Forum - View topicVice & Luna - Invasion of the Old-Timers, Part II
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meruru
Posts: 471 |
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Or the original footage includes unusual images for which DVD encoding was not optimized. The original Cowboy Bebop DVDs take ridiculous hit in quality during the hyperspace scenes.
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reanimator
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Speaking of LD, I just received "Combustible Campus Guardress" vol 1-4 yesterday. The previous owner was nice enough to throw in the show's cel painting & drawing. To this day, that OVA is not out in DVD or BD.
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Who knows? Maybe Laserdisc will make a comeback for some weird reason, like vinyl. (None of those pops, cracks, and scratches that people find charmingly rustic though.) Which reminds me: Magnetic tape is very slowly making a comeback too, though not for video or audio, but for data storage, due to the insane amounts of data magnetic tape can hold. A videocassette-sized reel can hold at least a dozen terabytes, for instance. It's just not very consumer-friendly due to the need to rewind and fast-forward to get to the data you want, but it's in current use by archivists and universities.
The reason why Betamax never caught on with the general public was simply because it was more expensive. Your typical consumer, who might not necessarily understand the differences between VHS and Betamax, would opt for the cheaper one. This created a vicious cycle in that studios releasing things on home video would naturally prioritize the more popular format, so they would release lots of VHS copies and relatively few Beta copies. As home videos on Beta and Beta players got harder to find, and fewer movies and such got released on that format, that would create less and less incentive for the consumer to get a Betamax player. Then the content providers and manufacturers would have even less of a reason to produce them, and this kept going until Betamax vanished form the public market. (Betamax remained in use on the production side, however, well into the 90's, or at least Betamax cameras were.) The other reason is because a VHS tape was able to store a longer amount of information than a Beta tape. One VHS tape could hold upwards of 6 hours of footage (though you have an inverse relationship between video quality and length). If I recall correctly, the limits of what a Beta tape could hold was about 150 minutes. The beginning of the tape has to be set aside, as is the end, as buffers, and this meant any movie that ran longer than about 2 hours could not be played on a single Beta tape, as would more than four 30-minute episodes or two 60-minute episodes of a TV show. And since the tapes were more expensive than their VHS counterparts, they'd have a real tough time selling 2-tape sets on the Betamax format. Though Betamax stopped being relevant by then, there is no way they could fit Titanic onto one tape, for instance, and that would've been a huge deal when the movie was new. |
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icomeanon6
 SubscriberPosts: 114 |
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My dad said that the longer runtime was indeed the primary reason for most people he knew. In addition to movies, there's a key factor with runtime that video-nerds often forget: sports. You knew that a VHS could record an entire football or baseball game, which Beta could not. Re: the LD vs. DVD discussion above. One thing you can say about DVD that you can't about LD is that (after the initial rough patch), the quality of the video/audio was waaaay less tied to the quality of your player. There's a lot of room for an analogue signal to lose definition in the transfer from medium to reader, like in LD's case. With DVD, as long as the disc only had minor scratches, any player would receive the same digital signal from the disc. LD is certainly interesting technology though, and if I had more space around the TV I'd probably check it out just for curiosity's sake. (Too many old game consoles in the way, lol) |
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Ouran High School Dropout
 Posts: 440 Location: Somewhere in Massachusetts, USA |
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Like the "enchantment" of having a max runtime of only two hours per disc (depending on individual disc and player)? It's the main reason I was never interested, despite having the income for the tech. Some discs were only 30 minutes on a side...
Blue Amberol, good one! My best friend in my high school/college days had quite the collection of Edison cylinders and several functioning players. Even listening back in the 70s and 80s, they were a lot of fun to listen to; anything that makes the past live again is okay by me.
Unfortunately, they couldn't fit Titanic on a single VHS tape either... 
Last edited by Ouran High School Dropout on Wed Jan 24, 2018 2:37 am; edited 1 time in total |
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docsane
 Posts: 53 Location: Boston, MA |
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I'd like to point out that the idea that laserdiscs were "uncompressed" video isn't really accurate. True, analog video isn't compressed the way digital video is (i.e. find only the interframe changes and just encode the data describing them), but laserdisc compressed its video the old-fashioned way - by limiting the bandwidth.
