The Dance DVD on a HDTV
 

Forgive me if this has been discussed - We got a Samsung HDTV & Blu Ray recently. Soundstage in HD is like a dream. LiB DVD looks okay (but have you seen it in HD on Palladium?) But my biggest concern is The Dance DVD - It looks just awful - fuzzy, etc. Do oither HDTV owning folks experience this?

And the bigger question - are the masters from the Dance taping in HD so we might eventually see a BR disc?

(Red Rocks is fuzzy too, but everything about RR is a tad fuzzy. I say that out of love.) :-)

Both Red Rocks and The Dance are on standard definition DVD only. I also think they were filmed only in standard definition. MAYBE The Dance was filmed on 35 millimeter actual film and then transferred to video tape for editing. In that case there might be hope for one day getting a 1080 transfer, but as it is right now the best you can do is make sure you player can do a 1080 up convert of the DVD. If anyone can get a clear view of one of the cameras on stage look to see if there is anything resembling a camera film reel? If it was edited in video though they would have to go back to the original Film, transfer it again into HD and reedit the WHOLE thing from the beginning. Based on the amount of tweaking to the vocals, lip sync issues I'm guessing the producers of The Dance wont be much interested in re editing it and possibly exposing all the fakery that went into making The Dance seem like a perfect and flawless performance.

LIB was filmed in HD, but the DVD is standard definition and worse than that was NOT made in 16:9 but awful letterbox. No matter what I do I can not get my DVD player and TV to not make everyone look fat. There is hope that LIB will be released someday in proper HD format. If not be Warner then maybe by SoundStage itself?

Stevie's Soundstage of course was also filmed in HD and released on BlueRay so its going to look amazing.

Yes, sadly, The Dance, whether shot on film or video is full screen ratio(4:3). So widescreen TV's may be stretching the screen, which distorts.

The nice thing about IF the Dance was filmed on a Film medium it in theory can be cropped slightly to be 16:9. You would lose a bit of aspect ratio but would still look good on 16:9 without any loss of clarity.


you know whats really funny? I remember when the DVD first came out it was all over the place at TV stores and best Buy and Circuit City and everyone was saying how clear it was! and how you could see flyaways on Stevies hairdoo and wrinkles on their faces and the design in the lace on stevies outfit. Now we are so spoiled by HD that when we look at the DVD now we are like "EWW!", dont even get me started on my VHS of Tango!

Oh. here is something you can try.....

If you download a program called Handbrake you can rip your DVD and do a little manipulation to your DVDs. I used it to Import LIB and convert to 16:9 ratio and the results were very good. Then you can burn it back to a DVD. I just left it as a MP4 file and watch it in iTunes.

I suppose if you rip The Dance you can do a little smoothing and get some of the digital artifacts out, but with a loss of some details. It will kind of be the digital equivalent of wearing over photoshopping and airbrushing an old photo.

I wonder if part of the problem with The Dance is that it was released VERY early in the DVD era (late 1997). The video transfer technology at that time was fairly low-res, which was OK for VHS and laserdisc but looked like crap on DVD. I wouldn't be surprised if the DVD was mastered from the same transfer that was used for the laserdisc.

Perhaps a new transfer of The Dance would improve things...even at standard definition I'm sure it could look much better than it does.

Yeah the regular DVD, the best you're gonna get is 480p out of it. And its in 4:3 aspect ration instead of widescreen, which sucks donkey nuts. BUT... if you have an upconverting DVD player (or a BluRay player) you can view it in 720p or 1080p (but because of the nature of the way it's shot it's going to make it look "worse") To be honest, The Dance will always look better on a standard definition TV... unless someone digitally remasters the source material.

It is gorgeous on Palladium! I felt like the concert was happening in my living room!