemo and The Lion King.

However, more recent titles are unbearable to watch. These titles are as follows:

1. Brother Bear (uses only 2.8 Gb out of 9 Gb disk space resulting in colour banding)

2. Beauty and the Beast (uses only about 3 Gb out of 9 Gb disk space resulting in mosquito noise in too many scenes)

3. Where Dream Lives (uses only about 3 Gb out of 4.7 Gb disk space resulting in pixellisation... and making it worse, it uses the same VHS master for most parts of the DVD making it a DVD with lower-than-VHS picture quality)

4. Haunted Mansion, again only using about 3 Gb out of 9 Gb space resulting in many compression artifacts in the dark scenes.

What's up with this? I'm not even using too large of a screen and my system is calibrated to movie industry standard.

Aaaargh (where is the hair-pulling smiley when you need one)

 

[Synonymous]

Does it really surprise you that Disney no longer means quality? That seems to be corporate policy throughout the organization now. Lowered maintenance standards in parks. Lousy programming at ABC. Cinderella II. It never ends. There's always some new area they find to cut costs.

 

[JKanownik]

95% of people buying Disney DVD's don't even now what MPEG-4, compression, color-banding or pixelissation are. Of the remaining 5% that do, 80% of those people don't have a nice enough TV & DVD setup to realize the problem is with the DVD and not their system. If I was Disney I wouldn't be too concerned with 1% of the market. And considering Brother Bear & Haunted Mansion bombed and Where the Magic Lives is a park DVD, I would suspect that they had very limited budgets. Your statement on the The Beauty and the Beast DVD quality is misleading because there are multiple versions of the film and audio commentary. They used all the space on the disc, so its not like they were cutting corners. They just decided the multiple versions were more important than the picture quality.

-DH

 

[FatCow]

The funny thing is that what they're doing with the compression (except for Where Magic Lives DVD) is actually costing them MORE money.

The space is there but instead of filling it with movie, they filled the space with DVD-ROM content which statistically no more than 5% of the buyer ever use or even glance.

Creating those contents cost lots of money and having further compression on the video file also cost more money.

I'm really confused what do they want with all these bad decisions.

 

[Harambe]

Wow - you are way more technical than me! LOL! But I do notice that the DVD's are not as good as they should be. However, that being said, DH buys a lot of DVD's and I've notice the poor quality trend goes beyond Disney. Maybe this is going to be a new industry standard. Yuck!

 

[FatCow]

Originally posted by JKanownik
Your statement on the The Beauty and the Beast DVD quality is misleading because there are multiple versions of the film and audio commentary. They used all the space on the disc, so its not like they were cutting corners. They just decided the multiple versions were more important than the picture quality.

-DH

Actually, it's not misleading. Each version of the movie only took around 3 Gb of space which is not enough for animation. There are too many different versions of the movie but if they know the first thing about DVD specification, they don't need to put the entire length of each version of the movie on to one disc. All they need to do is creating "seamless branching" so if somebody choose the a longer version, at certain parts, the movie will branch to the additional scenes and back to the original file so there won't be any redundant file.

As far as "Where Magic Lives", my company does DVD remastering and remastering doesn't cost that much. For the length of that park DVD will cost no more than US$3,000. Don't tell me they don't have US$3,000 for mastering... after all, they spent (based on my company's rate) about US$ 15,000 to pseudo convert the mono signal to 5.1 Dolby Digital (which in the end has no use because it's just the same signal channeled to all 5 channels).

 

[JKanownik]

Originally posted by FatCow
The funny thing is that what they're doing with the compression (except for Where Magic Lives DVD) is actually costing them MORE money.

The space is there but instead of filling it with movie, they filled the space with DVD-ROM content which statistically no more than 5% of the buyer ever use or even glance.

Creating those contents cost lots of money and having further compression on the video file also cost more money.

I'm really confused what do they want with all these bad decisions.

While only 5% of people view the extras, a much larger percentage take them into consideration when they buy the DVD. People don't understand compression and video quality. They do understand extras and perceive them as adding "value" to the DVD (thus lowering the overall cost) regardless of if they even care about the extras or even intend on ever watching them.

-DH

 

[moinab]

I won't even pretend to understand the technical aspects of this thread, but I will say that we have problems with the majority of our Disney DVDs. It is extremely frustrating, especially since we don't have problems with any others. We are on our third Schoolhouse Rock DVD, and it is still almost unwatchable. The picture breaks up or freezes all the time (sorry I don't know the correct technical terms.) This also happens regularly with Finding Nemo, several of the Baby Einstein titles, and the parks and cruise planning DVDs. It happens occasionally with all of our other Disney titles. Like I mentioned, this only happens with Disney products, so I really don't think it's our DVD player.