Professional Store Purchased DVD's need to be restored
 

This is a new one:

Purchased a few DVD's, kind of rare titles and found many flaws.

1st DVD
1) Analog Blocks in the picture
2) The sound only plays in the left channel
3) Lots of snow and grain in the film

2nd DVD
1) They basically copied the VHS release of the video an put it on DVD. Didn't go back to the sourse, kind of made it on the cheap. If you look close at the picture you can see the VHS tracking issues.
2) Lots of snow and grain in the film

3rd DVD
1) Didn't restore the color of the film
2) Since it is an old recording didn't clean up the picture or fix bad frames, the recording itself has hundreds of errors.

Thought this is kind of funny, because these are the things I am trying to fix on my VHS tapes. (These are all factory titles and not bootlegs)

Congratulations. You've just graduated to ... well... I don't know what .... but clearly your knowledge and understanding of video is improving -- you're seeing video for what it is. The idea of "it's professional, so it must be good" has been discarded, as it should be.

Blu-ray is an easy target these days. Sony loves to tell you how everything looks better, how it's much clearer than DVD, blah blah blah. Yes, it has more resolution, it CAN BE sharper (but isn't necessarily). Whoop-dee-doo. With all the "extra picture" from higher resolution comes grain and noise -- and in many cases, film flicker. Quite a few pre-digital-age movies (which is, of course, most catalogs) look terrible.

I recently bought The Postman on Blu-ray because it was $10 vs the $20 DVD. I wish I'd have bought the DVD instead. This Blu-ray has so much luma-based flicker that I almost can't stand to watch it. The DVD, with it's long GOP MPEG-2 encoding, tends to hide errors like that. Same for the film grain.

About 4 years ago, Thundercats fans raised hell at the awful conversion done on the DVD releases. There was obvious blue/red chroma noise in the image, making it look like near-raw dumps off broadcast tape masters, across a composite connection.

Most B&W film and TV is treated like garbage, given no respect, dumped as-is to DVD and then -- to add insult to injury -- touted as "digitally restored" when it looks and sounds like crap. The Little Rascals "restored" VHS set comes to mind. I restored it for real a few years ago, converting it to DVD for personal viewing. I made it truly B&W, balanced the contrast/levels, and fixed the hissy/noisy audio.

Factory-pressed, studio made -- but still pathetic.

Sometimes you see the awful videos that get released, and you have to wonder how the people who 'signed off" on the final product got their job.

I'm reminded of this video:



.... but I'd have to say it's more often than just April 1. :D

That was an actual TV promo spot on Cartoon Network at least 5 years ago. Remember that Time Warner owns CN, along with quite a few TV channels, studios, etc.

I've spent a LOT of my hobby time repairing screwed-up releases, so that I could watch AND enjoy them. It's hard to enjoy a butchered release, I feel compelled to fix it first.

So I understand you completely.

Smart studios hire people to restore their stuff -- I'm working with one right now, cleaning up their library for streaming distribution. As you may or may not know, noise becomes a major issue when compressing for the web, to formats like H.264 and FLV, for high-compression delivery.