[old_tv_nut]

The Traveltalks and King Solomon's Mines DVDs arrived today. I've been doing some quick previewing on the Blu-Ray player and HD set, and I have to say that the processing they have been through makes it hard to guess what the original source was.

King Solomon's Mines shows minor differences between the location and studio shots, but it seems the film was processed to remove grain before putting it on DVD, so you can't really see a difference in that. There is a river/waterfall scene where the white water has a peculiar moire pattern in it, which may be a conflict between random motion in water, grain reduction, and MPEG coding. There is a slight difference in contrast (location shots being contrastier) but it seems to be mainly the difference in lighting rather than film stock. The location scenery is certainly magnificent.

The Traveltalk shorts have visually obvious lower resolution than the feature film, but is it due to the original source, some analog video transfer stage (there is edge enhancement), or down-resing before encoding to get 2.5 hours on the DVD? It's hard to tell what all is going on. All evidence of film grain has been obliterated, although you can see some blotchy effects in the sky at times. There is one segment of one episode that has some obvious misregistration of the three-strip printing process. Fine vertical details like window edges seem to show some aliasing that causes them to brighten and darken as the film weaves, a sign of down-resing. A Tokyo theater street scene with colorful signs has one blue and yellow sign that jitters left and right, probably due to an MPEG coder motion detection failure with low luminance contrast.

Color overall in these shorts is quite good. I get a kick out of looking up some of the locations to see what they look like today.

So, first impression is that these are great demo materials for vintage color sets, but trying to guess the original source format for the travel shorts (35mm or 16mm) is probably futile.