Hi-

HD was the issue in the context.

Shahran Sunny Audit's first sentence was, "All Indian companies use the crappy (1-passrate) optibase card for video encoding." before going on to his Hi-Def question, and I wasn't quite sure which part(s) of his post you were answering.

What's your point? I did not say Indian DVDs are (not) encoded with professional encoders.

My point was that anyone on a home computer can do a better job reencoding a retail Indian DVD if they know what they're doing. Of course, not everything can be fixed, but such things as PAL2NTSC ghosting, chroma interlacing, interlaced encoding of what was originally 24fps film, screwy luma of B+W movies, etc., can be fixed, screwups that shouldn't have happened to begin with, were Indian DVD Production companies the least bit competent, used some sort of quality control, had access to decent encoders, and cared even a little bit about their product.

Your statements about color are meaningless as long as you don't have the master for reference. Yes, a lot can happen. But where is your evidence that the color is wrong except that you think it is wrong?

I try and I try, but I can find no reference to color in my previous post. Are you perhaps thinking of something or someone else? I showed the pics not to point out any color flaws, but the very serious macroblocking, something that's inexcuseable, in my opinion. It was your reply to harry_rasul that originally prompted me to respond in this thread. I tried to register and got no response, and then the thread kind of died down, but then you piped up again recently with your impressions, with which I also disagree. I logged in, and it accepted me, even though I had received no response after registering a while back. Harry had said that Lakshya was a better looking DVD than is Don. You, without having even seen the Don DVD said, based entirely on how the master looked, that you doubted his statement. And, in my opinion, Lakshya does have the better looking DVD - by far. And you were wrong to judge the Don DVD without having seen it.

What do you think I was referring to when I said "compression issues"?? I also saw that this song looked noisy, but the whole film does not look like this. And I already said the duplicate frames are very bad.

But then you still say that except for these things, this is a Hollywood-grade DVD. But what goes into making a good DVD, if not avoiding these kinds of basic things? This DVD has serious problems in addition to the things already mentioned, problems shared by many other Indian DVDs. It has chroma bleeding. It uses the Standard Matrix. Hollywood DVDs haven't used that since the very early days of DVD. They use much sharper and more detailed quantisation matrices these days. This thing uses 8-bit DCT Precision, where any rookie encoder knows it should be 10 if bitrate permits. The max video bitrate allowed is only 7.9Mbps. There are 2 audio tracks, a DD 5.1@448kbps, and a DD 2.0@448kbps. Giving the DD 2.0 track a bitrate that high is a waste of bits that could have much more profitably been used for improving the video quality. But the video bitrate should still have been boosted by at least .6Mbps, and probably 1.2Mbps or so, which would have prevented some of the artifacting. One of the criticisms of DVD is that the max video bitrate, at 9.8Mbps is too low, and frequently causes artifacting in complex scenes. This can be especially true for Indian films, with the intense dancing. In sum, my impression of the DVD is that it's an amateurish job all around. And Amitabh Batchchan's original version is way better. OT, I know.

But since you seem to have such a strong opinion about the issues why don't you tell us where you are coming from? Do you work in video compression?

I'm just an experienced video encoding hobbiest. And since you seem to enjoy defending the indefensible, maybe you can tell us if you work for, or have any connection at all with, these UTV people?

Me again-

Brother!! can u give us large shots, as we cant see through!

When I post those ImageShack small photos, arsh, can't you click on them and see the original large 854x480 pic? I thought about also including a link below, but when I tested by clicking on the small pic, it worked fine for me. My apologies if clicking on the small pic didn't work. I'll try and be more careful in the future. Thanks, ali, for getting the full sized ones.

it would be nice to see some screenshots from your re-encoded version aswell..

Well, vjmajic2002, thanks, but I don't think small jpegs would help in distinguishing the original from my reencode. As I mentioned, I reencoded it to remove the duplicate frames which make it play jerky during certain kinds of movement, and also waste bits encoding 25% more frames than is necessary (23.976->29.97fps). Also, I didn't reencode it for a DVD9, where I could use AviSynth filters to make it look better than the retail, but only for DVD5, so even though I criticized the retail version, except for smoother playback, I can't claim my version is any better. But if you're curious, here's a 26 second, 20 MB section of the reencoded film:

http://www.badongo.com/file/2275550

darn!! why the hell, we will purchase these one of best encoded compromised dvds and then re encode ourselves to make them play back smoothly or buy mucha $$$$$ deinterlacers etc to play them back right way

We agree here. Lots of issues on many DVDs.

