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 Post subject: Best Image Quality version of a disc
PostPosted: 22 Feb 2024, 16:46 
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Hi.

I recently acquired my first laserdisc player (Panasonic LX-K550EN).
It's a NTSC player, but I live on a PAL region, so it's easy to get both PAL and NTSC discs.
Maybe I'll get a PAL player in the future.

I read a lot about NTSC vs PAL.
From what I gathered, most PAL laserdiscs are just the NTSC version at 25fps, so they are just worse than the NTSC version.
That means that there are some PAL titles that aren't NTSC conversions and that have more vertical lines and, for that reason, have higher image quality.
Ignoring PAL only releases, does anyone know what are those titles?
It would be nice to have a tag in the lddb that said if a laserdisc was mastered from another laserdisc, for example: If Jurassic Park CAV PAL was made using the Jurassic Park CAV NTSC (I don't know if it was made from it or not, it's just an example), in the Jurassic Park (1993) [PLFFD 32711] page, below the "Rot status", there could be a "Copied from" (or something like that) and a link to Jurassic Park (1993) [41830].

Another question.
I read that for NTSC, to convert from a 24 fps movie to a 30 fps laserdisc, the first frame of the laserdisc has the first frame of the movie, the second frame of the laserdisc has a mixture of the first and second frame of the movie, the third frame of the laser disc has the second frame of the movie, and so on.
Does that mean that, if someone wants to get all the frames of a movie from a NTSC laserdisc, it can do it just by ignoring the frames in the laserdisc that are mixed? Or does that mean that some frames of the movie are incomplete in the laserdisc because they can only be get mixed?

A final question. For PAL releases that are not NTSC conversions, are they all speed up 4%? Or are there some PAL releases that have mixed frames like the NTSC and run at the same time as the theatrical release?
Just like the "Copied from" idea, there could be a tag in lddb for releases that are speed up.

Sorry for my ignorance, thanks for the clarifications :)
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 Post subject: Re: Best Image Quality version of a disc
PostPosted: 22 Feb 2024, 19:10 
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As for your first question…there is no central database that contains this information. Only the word of mouth in PAL-land knows which LDs are natively PAL and which are NTSC conversions. You’ll have to check on a movie by movie basis. This also applies to the speed question. If you can play NTSC then focus on that. I’ve been an NTSC-only LD user for 30 years and never wanted a PAL release other than some CDVs that have now all rotted.

As for your second question: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-two_pull_down


Last edited by signofzeta on 18 Mar 2024, 16:00, edited 1 time in total. _________________
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 Post subject: Re: Best Image Quality version of a disc
PostPosted: 23 Feb 2024, 11:51 
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Thanks @signofzeta.

signofzeta wrote:

So I guess it's possible to recover all original frames :)
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 Post subject: Re: Best Image Quality version of a disc
PostPosted: 23 Feb 2024, 16:20 
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peido wrote:
Thanks @signofzeta.

signofzeta wrote:

So I guess it's possible to recover all original frames :)


The resulting video lacks nothing but you won’t find every frame from a 24fps print present on an LD if you go frame by frame.
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 Post subject: Re: Best Image Quality version of a disc
PostPosted: 23 Feb 2024, 18:05 
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Nice to hear the format is still alive with new people getting into it.
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 Post subject: Re: Best Image Quality version of a disc
PostPosted: 24 Feb 2024, 06:15 
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Something to bear in mind re: 3:2 pulldown is that interlaced video only has "frames" if you're stepping through frame by frame, or if you're plugging the player into a progressive TV that has to deinterlace the video into frames. Interlaced video shows one field at a time (every other line of a frame), not one frame at a time. On an interlaced TV in ordinary playback, the "blended frame" isn't visually different than the other frames. The transition between two non-blended frames has the same interlaced look as when the blended frame is on screen.

