I was watching a DVD of the movie Thief from 1981 and film artifacts(black and other color splotches on single frames, black threads etc) are pretty obvious and noticeable, its fairly annoying. This is not a rare occurance either, its common to see these errors in older films released on DVD.
What is the deal with this? Looking it up the answer is that these artifacts were on the film copy scanned in digitally to make the DVD, but why? These artifacts are something I’d expect to see on a used copy of the film shown several times in a theater, not on a presumably perfect and pristine archival copy kept solely to create home releases on. Even for films made before home viewing was possible, surely they understood generation decay and kept some pristine master copies if for nothing else to run off more first generation copies for revival theaters and art houses etc.
If it was some obscure cult film I could understand if the studio went bankrupt etc and the only surviving copies were from a theater somewhere, but thats not true with all of these I see plenty from big name studios, big profile releases. Did they really not keep archives?
Or is it really just sloppyness and penny pinching, and they can’t be arsed to pull the master from the archive for the DVD release?
Film only remains pristine if someone puts a lot of time and effort into KEEPING it pristine. Many movies were stashed in some inexpensive manner, because no one really expected to need it again.
Only a few films get the kind of close examination and rework necessary for a flawless copy. Archive copies or production reels are sent to outside companies to do the work, and the film will usually suffer in the process, so the best quality film is never sent out. The contracts for these copies sometimes allow the original owner to re-license a ‘digitally re-mastered version’.
Back in the early days of CDs there would often be a disclaimer on some saying that the high fidelity of the CD format can reveal limitations of the source material, IOW the original analog master tapes. This isn’t really an issue anymore for music because fully digital recording equipment has been ubiquitous for probably over 20 years now.
Because of the order of magnitude increase in storage requirements film always lags behind music by many years. There wasn’t really a viable digital format for it until DVD in the late 90s (there was DVHS but it was never pushed for the consumer market, and contrary to belief the picture on LaserDisc is not truly digital). Its also only been in the last five years or so (because of the popularity of HD TVs) that source material has finally mostly switched to fully digital recording.
*Thief *is a good example. While generally regarded highly by critics (it’s one of my favorites) it wasn’t exactly a blockbuster. Box Office Mojo gives its domestic gross at $11.5 million which even for 1981 is low. So the studio is going to be very penny-pinching in it’s DVD release. They have to estimate what they think it’ll sell and spend accordingly on it’s transfer. I’m sure they still tried to get the best print they could for it, but they’re definitely not going to strike a new one nor will they spring for any digital restoration because they’re too expensive for a DVD that will only sell modestly.
Yes, I have the earliest release of Best of Credence Clearwater Revival, and the progression of quality of the recording is obvious as the recording date goes forward. The background white noise becomes less and less…
A film may need to be “digitally remastered”, but if you’ve ever tried to adjust your home photos with “auto-adjust”… doesn’t work well. Corrections, to be good, have to be done by hand. There is no magic “Fix All” button. Someone watches each scene, looks for flaws, and applies the fix to those flaws until they are as good as they can get… one at a time. “Get rid of speckles” without picking certain areas may cause highlights to blur, for example. Plus, you have to use the best master rather than a secondary copy - this risking the vault copy. Finally, a lot of Hollywood storage is less than ideal, and likely will become more of a crisis as films become older and changing media trends mean more bankruptcies.
The digital remaster treatment as mentioned by thers is reserved for films where enough people will appreciate the treatment that they will pay for it. A film can be scanned and turned digital for cheap. How many people will pay an extra $15 or $19.99 instead of picking it out of the bargain bin for $9.99? Worse yet, once it’s been released as a moderately good copy, is there still a market for “digitally remastered”? Would you buy it a second time in better condition? How many would?
(Aside - I used to buy a lot of DVD’s. Nothing was more irritating than buying the movie when it was first available - only to have the extended edition, with extras etc. to come out much later. Very very few movies would I then buy that second version. In my mind, most studios are shooting themselves in the foot that way. Even Blu-Ray - it’s too late, unless it’s a massive classic, I already have it on DVD, that’s plenty good enough.)
As was Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. In the middle, there’s an image of the film being caught in the projector and burning. The time I saw it, it was unimpressive, since that happened all the time with the projectors at our college.
If what you are seeing could best be described as pixilation (small, box-shaped artifacts), the most likely explanation is that you are seeing the effects of data compression. To have really optimal picture clarity, you should have only about 1 hour of video on a “single-layer” DVD. You can get 2 hours on a “dual-layer” DVD. However, when you try to crunch 2 hours onto a “single-layer” DVD, you are trying to represent too many pictures with too little data.
It’s the same thing as .mp3 for music. .mp3s come in various sampling rates. 320 Kb/s sound best. 24 Kb/s sounds absolutely dreadful.
Back to video - single layer DVDs are cheaper. Therefore, they are often used for children’s programming (where picture quality is assumed to not be a vital concern), documentaries (which are often not much longer than 60 min), comedy (often not longer than 60 min), and for lower-end movies, which need to be priced “more competitively” to use the euphemism.
This is also the reason that “streaming” video looks so poor when viewed on a decent screen. There’s just not enough data there to draw a good picture.