DVD Quality

After several days of agony, I finally received today my UFO DVDs
from DeepDiscountDVD! :-) :-)
I did the pre-order with free shipping, and got an email two weeks
ago saying that the order was completed on 7/9. I was starting to
think that my DVDs had disappeared somewhere within the postal
system, but luckily that wasn't the case!

Anyway, I just finished watching IDENTIFIED, and everyone was right,
the picture quality was excellent!
However... I noticed that sometimes when the camera moved at a not-
so-slow speed, or when someone in the visual field moved, the person
(s) looked a bit out-of-focus during the movement. Am I
hallucinating? Did someone else notice this? I am assuming this is
not exclusive of IDENTIFIED, but perhaps an artifact due to the PAL
to NTSC conversion? Can someone confirm/explain? Or is it my DVD
player (but don't remember having noticed this when I am watching
movies). If it is the PAL/NTSC conversion, I did not remember seeing
this in the VHS tapes (but they did not release IDENTIFIED on VHS).
After a while, this was becoming a bit distracting/annoying. Can
someone explain?

David Levine

>However... I noticed that sometimes when the camera moved at a not-
>so-slow speed, or when someone in the visual field moved, the person
>(s) looked a bit out-of-focus during the movement. Am I
>hallucinating? Did someone else notice this? I am assuming this is
>not exclusive of IDENTIFIED, but perhaps an artifact due to the PAL
>to NTSC conversion?

Can you name a particular scene where this is particularly noticeable
to you, or give us a "time elapsed" reading on your DVD player? The
only thing I'm noticing are what I believe to be MPEG compression
artifacts. Although since I seemed to be the only one noticing
it, I thought perhaps I was imagining it... :-) These aren't
the typical "blocky" artifacts, but they seem to show up with
the motion of an object within the frame (most notably clouds,
or the moon, etc.). Don't get me wrong though -- even with these
artifacts, the resultant picture is still better than anything
previously released!

Marc

Hi all,

I just got an e-mail from Amazon.fr, and although I cannot read
French, I do believe it's informing me that my French UFO DVD's have
shipped!

Marc

David:

I haven't watched my DVDs yet (for shame! :), but I think I know the effect
you are talking about. I noticed this a bit on the last set of Thunderbirds --
the scene would briefly go blurry then sharpen back into focus. It was a tad
annoying. I'll let the list know if I see it in Identified. Not sure what
causes it.

I have a Panasonic A-105 DVD player and a Toshiba DVD-ROM. Not sure if I
viewed the TBirds on the ROM drive to check the effect.

Anthony
----- Original Message -----
From: "dlevine2100" <[hidden email]>
To: <[hidden email]>
Sent: Monday, July 22, 2002 10:43 PM
Subject: [SHADO] DVD Quality


<snip>

Try taking the text and crunching it thru the Alta-Vista translator
(www.altavista.com).

Anthony
----- Original Message -----
From: "Marc Martin" <[hidden email]>
To: <[hidden email]>
Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2002 2:19 AM
Subject: [SHADO] French UFO DVD's Shipped!


> Hi all,
>
> I just got an e-mail from Amazon.fr, and although I cannot read
> French, I do believe it's informing me that my French UFO DVD's have
> shipped!
>
> Marc

--- In SHADO@y..., Marc Martin <marc@u...> wrote:

> Can you name a particular scene where this is particularly
noticeable
> to you, or give us a "time elapsed" reading on your DVD player?

OK, I noticed this in almost every scene with "lots of movement",
lets take Chapter 2 (IDENTIFIED).

1. Alec gets out of elevator (office), and says hi to (beautiful)
SHADO operative, she walks away from him... look at her belt and
back, they look blurry/out of focus.

2. Camera takes Ayshea, then Alec Freeman, then back to Ayshea...
concentrate on Ayshea at the end, she looks blurry.

3. Perhaps the most noticeable scnene, Alec walks into Ed's office,
and camera walks behind and around Ed's back (who is sitting), his
hair and back looks very blurry.