If you have a modern TV, it probably has a mode for inverse telecine (converting 3:2 pulldown back to 24 fps, i.e. "recovering" the frames (I wouldn't use the word "recovering" because they were never missing to begin with)). In my opinion, though, it's best to just watch laserdiscs/tapes/etc. on a tube television if you can. Deinterlacing hiccups are more noticeable and bothersome to me than 3:2 pulldown judder.
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 Post subject: Re: Best Image Quality version of a disc
PostPosted: 25 Feb 2024, 00:49 
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signofzeta wrote:
The resulting video lacks nothing but you won’t find every frame from a 24fps print present on an LD if you go frame by frame.

rcarlson wrote:
Something to bear in mind re: 3:2 pulldown is that interlaced video only has "frames" if you're stepping through frame by frame, or if you're plugging the player into a progressive TV that has to deinterlace the video into frames. Interlaced video shows one field at a time (every other line of a frame), not one frame at a time. On an interlaced TV in ordinary playback, the "blended frame" isn't visually different than the other frames. The transition between two non-blended frames has the same interlaced look as when the blended frame is on screen.

If you have a modern TV, it probably has a mode for inverse telecine (converting 3:2 pulldown back to 24 fps, i.e. "recovering" the frames (I wouldn't use the word "recovering" because they were never missing to begin with)). In my opinion, though, it's best to just watch laserdiscs/tapes/etc. on a tube television if you can. Deinterlacing hiccups are more noticeable and bothersome to me than 3:2 pulldown judder.

Thank you both for the explanation.
I guess the only sure way to "recover" all the frames to a progressive resolution is to use a software to automate the deinterlacing and then manually going frame by frame to correct any hiccup.

I'm going to use a 4:3 41'' rear projection TV. Most people hate rear projection TVs, but I like them. I just have to watch it relatively straight to it and in a dark room and the image quality is better to me than a normal CRT.
The few remaining rear projection TVs out there are extremely cheap nowadays because of their size.

rein-o wrote:
Nice to hear the format is still alive with new people getting into it.

I was looking for a laserdisc for years now, it is extremely hard to find one in Portugal for a friendly price.
I got mine from a lady that bought it new in Macau, it seems that they were kind of successful in Macau and Hong Kong.
I bought locally Godzilla NTSC (because it is in CAV and CLV, and I can test both with just one movie) and E.T. PAL (I'm almost certain it won't read PAL, but let's see...).
Still haven't test it, couldn't find time yet. Maybe it doesn't work, but I'm happy to have it anyway.
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 Post subject: Re: Best Image Quality version of a disc
PostPosted: 18 Mar 2024, 09:58 
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Blu-ray easily wins this battle, too.
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 Post subject: Re: Best Image Quality version of a disc
PostPosted: 19 Mar 2024, 12:12 
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I was wondering how a Laserdisc player could pause a CAV disc and would never show a blended frame, which will exists in a 3:2 conversion. It appears that Laserdiscs can contain a 'White Flag'.

Quote:
Laserdiscs took this a step further, and defined special encodings of their own. Line 11 of each field contains what is known as the "white flag", which is a simple binary indicator of whether the current field is the first field of a frame. Laserdisc players look for this white flag to know how to do a still frame that doesn't consist of a split between two film frames. Since it takes two fields to make one frame, and since many film-based laserdiscs are encoded in a 3:2 cadence, it is not straightforward to ensure this without some additional information.

https://aarongiles.com/old/?p=238

I think this is a really cool feature of LaserDisc. It cheats and fixes the blended frames.
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 Post subject: Re: Best Image Quality version of a disc
PostPosted: 19 Mar 2024, 19:20 
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roland_pater wrote:
I think this is a really cool feature of LaserDisc. It cheats and fixes the blended frames.

I am pretty sure that what the player does is to simply move one frame forward or backward, to an adjacent non-"split" frame.

Many or most early MCA Discovision (Standard Play) movies do not have that encoded flag, and/or do not have 3:2 pulldown, such that as you step through adjacent frames on a disc, every third frame is a flickering combo of two frames from the film (on a CRT display). Or maybe it is not every third one, but similar.
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