Whats Compression (Beauty & The Beast DVD)?

[Ravenous]

I was reading a review on Disneys Beauty & The Beast and the reviewer says "Disney crammed three versions of the film on to one DVD disc, and as a result the picture quality really suffers due to some bad compression."

What are the results of compression? What is it and what does it look like? I have this DVD and was watching it and noticed it does look crappy. The characters look cut out and seem like they were drawn out in white pen. Instead of their being black borders, theyre white, like cut outs. I thought it was the Interlaced shit, but now with my progressive DVD, the problem is still there. Its kinda hard to explain, but its not a white halo, but more of a white flickering over the black outlines of a character. None of my other cartoon DVDs have this crap (Atlantis, Simpsons, Transformers, The Sword In The Stone, etc)

Can anyone help me out here?

[downhuman]

First off, I'll give a brief simple explanation about how MPEG-2 ( or any MPEG) compression works. During the telecine process, a digital picture is made of each frame of the film at a certain chosen resolution until a digital file of the movie is completed. Keep in mind that such a file is extremely large as there is literally hundreds of thousands of frames and tens of thousands of pixels within each frame.

Now what happens during compression is that the MPEG encoder looks at each frame of that large file on a pixel by pixel basis. What the encoder does is compare each individual pixel to the corresponding pixel in the previous frame. If the information in the following pixel doesn't change(the best example is a still shot) then the encoder doesn't add any new information to the new file regarding that particular pixel. And in doing this with every pixel you can see how it greatly reduces the file size. This is an extremely simple explanation, I realize, but I think you get the basic jist of compression. Also realize that when your DVD is authored, it doesn't have the same rate of compression throughout. The rate of compression is variable.

Now to answer your question about what you see on the screen during heavy compression. You'll see things like blocking where solid blocks of color pop up in areas of little to no on-screen movement. Solid color surfaces such as walls seem to lose all texture. Fine detail is almost non-existant or extremely blurry. You get whats called mosquito noise (a lot of that on Beauty) where there seems to be a buzzing around hard contrast lines (mostly light and dark) which kind of looks like a bunch mosquitos buzzing around.

I have to admit, that I was dissappointed with the Beauty and the Beast transfer as well. They used the same digital mastering process that they used for Snow White where they scanned each individual cell element of the frame separately (as opposed to scanning the entire frame at once). It looked great on Snow White but Beauty and the Beast didn't fare as well. I think as a result the fluidity of the animation suffered as well making it look more like a Saturday morining cartoon than the visual masterpiece we remember it as being. I think the flickering white lines you talk about were a side effect of that process as well.

The color balancing is off a little bit, too. Reds look pinkish and the dark almond of Belle's hair and eyes are now a nice shit brown. Take a look at the trailers on disc 2 to see a truer representation of the color palette (the prints for the trailer are admittedly alot dirtier, though). Disney could have done so much better with this.

[Jellodyne]

I grabbed an image from the DVDFile homepage, this picture is 10K (10,322 bytes)

[Jellodyne]

I cranked up the compression in Paint Shop Pro, the resulting picture is only 3.3k (3,348 bytes), see the ringing, look at the blockiness in the background, see how 'dirty' the image looks.

[Jellodyne]

Actually, the following is what you're more likely to see on a DVD - I ran a 'soften' filter on the image (which helps remove fine detail) and thus was able to decrease the amount of compression I needed to do to achieve the same file size. The image is roughly the same size at 3.3 KB (3,395 bytes), but the ringing is somewhat removed. The diference is subtle...

[Jellodyne]

Ok, I just noticed the right-hand side of Ravenous's avitar looks like downhuman's... freaky

[tvboy]

Originally posted by Jellodyne
I cranked up the compression in Paint Shop Pro, the resulting picture is only 3.3k (3,348 bytes), see the ringing, look at the blockiness in the background, see how 'dirty' the image looks.

Hey look!
A Madacy DVD release!

[Ravenous]

Ahhh ok, I get what you guys are saying. But if B&TB is suppose to be really compressed, than the image should appear blocky. Well Im not seeing it blocky than. So Im a little confused. But the mosquito noise description seems to hit it right on the head. It does look like something is flying around the people because its going from black out lines, to white outlines. Kinda like a flickering. Rersulting in everything looking cut out.

But I kinda fixed this. I just lowered the sharpness on my TV! I had it really fucking high anyway. It was at about 50 out of 63, so I lowered it to 13. It looks damn good now and the compression is barely noticeable. It even looks good on movies, I popped in my LOTR EE to see if it was affected, hell no! The sharpness hardly did anything, the picture didnt get much blurry (if at all) or anything.