compression

From: Pip Chodorov (email suppressed)
Date: Wed Jul 09 2008 - 17:02:14 PDT


It doesn't if you compare it with betas or a film prints. It looks
seductive and colorful but if you compare it frame by frame with a
full resolution reproduction (I happen to have betas of many of the
same films, and have done this experiment), you see a reduced color
space and loss of detail. For example on Mothlight, little specks of
color and detail are lost and replaced by a beige fuzz. Where a
hundred subtle colors intermingled, the DVD may give you only three
or four variations of square pixels. Watching at full speed, a novice
viewer may have the impression of seeing a fine reproduction and a
rich visual experience, but in fact the reproduction is not faithful
to the original artwork. VHS may not be great, but an analog copy
from a first class beta will keep the colors and much of the detail
intact. MPEG2 was intended for natural, predictable motion, so all
this frame-by-frame detail gets lost in artefacts and macroblocks.
Depending on the film, you can squeak by: blurring the image 2 or 3
pixels before encoding, using a GOP of 1 and doing many passes can
give a soft photographic effect to the compressed image. But it will
always be lossy.
-Pip

At 16:04 -0700 9/07/08, Myron Ort wrote:
>Why does the Brakhage Anthology on dvd look quite acceptable?
>
>Myron Ort
>

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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.