Mondo Vision

[PaganPoet]

I'm so happy to hear that Mondo Vision have acquired the rights to "Possession." Any idea if this is already in the works or when we can expect a release?

[Camera Obscura]

I got my Limited Edition of L'Important c'est d'aimer last week and it's easily the most insanely luxurious DVD edition in my collection (besides perhaps a few box-sets). And that for a Zulawski film.

[ouatitw]

I just bought the regular edition (I don't know why because Love is one of my favorite movies). I'm very impressed at how well this regular edition was done. I'm tempted to double dip on the LE.

I watched the movie with the commentary last night. This is a great DVD, the commentary was pretty good and the picture is better than the R2 release I've previously seen.

I will definitely buy the LE on the other Zulawski's I love. I'm pretty glad that this company had the rights to so many of his other films, I do hope that they sell enough of each film.

[zone_resident]

Beaver on L'important C'est D'Aimer

[David M.]

Yikes - what happened to those screen grabs!

None of the discs (except perhaps the German release) are as blurred as the screen shots on that page show. Needless to say, if a video master had arrived to me looking like that, I would never have allowed it to go out!

As the guy who spent all of last summer getting this one ready, it's a little disheartening to see screen shots like those, even if they did decide the Mondo Vision version was the best looking.

[MichaelB]

As the guy who spent all of last summer getting this one ready, it's a little disheartening to see screen shots like those, even if they did decide the Mondo Vision version was the best looking.

Nick Wrigley had similar complaints about Beaver's screengrabs on La Vie de Jesus in this thread - and ended up posting his own caps which were (a) vastly better than Beaver's, and (b) one hell of a lot closer to the actual disc - which I'd seen, so could endorse this at the time.

[denti alligator]

You know, I've been wondering about the Beaver caps. Wouldn't each computer's video card make a slight difference in how caps look? Or the drivers that are running that card? There seem to me so many factors at play in how screen captures look, and perhaps the discrepancy lies in something as basic as this.

[MichaelB]

Talking of Possession, that YouTube mashup of it and Bob Dylan's 'Love Sick' seems to have been taken down.

I can only assume it was to do with the music side of things, as I know Żuławski himself thought it was hilarious - I showed it to him on my iPhone at a dinner a few months ago. It would make a brilliant DVD extra if there's any way of tracking it down.

[David M.]

You know, I've been wondering about the Beaver caps. Wouldn't each computer's video card make a slight difference in how caps look? Or the drivers that are running that card? There seem to me so many factors at play in how screen captures look, and perhaps the discrepancy lies in something as basic as this.

It's something to do with that, I think. The best way is to grab frames directly out of the MPEG2 Program Stream, these will be representative of what a set-top DVD player 'sees' when it plays back the disc and will mean that any video card oddities are bypassed. Oddly enough, in the captures on that page, the subtitle overlay is nowhere near as blurred.

I think DVDBeaver are actually using a software DVD player (PowerDVD) to take screen captures. The problem here is that, depending on how its set up, the image will be scaled several times (with a poor quality algorithm which is different to that found in an actual DVD player, no less) and then perhaps even re-scaled for the web page. In other words, it goes through many degradations. That's the only explanation I can come up with for how those images look the way they do, I'm amazed they're so blurry: I've seen VHS tapes with more horizontal detail than those images and I would certainly never allow a disc to go out looking like that.

The same thing happened with La Femme Publique, but the site owner misunderstood my complaint and seemed to think that I was trying to "get a leg up on the competition" (he thought I wanted him to artificially sharpen the pictures, whereas I really wanted him to take proper screen grabs!) For that reason, I actually included a hidden resolution test pattern on the DVD of "L'important" which would prove something was going wrong.

For what it's worth, here's DVDBeaver's grab compared to what is actually stored on the disc I worked on.

DVDBeaver's picture:


What's actually on the disc:


Note the differences in the highlights in Fabio Testi's eyes (there are three highlights on the disc, but the smallest details get obscured in the blurred screen grab), the text on the right, the faithfulness of the film grain structure, etc.

It's also important to note that no DVD player design would process the image in such a way to blur it in the horizontal and vertical directions like the images show (unless the user instructed it to do so). Although I don't feel any malice was intended, those images are incredibly unrepresentative.

Talking of Possession, that YouTube mashup of it and Bob Dylan's 'Love Sick' seems to have been taken down.

I can only assume it was to do with the music side of things, as I know Żuławski himself thought it was hilarious - I showed it to him on my iPhone at a dinner a few months ago. It would make a brilliant DVD extra if there's any way of tracking it down.

Noted, but I think the music scuppers any chance of that happening!

[denti alligator]

Wow! The difference is stunning. It's like a bad DVD compared to a Blu-ray!

[David M.]