I know that when the camera or subject moves, there supposed to be
some blurriness, but here it just looks to me out of the ordinary,
and a bit annoying. Again, hope that I am not hallucinating, but
haven't noticed this on other DVDs. I even paused in the middle of
the scenes above, and they look too blurry to me! I have a Sony DVP-
S560D and a 32-in color TV. I tried playing with the Video Equalizer
control and Video Enhancement, but they did not help. I also tried
playing the DVD on my computer, and although the quality is not as
good, I think I can make the same observations. I have the 8
episodes that came on tape, and I don't remember being distracted by
this.

On another note, watching the episode made me wonder why the aliens,
supposedly being so advanced, were such bad shots when trying to
hit the Rolls! Also, how come they used riffles with what appeared
to be bulles with powder (opening sequence), instead of a laser
gun??? :-) :-) I know, I know, but I still love the show.

David Levine

"dlevine2100" wrote:

>
> I know that when the camera or subject moves, there supposed to be
> some blurriness, but here it just looks to me out of the ordinary,
> and a bit annoying. Again, hope that I am not hallucinating, but
> haven't noticed this on other DVDs. I even paused in the middle of
> the scenes above, and they look too blurry to me!

One of the problems with high quality HiFi components is that
they sometimes make us listen too critically, and it may be that
a similar thing is happening with the DVDs - our expectations
have all been raised by the remastering, and perhaps we are paying too
much close attention to the


> On another note, watching the episode made me wonder why the aliens,
> supposedly being so advanced, were such bad shots when trying to
> hit the Rolls! Also, how come they used riffles with what appeared
> to be bulles with powder (opening sequence), instead of a laser
> gun??? :-) :-) I know, I know, but I still love the show.

This is actually one of my pet 'likes' about UFO - the fact that the
aliens use a good old-fashioned kinetic energy weapon resembling an
earthly submachine gun in function! It would have been so obvious
to have had them use a typical sci-fi 'death ray'. The gun makes
them a bit more 'real' and sinister somehow.

I think you can construct a reasonable explanation for them doing
this when they clearly have 'death ray' technology in their space
vehicles - perhaps it requires an energy source that wouldn't be
portable.

As for the aliens being bad shots, maybe it isn't easy to fly a UFO
in a strange environment and incinerate moving cars on the ground at
the same time! Maybe they should have taken lessons from the
Israelis.


James

James Gibbon wrote:

>
> One of the problems with high quality HiFi components is that
> they sometimes make us listen too critically, and it may be that
> a similar thing is happening with the DVDs - our expectations
> have all been raised by the remastering, and perhaps we are paying too
> much close attention to the
>

.. oops, didn't finish this sentence:

.. to the video quality. I suspect you'd find that the blurring
you refer to is really just a natural artefact of the camera work
(moving or focusing on something else). Unfortunately I don't
have my VHS copy of Identified anymore so I can't check ..

Cheers
James

Why do the aliens use a submachine gun type weapon instead of a laser?

I know its easy to think, hey the aliens are more advanced and they have a
laser type weapon on the UFO so why don't they have a hand held model that
their crews can use. The best answer I can giving knowing smallarms and
weapons is five reasons. First development time. We have had laser here on
Earth for more than 40 years and we are just now getting ones that can be
used as weapons. Now if you look at gunpowder being developed around 700
years ago you see that the practical handfired versions didn't get produced
for another 300 years. Size and weight are the second problem. Like the old
hand cannons which were the first man held firearms any early version of a
laser weapon carried by one man would be big and heavy making it hard to aim
and tiring to carry around. Next reason is any it would be a lot more
fragile than the ship base weapon unless you made it even more heavy
to sheild it. Next the problem of power. The lasers we have that are
powerful enough to use as weapons take an enormous amount of power to
operate. That means if you shrink it down to rifle size you got to shrink
the power pack. Unless the aliens can shrink a atomic reactor to the size of
a couple of D cell batteries thats a no go unless you want have to carry a
round more weight in power packs. Lastly cost. It would take a lot of money
to develop and the would cost a lot of money. And the least amount of money
is always spent on the weapons individual troops carry. Governments will
spend billions if not trillions of dollars to develop a weapon to wipeout
whole countries but they flinch at spending money to develop a better weapon
for killing individuals. So with the aliens being from a world that is so
hard up they have to come to Earth to steal body parts they might be a bit
hard up on defense spending money and people to do the work and materials to
work with.

James K.


