Urheilukatu
FI-00250 Helsinki 25
Finland
The Walt Disney Company
Walt Disney Pictures
500 S. Buena Vista Street
Burbank, CA 91521-0643
U. S. A.
July 19th,
2004
Dear Sirs:
Let me first say that I am
a great admirer of Disney animated features and have enjoyed them all my
life. Now that you have restored and released many of your classics on
DVD, they gain new life and can be enjoyed repeatedly.
However, I have encountered
some visual quality issues, especially in the Region-2
releases, that I would like to discuss in this letter, hoping that you may
find my comments constructive and helpful. You may need to talk some of
these issues over with Buena Vista Home Entertainment.
First of all, I would like to
point out that many of the European/Scandinavian releases that I have
acquired and viewed with high-quality equipment represent a supreme
level of digital craftsmanship. The transfers are excellent, they are made
from clear prints, and there are no unnecessary video artifacts in the
picture. A few releases reveal, though, that they were probably converted
into PAL system from an original NTSC medium and certain problems
occurred in that process. I can see the same problems with different DVD
players, so they do not arise from a single player’s malfunction. I
will demonstrate my observations with a few screenshots from the DVD
releases. I encourage you to obtain and view these disks yourselves with a
fully PAL-compatible equipment.
1. My first
example comes from the Scandinavian release of Walt Disney
Treasures: Mickey Mouse in Living Colour. I noticed immediately
that the animated films have considerable black bars on every side of the
image:
These bars are unnecessary, and they also can be seen on a TV set, even
if it has some “overscan”. The Chronological
Donald doesn’t have such bars. Do they arise from the
resolution difference between the NTSC and PAL systems, which has not
been compensated properly for, or why are they inserted? They are not
present in other material:
I haven’t seen bars like this in other of your Region-2 releases,
although I did notice similar bars in the Finnish release of Hayao
Miyazaki’s Spirited Away:
As you can see, this release has an additional problem: the movie has been
released on 24 fps, although in the PAL system, display frame rate is 25
Hz. Because of this speed error, part of the film frames need to be shown
interlaced, and you get interlace artifacts and extra motion blur, because
the original NTSC medium has been treated as video material, not as film
material, in the conversion process. I have noticed this particular problem
in some Disney’s extra features, too, like in the Clock
Cleaners which is an extra feature in the Scandinavian DVD release
of The Great Mouse Detective.
Another problem in
Mickey Mouse in Living Colour is the low quality of the video
image. I guess that there are some kind of flagging or deinterlacing
problems involved, and the image may also be compressed too heavily. I
hope you are more familiar with the technical details than I am, and can
correct this problem. Anyway, please look at the following enlarged
screenshots:
All the lines, that are almost horizontal, look more like stairs, or a saw
blade, or a string of pearls (look at the strings of the ukulele, the edges of
the surfboard, Goofy’s fingers etc.). This issue does not impede all
your DVD titles for Region 2 (The Chronological Donald is
better), so I assume that in this case there were some problems in the
NTSC → PAL conversion that could have been avoided.
In Hawaiian
Holiday, there is one frame that looks especially bad, but this may
have been caused by film material:
I haven’t seen the
Region-1 release of Mickey Mouse in Living Color in NTSC. I
assume, however, that these problems simply are not present there. (I have
Behind the Scenes at the Walt Disney Studio from Region 1,
and there the main features are immaculate.) I consider the
European/Scandinavian Mickey Mouse in Living Colour to be
so defective in quality that I will rather try to buy the Region-1 release.
— These low-quality releases for Region 2 undermine the regional
encoding system because people will have to buy the U. S. releases
anyway in order to obtain the Disney quality. This wastes the two benefits
of the PAL system: the slightly better resolution, and the avoidance of 3-2
pulldown effects.
2. The
Scandinavian release of Beauty and the Beast — Special
Edition is ridden with similar problems:
The same applies for Atlantis: The Lost Empire and The
Treasure Planet in a lesser degree. Does this image quality tally
with that of the Region-1 release?
3. The Dance of
the Pink Elephants from Dumbo is surely one of the most
memorable moments ever in animated features. When the pink elephants
start marching on the edges of the screen, it creates a metafictional
effect.
I have the Scandinavian DVD
release of Dumbo, and its image quality per se is
somewhat better than in those features mentioned above when it comes to
video artifacts, but there is another kind of problem present: it seems as if
the image were slightly “overscanned,” so that all things in
the film frame are not visible in the video version, when compared to the
theatrical release, for instance. (I had the same feeling with
Fantasia.) From time to time, it seems as if tops of hats &
mountains and things like that are slightly cut off frame, although you
have a feeling that they were drawn complete and should be visible for the
sake of visual composition. How do these things look like when compared
to storyboards and to the original negative?
I think this phenomenon is very
obvious in the shot where the pink elephants are marching on the edges of
the screen:
Aren’t you supposed to see more of their feet than is shown here?
If the TV set adds its own overscan to this, you lose even more visual
information and the effect is destroyed. Does this correspond exactly to the
NTSC release of Dumbo? Should the digital transfer perhaps
be made again in order to preserve the original vision of the
filmmakers?
4. I prefer to see
movies in their original (theatrical) aspect ratio. Therefore, I had to
acquire the German special edition of The Sleeping Beauty, in
which the aspect ratio is anamorphic 2.35 : 1, in order to
avoid the pan&scan versions. However, shouldn’t this ratio
actually be 2.20 : 1 because it was filmed in Technirama 70, not in
Cinemascope? The image seems in some occasions to be matted a few
lines too heavily:
(See the MPAA approval sign at the bottom.)
5. Finally, I hope
I would be allowed to make a few suggestions concerning future releases.
There are some widescreen features that you haven’t published in
anamorphic versions (enhanced for 16 : 9 TVs) so far. I
would like to mention especially The Black Cauldron and
Lady and the Tramp. They were published on laserdisks with
the aspect ratio 2.20 : 1, but those releases weren’t
anamorphic. Could I hope for a technically more up-to-date release, made
from better prints? I think TRON provides an exellent
prototype of how this ratio should be dealt with on DVD and published in
PAL format.
It will be sufficient for me to
know that I have made you aware of these impediments in the European
releases and that you have the means and will to avoid them in the future,
and perhaps to improve the present releases.
| Yours sincerely, |
Markus Lång |
| |
Markus Lång
internet mlang@elo.helsinki.fi |
