The complaint doing the rounds about the new Magoo Christmas Carol disc comes with a very specific example, and it's the detail that makes me believe it. During the All Alone In The World sequence, the words and images on the chalkboard reportedly disappear as the camera pans across them. Everything else apparently looks clean and colourful.
That failure is the signature of temporal noise reduction. The processing compares frames to work out what's grain and what's picture, and low contrast fine detail that moves gets read as noise and averaged away. Chalk lines on a dark board panning past the lens is close to a worst case input for it. On live action you lose skin texture and faces go waxy. On hand drawn animation it's worse, because the grain and the line came off the same piece of film, so scrubbing one sands the other.
The annoying part is that it usually isn't incompetence, it's budget. Heavy NR plus a saturation lift is cheap and it makes stills look punchy, which is what sells a catalogue title from a thumbnail. A real restoration with a fresh scan, hand checked dirt removal and proper colour timing costs money on a title with a seasonal audience.
I'd still rather it existed on disc than not, but I'm not double dipping later if a proper job turns up. Has anyone put it side by side with the old DVD? If the DVD holds more chalkboard detail than the Blu-ray, that is worth knowing before people buy.
That failure is the signature of temporal noise reduction. The processing compares frames to work out what's grain and what's picture, and low contrast fine detail that moves gets read as noise and averaged away. Chalk lines on a dark board panning past the lens is close to a worst case input for it. On live action you lose skin texture and faces go waxy. On hand drawn animation it's worse, because the grain and the line came off the same piece of film, so scrubbing one sands the other.
The annoying part is that it usually isn't incompetence, it's budget. Heavy NR plus a saturation lift is cheap and it makes stills look punchy, which is what sells a catalogue title from a thumbnail. A real restoration with a fresh scan, hand checked dirt removal and proper colour timing costs money on a title with a seasonal audience.
I'd still rather it existed on disc than not, but I'm not double dipping later if a proper job turns up. Has anyone put it side by side with the old DVD? If the DVD holds more chalkboard detail than the Blu-ray, that is worth knowing before people buy.