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

David,

I had a look at those IDENTIFIED scenes on both the A&E DVD's and my
Japanese laserdiscs.

>1. Alec gets out of elevator (office), and says hi to (beautiful)
>SHADO operative, she walks away from him... look at her belt and
>back, they look blurry/out of focus.

I'm not seeing what you're seeing here. I don't see anything
out of focus here.

>2. Camera takes Ayshea, then Alec Freeman, then back to Ayshea...
>concentrate on Ayshea at the end, she looks blurry.

Yes, she does, on both my laserdisc and on the DVD. The camera
is focused on Alec in the background, which is 30+ feet away,
while Ayshea is about 3 feet away from the camera, so I would
expect her to be a bit blurry. At the very end of the scene,
you can see that the camera is starting to bring her into
focus, and the background blurs a little.

>3. Perhaps the most noticeable scnene, Alec walks into Ed's office,
>and camera walks behind and around Ed's back (who is sitting), his
>hair and back looks very blurry.

Same thing as #2. The camera is focused far away, and Ed's back
is within a foot of the camera. It's blurry on the laserdisc too.

These out-of-focus scenes stand out a lot more on the DVD's,
because the picture is so SHARP otherwise. That's one of
the "problems" of these DVDs, everything is so clear that
you can more easily spot the flaws -- wires holding up the
models, background paintings, eyerliner on the male stars, etc.
On a VHS copy (or even these laserdiscs), these problems don't
stand out because the whole episode is blurry!

Marc

James Gibbon wrote:

>As for the aliens being bad shots, maybe it isn't easy to fly a UFO
>in a strange environment and incinerate moving cars on the ground at
>the same time! Maybe they should have taken lessons from the
>Israelis.

At the risk of going off topic - the West should certainly (no 'maybe'
about it) withdraw support from the genocidal racist regime now in
charge of Israel... not only is that the morally correct choice,
it would remove any danger of Arab militants striking at U.S. or
'Western' targets on account of their support of the Israeli state
(which could not exist without that support), and so would ensure
there would be no
repetition of such disasters as the September 11th 2001 tragedies...

Regards,

Andy

--- In SHADO@y..., SumitonJD@a... wrote:
> Why do the aliens use a submachine gun type weapon instead of a
laser?
>
> I know its easy to think, hey the aliens are more advanced and
they have a
> laser type weapon on the UFO so why don't they have a hand held
model that
> their crews can use. The best answer I can giving knowing
smallarms and
> weapons is five reasons. First development time. We have had
laser here on
> Earth for more than 40 years and we are just now getting ones that
can be
> used as weapons. Now if you look at gunpowder being developed
around 700
> years ago you see that the practical handfired versions didn't get
produced
> for another 300 years.

Hey James,

I still think that if the aliens could travel billions of miles,
they could had developed something better than a small-caliber
machine gun for their troops. Machine guns have clear disadvantages
for high-tech warfare: they produce heat and noise that can be
traced, smoke, and flares. I am not a physics major, but couldn't
there be something else easier to develop than a laser gun, but more
advanced than a machine gun? Maybe something like an electron beam,
or alpha particle weapon? I don't know.

By the way, something else that I have always questioned about
IDENTIFIED, why did Alec tried to hide the plane in the clouds? The
aliens didn't know about radar? I supposed the case can be made that
the primary objective of the UFO design was space travel, not short-
range combat.

Looking at the scenes of the SHADAIR, UFO, and Sky flying near
clouds reminded me of how good Derek Meddings was! Those scenes look
so awesome/realistic, you could even see the shadow of the plane
over the clouds.

David Levine

--- In SHADO@y..., Marc Martin <marc@u...> wrote:
> David,
>
> I had a look at those IDENTIFIED scenes on both the A&E DVD's and
my
> Japanese laserdiscs.
>
> >1. Alec gets out of elevator (office), and says hi to (beautiful)
> >SHADO operative, she walks away from him... look at her belt and
> >back, they look blurry/out of focus.
>
> I'm not seeing what you're seeing here. I don't see anything
> out of focus here.

Hey Marc,

Thanks for checking. I will ask my wife to watch the episode with
me, and ask her if she also sees what I see! Maybe it will be time
to go to the eye doctor :-).