Looks like a mix up. Sorry.

That's why I said "doubt" and not "is" or "I know". After seeing both the situation is that the Don DVD uses a far better master but the Lakshya DVD has no repeated frame problem and has no places where compression breaks down so badly than on this song in Don. So it's a mixed bag for both DVDs. On average I think though that Don DVD looks quite some better if you ignore the repeated frames. If you don't Lakshya is likely preferable.
And yes, I agree that such macroblocking is not acceptable at all, same as the repeated frames.

First the use of a very high quality master. And Don has one of the best masters in Bollywood, which is comparable to masters used for Hollywood DVDs.
Then the mastering of that source to DVD. Here Don is not Hollywood quality at all. We don't disagree here. That's why I said if you ignore... The good news is that it's rather easy to go from here to a Hollywood quality DVD since the whole bad source on bad telecine with bad transfer issue has been eliminated. And that used to bring almost all Bollywoods DVD down in addition of mastering the source to DVD.

Could you post some shots please that show the issue?

I'm not defending the compression of the DVD. I'm defending the approach of going from DI to HD and then DVD. The critique of the DVD as is by you is justified. But you have to admit that the blocked shots you posted are not representative of how this DVD looks most of the time. Compared to other Bollywood DVDs it looks quite some better most of the time (again ignoring the frame issue). Concerning my connection with the house who did the mastering (not UTV) I happen to know them, yes. But I don't defend their actions when I see a problem with the quality. I applaude them though for using the HD as it is the right approach.

manono, I welcome your presence on this forum from core of my heart. your discussions with mike are very valuable and eye opening for many who care.

I do not give a damn that how good are the orig masters if end product is unworthy and same or more inferior!

I do not care if films has DTs, DD EX soundtracks or SONY SDDS etc if I have to pay $10 and watch in two front speakers in the theatre! This is outright cheating and unacceptable to me.

Dhoom 2's back ground lacked high quality mix, sounds, but was more music oriented and loud, with sure some directional effect that I heard on dvd and were non existent in theater!

Hi-

Could you post some shots please that show the issue?

Unfortunately I don't have the retail DVD in my possession at the moment, and I hesitate to use shots from my reencode. I'm quite confident my reencode didn't create more of it, or add to the problem, but it still might not be right (as in, might not be ethical). When I was studying the retail DVD back in early January, I made notes about what I discovered, and that was one of my notes. I couldn't tell you, without again studying the retail DVD, whether or not the chroma bleeding was only in that same song, and was caused by being bitrate starved, or for some other reason. But based on what my notes usually mean, I found it in more static scenes elsewhere on the DVD, where it shouldn't be.

Look, I have no real beef with you. You, over the years have performed a real service to the Indian-film loving community. When I'm thinking of renting or buying an Indian DVD, I come to check if you have a review of the DVD in question. You pull no punches, and there are almost no other sites that have reviews of Indian DVDs, especially not for my favorites, the ones from the "Golden Age" of maybe 1950-1965. My only real disagreement is that you often blame the ghosting/blending/double images on DVNR, where the real problem is a poor standards conversion, the use of a PAL (and usually VCR tape) master for the NTSC DVD. Elsewhere on this site I see the cause blamed on "field averaging". That's much more accurate. Where I come from (Doom9), it's usually referred to as "field blending". Close to 100% of my DVDs of Indian black and white films have the problem, and any time there's movement, there's blurring. I think many of those reviews are old, and I expect that you, as well as the rest of us, have learned a lot since then. Of course, using a PAL master doesn't necessarily mean that the resulting NTSC DVD has to be blended. It's easy to "telecine" from 25fps to 29.97fps without blending. I do it all the time. Maybe there aren't too many hardware encoders around that can do it, although I have seen it done on at least 2 occasions for retail DVD.

The only really decent retail DVD of a classic Indian film I've seen is the R2 MoC/Eureka DVD of Abhijaan (I haven't seen the R2 French Sholay - no English subs):

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055724/

All of the Satyajit Ray films have been restored, so where are the good DVDs? There's nothing but garbage out there (except for the R2 Artificial Eyes of The Apu Trilogy, which I haven't seen, and the just mentioned Abhijaan). And where are decent versions of all the Guru Dutt films on DVD, and Bimal Roy, and Raj Kapoor? I just wish Criterion would get interested in releasing some, because, from the looks of it, we can wait until hell freezes over for the Indian companies to take an interest in properly preserving their own cultural heritage. OT again, sorry.

