Technical
Background
- VIDEOBOOK programmes began life in 1982, as part
of Studio 21's film and video production activities.
- The source material originated
on low band "U-Matic" 3/4 inch analogue tape, with 16mm moviefilm
telecined inserts, and also "Video 8" clips, incorporated as required.
- Most of the original source
material was shot using bulky and very heavy 3-tube video cameras, or top-spooled,
400 feet, 16mm film cameras, all mounted on equally heavy tripods with fluid-mount
heads.
- Editing was achieved in
the analogue component transfer mode, using truly enormous machinery.
- Sound track compilation
was accomplished using 2 inch, 24 track analogue tape, mixed via a 24 x
24 x 4 analogue desk.
- The end result was distributed
on VHS cassette, in both PAL 625 and NTSC 525 formats.
- The sales of VIDEOBOOKS
continued right up until 2000, but they were re-edited several times, and
finally, in the early 1990s, to take advantage of new footage acquired using
the latest 3-chip digital cameras.
-
- In 2004, AngelFilms resurrected
a digital video format that came to life early in the 1990s, but which never
really gained any popularity in Europe at the time due to the complete saturation
of the home video market by VHS cassette, and then the emergence of video
DVDs.
- The format was VideoCD,
(VCD).
- This format might have
died completely, were it not for an interesting set of circumstances.
- The VHS home video cassette
system never really gained the same European style stranglehold in the Middle
and Far East, largely due to its' emergence during a time when these areas
were, for the most part, not very affluent, and, in any event, had nothing
much worth recording off-air.
- (It must be remembered
that the whole raison d'être of VHS was for home recording, rather
than the dissemination of pre-recorded material)
- When these areas became
interested in cheap, home video recording, the VCD made its appearance,
and, being intrinsically more sturdy than flimsy tape cassettes, rapidly
gained acceptance.
- All this would have simply
left a hot-bed of VCD in those areas (like the ill-fated V2000 or Betamax
tape systems in Europe), whilst the rest of the world pursued better tape
formats, like SVHS or Hi8, and lastly, the compact-disk styled DVD video.
- Indeed, the Japanese and
European consumer giants more or less pronounced VCD as "dead-on-arrival",
and ignored or excluded it from their plans.
- This has proved to be
a costly mistake in the longer term.
-
- The economic rise of,
particularly, China and India, somewhat shifted the electronic consumer
goods manufacturing base, and today, a great deal of these types of product,
that are on sale in Europe, are originating in both of those eastern countries.
- It is hardly surprising,
then, that almost all new players sold under the banner of DVD, appear to
be, in reality, VCD players that have been up-graded to have a DVD compatibility,
as well as many other formats, and most will accommodate the many different
mechanical characteristics of available disks.
-
- From AngelFilms commercial standpoint in 2004,
VCDs were potentially playable on more equipment than video DVDs
- All computers can, with
a regular CD drive, and compatible software (much of it free), play VCDs.
and almost all contemporary, stand-alone DVD players available in mainland
Europe would also oblige.
- DVDs are not usable on
computers that are not equipped with a DVD drive.
- An additional bonus, for
both the producer and the consumer, was that VCDs were cheaper to manufacture
than DVDs, suffered less compatibility problems, and, were more durable.
-
- AngelFilms own market research in 2004 revealed
that many older, stand-alone players did not proclaim VCD compatibility,
but, provided the recorded material did not exceed the boundaries of the
original MPEG1 VCD 2.0 "standard", then reproduction was usually
possible.
- The VCD feature was beginning
to appear on more and more consumer players.
- AngelFilms productions
were therefore manufactured to BOTH formats; conventional DVD, and our own
"VCD-HQ" format which, was and still is compatible with the global
VCD 2.0 standard, but provides higher picture quality.
-
- As far as playback quality was concerned, VCD
was often quoted as being similar to VHS.
- This was only true if
certain production parameters are met, a field in which AngelFilms exhibited
considerable expertise.
- However, a VCD disk had
distinct advantages over a VHS cassette tape, most notably, a complete lack
of temporal instability effects (line jitter, chroma disturbances, noise,
audio wow and flutter etc), and suffered only
from the necessary compression artefacts inherent in the MPEG1 coding system.
- As other digital formats
gain ground and stability in specification (e.g. DivX, MPEG-4 etc), then
AngelFilms may well incorporate them as available products.
-
- Whilst SVCD, XVCD etc
etc all have the potential to provide much greater quality, yet still on
low-density optical discs (CD-R), there are several issues with compatibility
and playabilty.
- In Mainland Europe, almost
all post-2004 DVD players will handle SVCD, but it is doubtful whether many
of the pre-2004 players already in use are compatible.
- The difficulty is that
many older players cannot spin CD-R disks fast enough to obtain the data
throughput for MPEG2 medium bandwidth datastreams.
- There is also the software
requirement in decoding the non-square pixels used (similar to the "Squeeze
Lens" technology of widescreen film cinema), a problem which also exists
within DVD +/-R when used in anything other than standard play mode..
-
- It would be wonderful
if we could say that our DVD disks would play anywhere, anytime ... but
nowadays, just as we seem to have a stable format and media, somebody comes
along and threatens obsolescence with "new technology" (HD-DVD,
Blu-Ray, FDVDetc).
-
We therefore
have to earnestly request that our customers check
that
they CAN play DVD-R disks BEFORE ordering ....
life
shouldn't be like this, but it is.
-
-
It is AngelFilms belief that all
"moving parts" mechanical media will rapidly die away in the next
decade, to be replaced by solid-state media.
Indeed,
we use a good deal of "no-moving-parts" technology in our own
productions, and we believe that "multi-gigabyte" media cards
are not far away from mass-production, with an attendant price fall.
Whether
this will achieve the dollar/gigabyte levels of present-day optical disks
remains to be seen, but the rapid rise in popularity of "I-pods"
and other solid-state media devices is indicating that the day may not be
far away..
It
may be that achieving such parity becomes irrelevant against the advantages
of the elimination of the compatibility and mechanical problems which are
inherent in all "moving parts" technology............................
"Wherever
motion picture technology takes us,
professional
expertise will be there also !!"
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