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Will the release of the DVD's help settle any long standing debates? Ones I can think of off the top of my head are the asteroid destruction scene, bridge 'destruction' scene and finally the Stormtrooper Vs arrow armour debate.

Did I miss any?

I'll echo what I said in the recent bridge tower thread and say that I don't think it'll make too much of a difference. DVD VOB files might scale better than VHS captures will, but otherwise there's not a great deal of difference. If you open a VOB file in something like VirtualDub, you'll find it matches the NTSC dimensions (720x480@0.9) just as a video capture from VHS will. Unless I've completely missed something. I haven't ever seen anything to the contrary, though.

McC wrote:I'll echo what I said in the recent bridge tower thread and say that I don't think it'll make too much of a difference. DVD VOB files might scale better than VHS captures will, but otherwise there's not a great deal of difference. If you open a VOB file in something like VirtualDub, you'll find it matches the NTSC dimensions (720x480@0.9) just as a video capture from VHS will. Unless I've completely missed something. I haven't ever seen anything to the contrary, though.

You obviously know more about these things than I do, so I yield to your technical superiority on the subject.

Not exactly, VHS can't be 720x480 without being scaled. Its virtual digital resolution is 352x480. It's a different situation than having 720x480@.9 compared @1.2 ratio, you don't lose data but you squeeze the picture, with VHS it outright can't produce that data at all, so its squeezed and has less detail/resolution.

Ah, interesting! Now that you mention those numbers, they do sound familiar...so what happens, then? The VHS picture is stretched exclusively in a horizontal direction when it's interpreted?

He's refering to anamorphic compression for DVD.

DVD-resolution pictures will be nice but I don't see how they will make a big difference to "vs" debates or any kind of sci-fi analysis, apart from trivia like being able to see the rank insignia on certain officers etc.

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:He's refering to anamorphic compression for DVD.

Yes I used pixel ratio just as an example of stretching without actually losing information, but with VHS when its sampled to that resolution it just doesn't have the quality and resolution so I think it get interpolated (I think that's the term), and you get a slight fuzz and colour is inferior. IIRC VHS doesn't have separate luminance and chromanance tracks.

Few quick links to show it more clearly,

http://www.bealecorner.com/trv900/copy/copy.html

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~leopold/Ld/ResolutionComparison/

Darth Wong wrote:DVD-resolution pictures will be nice but I don't see how they will make a big difference to "vs" debates or any kind of sci-fi analysis, apart from trivia like being able to see the rank insignia on certain officers etc.

Not to mention that we still have the LaserDisc copies of the OT that can be digitized and look good enough to do serious analysis on.

We, it may be useless for "vs" debates, but I'm looking forward to high resolution images for my Rag-Tags page.