Anyway, keep up the good work. Keep 'em honest. Since you maybe have a pipeline into some of these companies (?), don't hesitate to criticize them when deserved, make suggestions for improvements, and let 'em know we've got our eyes on them.

viewtopic.php?t=7493&highlight=satyajit

Was it Satyajit Ray or was it Ivory Merchant collection, or both, that was done by Criterion (although not in Criterion Collection)?? It's R2 DVDs that are direct Film to PAL. NTSC discs are converted from PAL, field averaged.

But such bleeding is a compression issue or would you say it could be on the master too?

I have no beef with you either. But since you have apparently quite some hands on experience with compression I think we all here would like to hear more from you about compression details and how they manifest themselves on Bollywood or other DVDs.
I'm not a specialist for compression issues but have a good overal understanding of the whole mastering process from film elements to finished discs.

Well, there are cases where I bet you 100$ it's DNR and others where I have to guess too. It's not always clear what is to blame, only that something is wrong and does not look right. Anyway, if you have specific examples we can discuss it further.

I'm not aware of any really good quality DVD of classic Indian films either. Mughal E Azam is rather poor as well despite digital 'restoration'.

I'm afraid the only way to get the DVDs and HD DVDs done properly is paying for them from your own pocket and constantly breathing down people's necks, supervising stuff all the time, step by step.
I hope DCH will come out quite well but till I see the quality with my own eyes I'm not making any promises except people are trying hard to do it right without Hollywood budgets for restoration and mastering.

Mike!! %return on these films , for these big wigs, zeros, utv, adlab, yrf is not less than hollywood, imho. their expenditure is in diff league too, but even film flops, dvd is reasonably good or even better than some good ones!

But here the situation is , more they make they release inferior prints and dvds keep going down the drain man!!

Imho, the real reason is incompetence from top to bottom, they can watch a hollywood film and orchestrate the shot same way like wankas of sanjay gupta, yrf, remake/butcher old classics!! Makes maha mullah!!$$$$$$ and their dvds keep going down the drain, consistently.

They can buy machines cheapo but not expertise, competence to run it!

There should be a basic standard of authoring, they should get masters from hongkong and then replicate on bomb discs at home

It will be loosing proposition for customers one way or the other!!

I know here at zulm, we had this discussion where I claimed that some prog dvds look as bad or worse than non prog, and vise versa!!, but some people got inflamed by that ! Now over the period hindi dvd makers have made me loose my confidence in proper authored prog dvd and properly released theatric prints!

If actors, directors, producers whose expertise is nothing more than copying hollywood and shoving down our throats will be supervising dvd production then the results..hallalujia!

BTW!! Bhardawaj, Farhan, aamir, VVC, are they blind and cant see diff between, asoka, lagaan, MK dvds and their crappy dvds??????
Where are their heads and noses? I think in their wealthy A***s

How far can chickens fly? hindi dvds are and will always be=glitches, freezing junky vhs. I have seen Dhoom 2, Don, and Jaane Man, and all have this jumpy motion repetitive screwy animation movements, flashings, and blur on dancing song scenes causing severe eye strain. It kills the choreography, song and the music. Why do these great dancers like Hritik perform so well in Dhoom 2 and then the public cannot view his great dancing styles because the crap dvd shows him dancing animated looking like a cartoon character, not natural? This is a slap to Hritik’s face and humiliating to his great efforts as an expert dancer. I like to see natural dancing as Bipasha did in Omkara, not dancers in speedy, jerky animated motion.

Hi-

I don't know anything about masters, but only what shows up on the DVD. My strength is in dismantling and studying DVDs. I know that color bleeding can result from not having enough bitrate, and from improper colorspace conversions. Other than that, I don't know what else can cause it.

I think we all here would like to hear more from you about compression details and how they manifest themselves on Bollywood or other DVDs.