Basically, laserdisc had limited space for describing the color and black and white waveforms that comprised the video, and that would show up as noise in the picture. Laserdisc was fantastic compared to home videotape because tape formats like VHS were just so terrible by comparison. And unlike tape, LDs had no time base errors that were caused by weak control tracks introduced through the copying process (Which would cause picture bending and flutter on playback). But laserdisc video is surprisingly noisy, with all sorts of shakiness in the color that was nicely hidden on old CRT displays. Interlaced CRT displays hid a lot of recording flaws that show up plainly on modern displays. I still own a few laserdiscs, but modern digital formats are so much better than they ever could be. |
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Saidah Gilbert
Posts: 28 Location: Trinidad and Tobago |
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Me. I'm an anime fan in my 20's and I don't think I've ever heard of laser discs. I was surprised to see the picture in the comic. The first thought that came to my mind was, " a silver record?" |
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belvadeer
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My post is a joke quote for something Scott might say in response to modern anime viewers wondering why laserdisc was a big deal originally. Your post would make a good counter to my hypothetical Scott comment. XD |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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You're absolutely right, and I hadn't thought of that. Baseball games and American football games most commonly run about 3 hours long, though they could run longer. Basketball is supposed to be quick, but the last few minutes have always been riddled with time-outs and intentional fouls that slow things down to a snail's pace. You could store the Super Bowl on one VHS tape, but you could not on one Beta. I guess feasibly, you could store the first half and the halftime show on one tape and the second half on another, but yeah, that would've been too expensive and inconvenient. (I don't know how long soccer and rugby matches tend to be, but the World Cup matches I'd see definitely run over 2 hours.)
They COULD. They just didn't want to compromise with video quality (which, by and large, is the right decision, both because home video appeals to the fans, collectors, and those who want to see the movie again and again, who owuld be the ones most concerned about video quality; and because they needed a reason why you would get the official release rather than recording it off the TV).
Laserdiscs were also pretty fragile, compared to videotapes. And that's a pretty big deal if you have kids around the house. Nowadays, disc-based media are stored in sturdy plastic cases (though the "wagon wheel" ones aren't quite so much, but they still offer some decent protection). Back then, Laserdisc took off (to whatever extent they did) when vinyl was big, so people would put them in those paper sleeves, which made them susceptible to damage by bending or falling out of the sleeves. Parents of energetic children will pick videotapes over Laserdiscs any day because they know those tapes can take a beating. (And children's movies were, and still are, a very lucrative market.) |
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5831 Location: Virginia, United States |
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Laserdiscs had another wonderful feature, they were large like LP's, so you had lots of cover artwork on both sides, and many of them even had small booklets or posters in them.
You took care of them, much like you would do with an LP. I have never had a problem with them bending or warping, since they are stored together upright. Never heard about people putting them in paper sleeves. I have always kept my LP's and Laserdiscs in the sleeve and cover it came in. Believe I have the entire Gallforce series (excluding the latter Revolution), Outlanders, Tenchi Muyo OVA's, Iczer One, and Bubble Gum Crisis on Laserdisc. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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What sort of sleeves do they ordinarily come in? I must admit, most of my experience with handling Laserdiscs came from my time working at a donation center. Every now and then, we'd receive Laserdiscs, and, without exception, they came in the same kind of paper sleeves vinyl records would come in, which is made of thick card stock (thicker than regular printing paper, thinner than cardboard). |
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TarsTarkas
Posts: 5831 Location: Virginia, United States |
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Usually, Laserdiscs had an inner sleeve sometimes made of paper or plastic, or even a combination of both. That inner sleeve was then put in an album cover, made of some sort of card stock. The inner sleeve was probably to prevent scratches and fingerprints.
I have a limited edition Laserdisc of the first Tenchi Muyo movie and I believe one for Iczer One that had a thin record sized booklet in it. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Ah, I see. In that case, the donated Laserdiscs must have either mostly or all lost those inner protective sleeves, because there was no physical difference between the Laserdisc sleeves (the ones I had to handle, at least) and vinyl record sleeves.
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 9844 Location: Virginia |
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@leafy sea dragon
Those vinyl records all came with inner sleeves also. The majority had paper inner sleeves, a few had soft plastic sleeves with high end records coming in plastic lined paper sleeves. The manufacturer would often use the paper to list other available titles or it would be printed with graphics as part of the package. Only the very cheapest shovel ware did not come with an inner sleeve. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Huh, so is THAT the reason behind the complaints about the paper sleeves in some of the FUNimation S.A.V.E. releases...
I take it that these sleeves are easy to lose? We'd get a lot of vinyls donated in (like, we'd average about 25 vinyl records per day), and about 80% of them would have no inner sleeves (excluding empty sleeves and naked vinyls we'd receive). I should've figured they were standard, because I made the connection that the donor was the bigger factor: If someone donated vinyls, either they'd all have the inner sleeves, or none of them would. But I assumed those inner sleeves were some outside-sourced item people would use to keep their vinyls in good condition, akin to those plastic card sleeves used for collectible card games, since so few of them actually had them. (I don't think I saw any plastic ones. They were all tissue paper.) |
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