If I have a movie that need a lot of compression wasn't it compressed to get it on the disk? Doest that create a loss of quality? Or are the large movies on DVD9 discs? Just curious because everyone says that compression reduces the quality but it seams to me that it is already compressed. whats up?
Yes, factory pressed original DVD's are compresed. DVD's use MPEG2 for the video with is a lossy compressor, so there is quality loss. However since the raw source isn't generally available, it is the best possible quality source (excluding HD sources). Re-compressing causes further loss of quality and in this case you do have the original to compare.
I was wondering about this myself. Wouldn't it be fair to say that all digital formats are using some form of compression. What sort of codec/electronics are used to take the final edit to DVD? There has to be some loss unless the video camera matches exactly the quality on the DVD.
also if George Lucas has his way movies will be shot with digital video cameras anyway. Now I dont know the specifics but I know the last 2 star wars were shot with some digital video camera of some sort. I beleive for episode 2 he used a Sony camera with some funky lens'. So one could argue that the video form it was shot in would be almost a direct copy to DVD. Plus I have yet to see a DVD that is DVD5 anyway. Most of them are DVD9 and with 8GB of space I dont think they need to do much compression. And compared to VHS I dont think anyone should complain at all. Once blu ray discs hit the market and movies are produced on those they should not have to reduce ANY quality to get the entire movie on the disc. At that point the thaters will need some "new" attraction. People can buy a projector and hook it to their blu-ray player and make a 100" screen then hook up their DTS 7.1 channel home theater system and be as good as the movies.
Many Of the Newer Movies are Starting to Be Shot on Digital 24P Cameras(24fps progressive Just Like Normal film) and the Video is Stored in an Low Compression DV Format simular to what you Capture from a MiniDV Camcorder .... This Video is then transfered to the Host Editing Workstation Computer(Or a Network of editing Workstations) where the Video is then edited and Processed... When the Movie is Finnished editing and the Data is ready to be Converted to Mpeg-2 for DVD authoring they Export the DV Format Movie out through the Firewire Port into a Standalone Rackmount Hardware Mpeg-2 encoder which Encodes the Video to Mpeg-2 and stores it back to HD which can then be transfered to the DVD Authoring Workststion to make the Master Copy of the DVD which then gets sent to a Duplicateing Studio which Presses all of the DVD"s.... This is Just a Basic rundown of how some studios do it and I am sure most other Studios have a simular sort of Method.... Cheers