There are many awful things that are done when encoding these Indian movies for DVD. I'll cover just 2. Perhaps the worst is the use of a PAL master for the NTSC DVD. Then whenever there's any kind of movement at all, there's no longer any detail present, but just a blurry mess. I understand it's expensive to go back to the original film elements to make a proper NTSC master. I've seen figures of upwards of $20,000 quoted. Since India is a PAL country, I guess they often use the PAL master for both the PAL as well as the NTSC DVD. For NTSC it only has to be resized and then they blend the heck out of it to get from 25fps to 29.97fps. As I mentioned last time, it is possible to use the PAL master without creating any blending, but maybe there aren't many hardware encoders that can do it. I don't know anything about that part of it. I just know that I do it all the time using software. That is, it's not only possible, but fairly easy if you know what you're doing, to convert a PAL DVD to NTSC, without creating blending.

Maybe the second worst problem is the still fairly common practice of using CBR encoding on a DVD, or some sort of 1-pass VBR encoding (not CQ encoding), which isn't much better. This wastes bits on static parts of the movie, and starves the complex scenes of bits. This can and does create such artifacts as mosquito noise (all the "dots" around the outside of sharp edges), color smearing (color "outside the lines"), and in worst cases, during complex scenes, macroblocks (the screen being broken up into 16x16 pixel blocks). Maybe you can't spot these things when just watching a movie at full speed. But the effect is to produce a movie without the detail and sharpness that it could and should have, had everything been done properly.

Well, there are cases where I bet you 100$ it's DNR and others where I have to guess too.

Hehe, I don't have to guess. I've seen temporal filtering artifacts also. They're on every single field where there's a good amount of movement. One sign of a bad standards conversion is that the blending is on about 40% of the fields. They also have a slightly different appearance, the 2 kinds of artifacts. Another sign of PAL2NTSC is that the base framerate is 25fps, whereas the base framerate of a true film->DVD transfer is 24fps, DNR or no DNR. Once you have the DVD on the hard drive, and know what to look for, it's not hard to tell what you have.

Anyway, if you have specific examples we can discuss it further.

I have a ton of specific examples. Although I saw one the other day that was sourced from NTSC, maybe 95% of the classic film Indian DVDs I've studied were made from PAL masters. I can remember only 3 that weren't, one of the Mughal-E-Azams DVDs I have, Baazi (1951), and Ganga Jamuna (1961). Ganga Jamuna was even encoded progressive. Surprised the heck out of me.

I'm not aware of any really good quality DVD of classic Indian films either. Mughal E Azam is rather poor as well despite digital 'restoration'

Are you speaking of the newer Eros colorized version? I rented that one from NetFlix and was disgusted by what I saw. It's PAL2NTSC, and has that first generation colorization, where the coloring is smeared, and it's that pastel color/water color looking garbage. And they have the gall to state at the beginning of the movie that they returned it to the way the director intended. And they converted it from 1.33:1 to some sort of fake widescreen 1.55:1 aspect ratio. So just the other day I got something called a Shemaroo Collector's Edition from NehaFlix. It's different from the 3 other versions mentioned in the review on this site, but seems to have all of the same problems, including all the shaking and shimmering. It's native NTSC (although hard telecined, encoded as interlaced 29.97fps), but it's a mess too. Oh well.

I guess a lot of this doesn't belong in a Don thread, and would be better put elsewhere. Anyway, thanks for reading.

there's a lot wrong with hindi dvds, but I have to say if they just fixed up the pal>ntsc thing without stuffing up the repeat frame thing like in Don), they would generally look heaps better.

Some color bleeding is inherent to DVD since it's 4:2:0 with only one color difference sample per 4 luminance samples. The effect is subtle though on most material.

My DNR mentioning reviews were mostly DEI DVDs. These had DNR and not PAL/NTSC issues. Clear cut cases, confirmed by DEI themselves. The Eros, Yash Raj etc. discs can have both issues, standard conversion and DNR. Plus various compression/mastering oddities in addition to poor masters from the telecine.

The non DEI cases then.

I have Shemaroo version.

The funny/sad thing is that there is a 2K version from the digital 'restoration' (unless they dumped that) and the DVD could have been made direct digital. I'm not sure i f the files were used, but the shaking looks like derailed digital stabilisation to me. Then there is typical flicker from bad DNR. Detail is quite poor. A dissapointment.

Hi.... I Just bought the 3 disc set of DON here in India. Very much dissappointing to me in the opening sequence itself, I noticed lip sync problem. Audio is a few microseconds faster than video. I stopped the dvd and could not see the movie thereafter. Just wanna confirm is it just my disc or anyone else has faced the same?