Yes, during the entire encode process I was extra-sure to make sure that no high frequency details were filtered out, as they usually are on DVDs. I even convinced Mondo Vision to buy a new MPEG-2 encoder (not cheap!) so that we could reproduce the grain structure 100% without any degradation or filtering.

I just hope that people take the source into account when they look at those screen captures.

[tartarlamb]

Yowza, that's night and day.

Not that I didn't already blind buy the disc. I've seen La femme, and the proof of the pudding, etc. etc.

[Michael Kerpan]

The best way is to grab frames directly out of the MPEG2 Program Stream

I assume this involves special equipment that we kids can't use at home?

;~}

[David M.]

Not at all, you can do it with a program called DGIndex for Windows (it's free and open source). It will only work on unencrypted discs, though (all of Mondo's titles are, we don't see the point in paying license fees to use a copy protection system that's already been cracked and would rather just trust our users).

[Perkins Cobb]

Well, for better or worse, this certainly deals the deathblow to the credibility of Beaver caps.

[HerrSchreck]

...and the old wisdom of a few was at last manifest for all to see.

[peerpee]

This is exactly the problem I've been noticing for a long time - from MoC LA VIE DE JESUS, MoC A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE, through to a number of other MoC titles that I've produced. Having become very familiar with how these DVDs look through the production process, I couldn't believe it when I saw how muddy and blurred they looked at DVDBeaver. I think Gary has since replaced those caps with ones I sent him - but the fact that there isn't a robust grabbing system in place makes me worried about all other grabs.

[pro-bassoonist]

As the guy who spent all of last summer getting this one ready, it's a little disheartening to see screen shots like those, even if they did decide the Mondo Vision version was the best looking.

I came here to back you up Dave!

I recently received your disc and could not be any more impressed with what you and Mondo have done (again). The release is simply fantastic - pure, unfiltered image that is miles ahead of what the German/Austrian release, which I reviewed a while ago, conveys.

In any event, please extend my warmest regards to the gentleman you mention above. Outstanding work!

And I hope to see you jump on the Blu-wagon soon!

Will talk to you soon.

Pro-B

[David M.]

Thank you Svet!

Yes, I would love to do this stuff in HD, the costs are still a little prohibitive though (even although the AACS license fees have just been lowered significantly). Not least of all because I watch films on a projector...

[HarryLong]

you can do it with a program called DGIndex for Windows (it's free and open source). It will only work on unencrypted discs, though

Is there a similarly reliable program that would work on all discs? I ask because I work on two magazines that use screen grabs to illustrate DVD reviews and sometimes articles. We use Power DVD & while I can do all sorts of jiggery-pokery in Photoshop, obviously the better the source material, the better the results.

[David M.]

You can take reliable screen shots with the later versions of PowerDVD if it's configured properly. Here's the instructions for PowerDVD version 8, your version is probably similar.

Right click the video window (while the PowerDVD logo is showing, I don't think you can change the settings when there's a disc in). Choose Configuration, go to the "Player" tab, click "advanced", click the Capture tab, make sure "Original Video Source Size" is selected.

That will give you 1:1 pixels exactly as they're stored on the disc, so the image on an anamorphic widescreen DVD will be squished. To scale this in a very similar way to how a digital TV or DVD player would scale it, load the image in Photoshop and resize using the Bicubic or Bicub Sharper algorithm (these have a very similar scaler response to the chipsets in most TVs and DVD players). Change the size to 1024x576 to "unsquish" a PAL disc or 854x480 to unsquish widescreen NTSC.

Hopefully DVDBeaver and any other comparison sites running images through multiple degradations (or whatever they're doing to make screen grabs as unrepresentative as those) will follow this advice to take unblurred images.

[HarryLong]

Thanks!
Just offhand I'm not sure what generation my Power DVD is ... it's several years old.
But I'll see if those instructions pan out.

[anvilscepe]

I just received my copy of La Femme Publique that I bought through Amazon and I just have to chime in and say... what beautiful packaging! I don't even want to touch it.

This was a blind buy for me, but all the research I did on the film and the comments on this thread make me believe that it will be a fantastic spin.

[denti alligator]

DVD Beaver's "Open Response to Mondo Vision"

[denti alligator]

DVD Beaver wrote:

For LA FEMME PUBLIQUE the DVD Producer actually posted me all 4 versions that we compared and I assured them I used the exact same system and settings to obtain the screen captures! The producer I dealt with was unsatisfied with our result and I had no ethical way of placating him. I wasn't about to improve the quality of his release's captures and invalidate all 80,000 other images on the site. I still insist to him that this would not be ethical.

I agree that Gary opens up a whole bag of trouble if he makes an exception to his system, but isn't that what he did with MoC?

Can anyone parse that first sentence for me? "All 4 versions" of what? There are 7 sets of caps and 3 DVDs compared. They "used the exact same system and settings to obtain the screen captures"? The same system and settings as Mondo Vision's caps? How could that be (see difference above)?