David Levine

Hi David,
Well there are the problems you mention with firearms. Smoke isn't
really a problem as modern gunpowder is smokeless. When you said flare I
think you meant muzzle flash. This and sound are a problem. Both could be
reduced by using a silencer but the aliens didn't see fit to go the covert
ops route I guess. Could there be something other high tech type weapon
other than a laser. Yes, but you run into the same problems as with the
laser. A proton particle weapon would need a lot of power to operate and
generate a lot of heat. Same goes for rail guns. Like I said about lasers
they would have to come up with a long life light power supply if they could
get the weapon small enough for a single man to carry. However since you
don't like firearms how about a high tech airgun? That would expand that
hose tube on the alien rifle. There are now airguns being made that can kill
a deer size animal. Actually this isn't a new development. There were
airguns used by the military back in the Napoleanonic Wars by Austria.
Napolean was so afraid of them he ordered anyone captured carrying one to be
shot on the spot. The modern ones now out can fire from 20 to a 100 shots
without need a new air charge depending on the power setting and come in
caliber from the .177 most of us used as a kid to .50 caliber.
Now as to Alec hiding the SHADO jet in the clouds. Being as the
aliens use a different tech perhaps they never came up with radar or
something like it. Or maybe the Seagull X-Ray has electronic counter
measures to radar and they only needed to get out of sight to hide. If so
the clouds would work. They would hide it from sight and from infrared as it
is cold those making the the heat. That is the way they defeat infrared and
night visionsites today. Smoke or fog mask the the body from infrared and
nightvision can't see thru stuff like smoke or fog.

James K.


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

CONTENTS DELETED

Regarding the quality of DVDs - I noticed on my Carlton copies of UFO
that there was a bit of 'bluriness' or 'fuzziness' throughout every
episode. While this was barely noticable - It did bother me. If you
try to read the SHADO badges, or look at peoples eyes during medium
shots - you may notice a slight out of focus type of effect. I at
first thought this might be my region and system free DVD player
translating the content but have also noticed on other DVDs that this
was the way the DVD was created. Movement can amplify this - as does
any scene with smoke (smoke shows up flat and slightly pixelated for
some reason) Objects not moving as much look better on DVD.

All of this is not the original out of focus of the camera and such -
it has to be the technology.

My guess is that if a DVD is cheaply layered and compressed than one
will notice artifacts and general fuzziness more often than Analog
video. Part of this is due to the technology and will probably
improve over years. I had the fortunate (unfortunate) experience of
watching an episode of The Protectors and noticed the same thing -
blurry eyes, etc.

I have not seen the A&E DVDs so I can't compare these with the
Carlton sets.

KP

Hi Marc and David!

Well, I don't own the A&E discs but I took some frame captures from
the Carlton disc for comparison.

--- Marc wrote:

I think you mean this scene, David:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SHADO/files/memorymetropolis/identified-
femaleoperativeback01.jpg

Yes, it's *slightly* out of focus or blurry, respectively (at least
on the Carlton disc :-)

> >2. Camera takes Ayshea, then Alec Freeman, then back to Ayshea...
> >concentrate on Ayshea at the end, she looks blurry.
>
> Yes, she does, on both my laserdisc and on the DVD. The camera
> is focused on Alec in the background, which is 30+ feet away,
> while Ayshea is about 3 feet away from the camera, so I would
> expect her to be a bit blurry. At the very end of the scene,
> you can see that the camera is starting to bring her into
> focus, and the background blurs a little.

Seems that Marc is right:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SHADO/files/memorymetropolis/identified-
ayshea00.jpg

and a little later:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SHADO/files/memorymetropolis/identified-
ayshea01.jpg

she is sharp again :-)

> >3. Perhaps the most noticeable scnene, Alec walks into Ed's office,
> >and camera walks behind and around Ed's back (who is sitting), his
> >hair and back looks very blurry.
>
> Same thing as #2. The camera is focused far away, and Ed's back
> is within a foot of the camera. It's blurry on the laserdisc too.

Which has to been proved:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SHADO/files/memorymetropolis/identified-
strakerbackoutfocus01.jpg
and
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SHADO/files/memorymetropolis/identified-
strakerbackoutfocus02.jpg

I hope that I could help a little bit!
Christian