LCD Televisions vs CRT
 

OK so yet again I've just dropped of a wedding DVD at at client who has a 50" LCD television in a room waaay too small for it.

They are very happy with the DVD (In fact I've never had any complaints) but I just see the flaws - slightly blurry/artifacts even slight stobing on the pans - even my menus look a little rough.

I use a Matrox RTX system (I film i 16:9 SD) and always preview as I edit in real time on a 16:9 CRT which always looks good. I then play back the final DVD on my 32" LCD which looks not as good but OK.

Am I missing something here or is this just the way it is? My DVDs are rarely more than an hour so I encode at the highest bit rate in Adobe encore

Thoughts?

i dont think your missing anything.
on many LCD monitors my SD 16x9 squeeze DVD isnt pretty, put the same exact thing on a 72" projection with 3xlcd and it looked great. and on every CRT in the place it looks great.
it is highly dependant on the "engine" in the LCD tv.
one LCD tv we have here makes a terrible SD

another one that costs 2/3rds the price because it was a OLD model, had in it an awesome 3D engine , and good SD input capability, and it upscales both DVD and Digital tv of SD resolution wonderfully. The newer model that it replaced made SD look terrible (was returned).

then my computer monitor which will take any ol signal i toss at it, has some major problems too with SD inputs of the non-digital variety.

some of that will change when they go ALL digital from the dvd, and the Dvd can handle BwuRay or something, and will have a better engine in it, so thier nasty tvs will be digitally fed a good upscale from the cheap blueray box they buy :-)

We now adjust the luma levels different to compensate for all the "features" of the lcd before outputting to DVD, to cover the white clipping and black crunching that can occur.

My 32" lcd is a new Sharp Aquos which was pretty expensive but my DVD player is a fairly old toshiba which doesn't upscale. I still think CRTs give a better picture - I can see artifacts on my LCD - especially around titles and dissolves.

I suppose I just need to be prepared for a client mentioning it at some stage - I'm sure it will happen!

Pete

customers dont know nothing :-) or they wouldnt have bought that stuff
or they should have taken it back, they also leave on those "enhancer" things , have the thing set all wrong for the light in the location, and every other thing to make you freak out and grab thier remote and start tweaking it.

Put a movie in, watch it, take your stuff out, if your stuff doesnt look as good as the SD movie, then fix it better.

Although I don't understand why it needs to be that way, players that upscale do a better job than when it is upscaled in the TV. The PS3 does a great job with upscaling.

I had the same problem lately when customer called me after watching it on their LCD and said that colors are too yellow. I was surprised because I did color correction and it looked good on my computer and on my 37" LCD played from DVD. I think I know where the problem came from - most people do not know that every single LCD or Plasma has to be calibrated to match the room lighting and user preferences. Good thing I'm asking every customer to pickup their DVD at my place, so they get to see samples of the DVD on my LCD - this way I know they know how the video should look like on calibrated LCD.

Peter, a couple of points. I've never seen a programme that didn't look substantially better on an LCD screen when played on an upscaling player. My understanding (and I claim no expertise) is that the upscaling player does the job of preparing the signal for the LCD screen better than the screen itself.

Ever since we stopped outputting our work on film (when we and our suppliers/labs etc had control of the colour) I've given up worrying whether the client was using a badly set up piece of equipment or not. If they want cyan faces or over-saturated colours let them twiddle the knobs. We always show the work on the clients' equipment. If it's badly set up then it's what they want or what they're used to. I've never had a complaint.

A competitor of ours locally who makes a practice of producing/editing to their highest standard regardless of what the client purchased and then talking the clients up at first delivery (a practice I abhor) recently ended up receiving legal papers because the bride said the programme didn't look as good on her TV as it did on their studio equipment. I'm sure it went nowhere legally but why bother with the grief?

Incidentally, CRTs were always more forgiving because they didn't have to deal with the remainders in mathematical division.

Finally, please don't let anything in this posting suggest that striving for the highest standards isn't what we do or advocate - it's just that clients often don't know how their equipment works.

From your profile, I assume you are shooting widescreen DV with your Z1. Of course that will look a lot better on a CRT (than on an LCD). It's interlaced footage, playing on a native interlaced display. Played back on an LCD TV (native progressive display), you are dependent on how well the television (or possibly the DVD player) deinterlaces the image. Some LCD televisions do a pretty good job of deinterlacing, while some (especially older ones) can be really awful at it.

If you shoot HDV, you can produce a DVD that would look better when played back on a big widescreen LCD. I'd suggest you try shooting in Cineframe 25 mode with the Z1. That should downsize very nicely (when using high quality resizing methods - like Lanczos resizing), for producing a 25p standard definition DVD (which should look better on any big LCD TV, and much better on some).

Peter before you rush to take Robert's advice, you might want to consider some of the disadvantages of Cineframe 25. This quote is just one I found:

"Because the field-tossing happens in HD, the downconverted SDTV output looks considerably better than field-doubled standard definition. Instead of being half as good as normal interlaced mode, (as it does in HD - note from Philip), Cineframe looks only slightly worse than interlaced."

Cineframe is more to do with the look and feel of film rather than resolution since at its core is simple field doubling.

My own recommendation, to first try an upscaling player, will show an immediate improvement in what you have produced already. Robert's advice can be tried for subsequent recordings.

A lot of the bad reputation Cineframe has, has to do with Cineframe 24 on NTSC Z1s and FX1s. The way 24p footage is generated from an imaging system designed to acquire 60i footage, the cadence is goofy. Cineframe 25 maybe what amounts to field doubling, but that's fine, when resizing downwards to SD resolutions (as long as resizing is done well), and there's no problem with cadence.

You might have a wee bit of difficulty getting all your clients to run out and purchase new players.