Picture Perfect?

Film Comment, May, 2001 by Gregory Solman

Movies travel from salt-mine storage vaults to multiple stages of mastering, compression, and tweaking. So who to blame for your less than dazzling DVD?

According to legend, Godard once quipped that movies can't be shown on TV because in the translation they become, in essence, television. That said, let's assume for the moment that the goal of DVD watching is to duplicate a theatrical film experience at home, to make the compressed digital bits and microscopic pits of the Digital Versatile Disc mimic the warm-and-fuzzy continual gray scales and familiarly unnatural color reproduction of an analog system we all know and love: motion-picture photography.

What can DVD deliver under ideal conditions? According to Lou Levinson. a high-definition colorist at Host Logic, Hollywood, and a renowned expert on mastering movies for all home formats, the answer is unepectedly hopeful. Levinson has pedormed side-by-side comparisons of reels from picture sources of varying resolution on professional color-corrected monitors and under controlled conditions. His verdict? "In my experience. when everything is right and done well, DVDs can come amazingly close to the standard-definition digital master." In other words. DVDs can potentially deliver Digital-Betacam-quality pictures, effectively eliminating the gap between professional and consumer formats. And that's to the trained eye of someone who knows what to look for when examining the image critically.

Yet a labyrinthine matrix of contingencies -- detours, dead ends. speed bumps, and steep cliffs along the road from a converted salt-mine film-print storage facility in Kansas to your TV screen -- practically guarantees that an objective qualitative analysis of any given DVD title will be impossible. Because DVDs are digital, one might expect a measure of perfection -- but some discs look unaccountably better when viewed on a particular machine-monitor combo, and others prove to be equally mystifying duds. For reasons unknown, John Ford's The Quiet Man is a little too strong and silent on my Pioneer DV-414: after the Republic Pictures logo ends, so does the entire soundtrack. It might be a quirk in a particular machine or disc; or a flaw common to the entire model of machine or to the entire pressing run of the disc; or a combination of these factors.

But, at least, to correct that which can be easily corrected, do adjust your sets. Watching DVDs as if you're merely watching a TV can reduce this remarkable format to the look of unexceptional cable reception. Because VHS tapes are little better than broadcast signal in image-quality terms, home viewers have developed bad habits -- whereas laserdisc converts learned that the factory presets for televisions ensure far too much brightness and contrast. These point-of-sale pre-sets have no aesthetic raison d'etre. They're simply turned up to eleven in order to sell models in overlit showrooms, where consumers predictably pick the brightest-looking pictures -- a logical criterion for the guy who watches football with far too much ambient room light so that his wife can read and the kids can play, all in the same room at the same time. Director David Fincher insisted on color setup bars on the DVD of Seven, to replicate the look of one of the film's original silver-retention process prints as it looked when projected in a theater. "The color bars are to help you get a reasonable picture out of your TV," Fincher says. "It's just to get you to set the black levels properly, because so many people have them set improperly."

So don't expect art out of something treated as an appliance. In his book DVD Demystified Jim Taylor lists the junctures at which artifacts -- anything not in the film's original photography -- can accrete to the final DVD picture: "... film scratches, film-to-video-conversions, analog-to-digital conversions, NTSC or PAL video encoding, anti-copying technology, composite signal crosstalk, connector problems, electrical interference, waveform aliasing, signal filters, television picture controls, and much more." The one thing consumers have a say in is their home theater setup. For instance, the high-quality DVD signal suffers by the use of the same coaxial connections that come out of your cable box. At the very least, use Super-VHS cables and ideally connect the player to a televison fitted with a component-in panel in the back. Experts advise reducing both brightness and contrast to about one quarter of maximum. (In the laserdisc days that adjustment allowed sharpness -- be potted up to three-quarters to improve the picture. But DVDs do not require extra sharpness, and some watchers maintain that any extra high frequency -- i.e. sharpness -- hurts more than it helps.) Now adjust the color to taste. Finally, unless you've always been bothered by dark movie theaters, turn off the room lights. The DVD now stands a fighting chance of looking vaguely photographic.

Unfortunately, your problems may have just begun. DVD mastering, the process of transferring an analog film print or negative into a digitally encoded format, comes after three critical stages of picture development, each fraught with pitfalls. First, how well photographed was the original film in the first place? Memory of just how wonderful a movie looked on the big screen is unreliable, often colored by enthusiasm, nostalgia, and a chauvinistic protectiveness towards the film medium now that its faced with possible extinction by the rise of theatrical digital movie projection. It's not uncommon to encounter complaints about image quality directed at DVD by viewers unaware that the movie was actually shot the way in the first place and that the original cinematography has been faithfully preserved.