"Ghosting"...why is it so common?

A

Aussie Soulja

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I've noticed that a LOT of cartoon releases on dvd seem to have BAD ghosting (where framses seem to overlap resulting in distortion or doube/triple images) problems with their video transfer.

Serieses tend to have more of this in my experience than feature films. X-Men Evolution (esp the S3 set) is probably the worst offender, but I had similar trouble with Dungeons & Dragons, and Vol 1 of Darkwing Duck.

Are the studios just trying to "cheap out" on the transfer, or is there some big technical problem that makes this inevitable?
 
It's most noticable in the first ep when Nick Fury and the SHIELD agents show up. The shots that are the worst are ones where you have the characters in motion forground while the camera is doing a pan move across the screen. it looks like 2-3 frames all on screen at once overlapped.

I'll try to get a screengrab and post it.
 
Maybe the studios put some weird DVNR-like filter over the video? I don't know for sure, but I do know that my Simpsons DVDs had a weird blurring effect in one of the episodes where there are really fast juttering motions, which was not the case when the episode aired on the local FOX affiliate.
 
What kind of TV are you watching it on? When I first got my 52" LCD TV last October everything looked super crappy until the TV settled, if that makes any sense. Now everything looks great.
 
Here's a screencap of what I'm getting (Click thumnail to view full size):



In motion, the characters are all moving slightly and the camera is doing a left to right pan across them at the same time. Sometimes it happens with just character motion, but it seems the combination of movements is worse.

I've also had this problem with some live action DVD sets, mostly of "less popular" shows that were released "no frills", like seaQuest (both seasons) and Knight Rider (Season 1).

It's noticable on my Sony TV played in a regular dvd player, but 100x WORSE when I play it on my computer via the dvd drive.

Major motion picture DVDs don't give me this problem, just TV show dvds primarily and animateds more than Live action.

I'm beginning to think that the studios just cheaped out on the encoding...
 
Thanks for the help!

After reading the articles you linked. I was able to fiddle with the settings on my DVD playing program on the computer to pretty much eliminate 98% of it. (got the best results by forcing "bob" deinterlacing). I don't know what to do on my stand alone player though. I'll keep looking into it.

Thanks to everyone who posted!
 
A lot of tv animation (like 99.99%) is in 480i, hence interlacing. With good dvd decoding software this can be far less distracting, but its always a problem
 
I think it may be an artifact of the analog film-to-tape transfer technology these studios may have used in the '80s and '90s.

I notice this problem on some anime OAVs from the '80s where a tape master (originally meant for laserdisc) has been used for DVD.

When actual film elements get used for the DVDs however, the quality is free of these ghosting problems. Unlike a lot of American animated TV shows, some anime TV and OAVs series were mastered on film and not tape and can sometimes get progressive transfers.
 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that screencap definitely looks like it's from an all-digital production.

I think this issue is just the result of cheapness; compressing a digital video too much means cutting more corners to reduce the amount of full frames stored in the file, which is partially accomplished through this "interlacing" effect. This is true whether the source was originally digital or not. Often, animated shows that won't make huge bucks and that aren't generally regarded as visual masterpieces will be packaged on as few discs as possible, which means more compression and thus lower quality.

BTW, technically the term "ghosting" refers to when the screen is unable to keep up with quickly moving images, resulting in little "trails" like you used to see all the time on old laptops. It's a problem with LCD screens that don't have a quick enough response time, and it's most noticeable with large areas of flat color, as you often see in animated shows or old video games. (Or new video games that use cel shading, like Strong Bad.) It's something that can't technically be screencapped.
 
Man, does anyone here have this problem with old 80's TMNT cartoon? On some of the episodes there's this "glitching" at the top of the screen like its some bad VHS tape.

What the hell.
 
...That's because Lionsgate IS using bad VHS tapes. The master copies no longer exist for the majority (or all) of the episodes, so they have to resort to using the old VHS releases for those (or it could just be that Lionsgate is too lazy to search in the vaults for those episodes, I'd believe either story).

You can even see the old FHE Video logo at the end of some of the Season 3 and Season 4 episodes, because they didn't edit that out while transferring.
 
But not all the old TMNT episodes ever came out on VHS. So how are they getting the other eps on DVD that were never released on VHS?

Don't these companies have "master copies" of these old cartoons in a vault somewhere?
 
Thanks for the correction. When I first started looking for help about this on another forum, they called it "ghosting", so that was the only name I had for it.

As I said above, I was able to reset my computer's DVD playing program to take out 98%+ of it. I had to use the "Force bob" mode. Forcing the "weave" left VERY noticible jagged motion artifacts (I beleive they're called "mouse teeth").
 
It's probably a combination of that and the fact that they cram so many episodes onto each disc. But of course when the source is VHS, it's almost not worth it to make a less digitally compressed transfer.
 
Too bad the '80s Turtles cartoon series is not available in anything higher than VHS quality.:sad: I remember watching it on my local WPIX station in the early '90s and the picture quality was crisp and beautiful.
Sounds really bizarre that for a show that was mega-popular in its prime that the original broadcast masters were not preserved.:sweat:
 
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