Did Criterion use LD transfers for early DVDs?

[C6H12O6]

And if so, how does that work? Do they have a digital master from the previous transfer they just 'convert' into a DVD format? If anyone can give the fine details to this, that would be great. The technical aspects of digital home video is pretty alien to me.

[Ed Bishop]

Which titles, exactly, do you think were dubbed from LD's? We need specifics....

:ed:

[Michael St. Clair]

I certainly don't have a list, but in the early days of DVD, many releases used existing letterboxed (or 4:3 academy ratio) transfers that had been previously used for laserdiscs. Disney was well known for this, and was criticized for it. Since early Criterion widescreen DVDs were non-anamorphic, I'm sure some of them recycled laserdisc transfers. I'll bet $10 that their Spinal Tap DVD wasn't a fresh transfer (I own the disc).

Discs like this still benefit from less noise and higher color bandwidth.

[C6H12O6]

No idea, if I had to guess, look through the early DVD titles up to and including "Brazil," and pick the ones that were previously issued by Criterion on LD.

So how does recycling previous transfers work? Considering what you have to do to burn a DVD from an LD, which I've yet to do, I'm curious about the differences between prepping a DVD and a LD from the same 'master.'

[greg_t]

Silence of the Lambs Criterion DVD.

[Ken_McAlinden]

Criterion used a number of existing transfers for their early DVDs including Silence of the Lambs, Robocop, This is Spinal Tap and the John Woo films among others. That being said, I do not know in what format those video masters were created. They do not seem to have the degree of composite video artifacts that some of the other re-hashed transfers had.

Regards,

[Michael St. Clair]

I'm sure a lot of those transfers are on component digital videotape (D1, D2, D3).

EDIT: Here's an article on Brazil:

http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_brazil_dvd_criterion/

"This is the Director Approved Edition, and Terry was satisfied with the original Lt/Rt, and that is what really matters," says Wiese. "The master for the laserdisc is a D2 videotape. We also use Digi Beta for our DVD masters. They are both very high-quality formats."


(those formats are far from state of the art today; the obsolescence curve has accellerated)

[nosticker]

A few clarifications:
D1 is component video, sampled 4:2:2 at a data rate of around 3 gig persecond

D2 is composite video; the data rate is approx 1.3 gig per second.

D3 is also composite, forgot the data rate

DigiBeta is compressed 2:1, sampled at 4:2:2, has a data rate around 90 mbps.

DVD gets around 6-8 mbps....I think.

I may be the only person in the world that doesn't care for DVD's picture. I wonder if it is because so much of the information is being thrown out?

Which "better" formats do we speak of? I've never heard of anyone complaining much about the picture on these formats, unless we speak of HD.

Dan