How To Get Into Laserdisc?

"Infinite" is a long time.

There were no letterbox releases in this era, so it wasn't possible to release a 1.66 or 1.85-matted version at the time. Eventually, that did happen (with Woody Allen's Manhattan and many other films), but it was never ideal for NTSC standard-def.

 

I was going to post pretty much the same thing before I saw your post, but thought what was the point since the guy already has a player and I think just wants to have fun.

Let me restate it in a more practical way, since you have a player amd are going to buy discs no matter what any of us say...and I would do the same thing if I were in your shoes! I had hundreds and hundreds of laserdiscs. I was not happy that DVD came out and rumor had it that it was going to replace lasers. I had two high end players and was extremely pleased....life was good! I have to tell you, however, that within a couple of years I owned hundreds of DVDs and gave away, yup, gave away, nearly all my discs. That is pretty much what they were worth. That is about all that needs to be said about the two formats. But here is where I will try and be more helpful, as you probably don't have access to a time machine, or the rental units at your local Time Machines R Us are always rented out for the day. The one, and I do mean only one, good thing about laserdisc is the amazing sound, though ironically it sounds like you don't have a player that will take advantage of that aspect....but you might come across one at a thrift store...which you should visit often because as others have said, you can find discs for almost nothing. If you see a concert by an artist you like, and there isn't a dvd version or the laser is stupid cheap, pick it up! I have saved most of my concerts, though many have now been reissued and at this point they do sound better than lasers, but early dvds usually didn't. There are a few movies, though not many, that are not on dvd so laser is certainly better than vhs. And there are some beautiful Disney collector sets that were a fortune when new....I probably should have kept them though I doubt I would watch them. Bottom line is that having to flip the discs over, and storing all those discs...just didn't make any sense. Lets not talk about blu ray VS laser video quality...I doubt you care (maybe that's a good thing...it will save you a fortune and the movies will still be fun to watch). So, you should either go all in and buy a ton of discs super cheap, and do so because they are cheap and you don't want to pay more for a dvd collection (though most dvds are awfully cheap used!), or just get a few titles for fun, and a lot of concerts if that is your thing, and don't go too crazy...because you will likely do the same thing most of us did....give them all away amd move on! At least you won't lose thousands of dollars like a lot of us did...but we sure had fun, didn't we guys? And showing off those discs when most people didn't have any kind of serious movie collection? Admit it...that was kind of fun too. Now, people come over and walk right by my beautiful collection of blu rays! And they think I'm crazy for owning movies. They won't when someday the studios start sticking it to the streaming services and prices start going through the roof after they have conditioned most people to stop buying physical media. I will be quite pleased that I own my own movies when that day comes.

 

Not sure a guy who clearly doesn't care much about picture quality (and good on him...I think sometimes we care too much about that sort of thing, and let that get in the way of simply watching a story unfold) is going to care if the matting is off!

 

It is a long time, but for now there isn't anything else that resolves audio the way a physical medium does, and vinyl is the best we got to do that. I don't see anyone putting development money into another physical format unless it can produce something like vinyl, and I mean sound exactly like vinyl, and at the same time remove the issues vinyl can present...warps, bad pressings, pops amd clicks, etc. Then maybe they got something. Doubt that is going to happen in my lifetime.

 

If ever. I'm totally happy with high-res digital and think this works fine for what we need. I tend to side with the recording engineers who believe that the colorations of vinyl are what some people like about it, but to me, it's not an accurate medium.

Laserdiscs are the opposite of accurate; when you look at test signals off laserdisc, there's a huge amount of loss. It's fairly gigantic and unsubtle, easy to see, and easy to measure. As bad as it is, it's better than consumer videotape, but not better than pro videotape and not better than digital files. Even standard-def ones.

 

Can one rip LD's to Blu-ray or dvd or does Copy Protection prevent. I think the original Star Wars on LD would be worth having

 

AFAIK, there's no copy protection on LDs. I used to copy them to VHS without issue - if that worked, copying to other formats should work, too...

 

I didn't mean the disc was letterboxed; I meant it was a center crop like how most channels produce their SD feed these days.

 

That's already been done by people with professional equipment. The files are available online.

 

Jeez if I'd only known I could have sent you all of my old LD's, but I had to dump them when I moved-I mean I literally put them into a dumpster (Princeton Record Exchange, my usual local dumping ground for unwanted items, wouldn't even look at them, and no love on Craigslist). And I had everything on your wishlist. Is this being unnecessarily cruel?

 

A while back I transferred a LD using a digital camcorder connecting my LD player to my Macbook. Like another comment said it might be worth leaving that to experts if someone already did the work and posted it. But overall for me after taking a slightly ironic/stupid plunge in to the format some 10 years ago I'm glad I did. The discs in my experience come in waves. There was a huge collection of old foreign film LDs at Half Price Books here recently, hardly any of them got bought up but other locations generally just have a handful if that.

My favorite Laserdiscs are probably the National Film Board animation ones but I've got some old educational filmstrips on LD, Weather Report, cheesy Karaoke videos.

 

I must've missed the memo.

Correct. 99% of home video from about 1977-1987 was all pan/scan. All the mastering I did in those early days was pan/scan, and it took a huge amount of skill and a lot of time to do. I much prefer not to have to do pan/scan, because the compromise is so great. The problem back then was, if you letterboxed a 525-line scope image, you wind up throwing away 40% of the image to blanking, meaning 315 lines, which is very crappy. It's not so bad with HD, since you wind up with a 1920x800 picture instead of a 1920x1080 picture, so there's still a lot of detail there.

 

Or, you know, the DVD releases from 2005 that were literally the LD masters.

 

DVD came out in 1997. It's very possible there were thousands of DVDs authored from standard-def digital master tapes done in the 1990s. "Laserdisc master" doesn't really mean anything: the studios frequently used the same master for broadcast, TV syndication, Pay TV, VHS, Laserdisc, and DVD. But starting around 2002, everything went to HD fairly quickly.

 

My dad, junk collector, ran into a batch of unopened LD's a couple years back. Probably 200 or so. I believe he paid something like $75 for the batch. He resold for a few hundred bucks. I'm not certain the titles, but I do know TOP GUN was on top of one of the stacks

 

Another Amy Grant LD/VHS only title worth getting is the Find a Way video collection, and also an Old Fashioned Christmas

 

Laserdiscs sleeves make great frameable artwork

 

There are some priceless commentaries on many laserdiscs.

 

Almost all copies of Let It Be rotted.

 

Mine hasn't yet.

 

What year was Let It Be released? In my experience, virtually all LD's from '81-83 are rotted. The older DiscoVision LD's that preceded these used a different manufacturing process are all rotted too, but they don't rot as completely. Many of 'em will play with just some spotting. Generally, 1984 and beyond are safe to buy for Pioneer pressed stuff, but it's still if-y for the other manufacturers. I have several Lumivision LD's that rotted. Everybody knows, or should know, that when Sony started pressing their own LD's in Indiana, the quality was the pits. I have several 3M pressed LD's from the mid-80's and none of them have rotted.

 

The last time I checked, which was 2-3 years ago, my Let it Be LD played fine. I think that in many instances people confuse a poor transfer with rot.

The only outright rotters I have are Beatlemania!, Beauty and the Beast, a Three Stooges box set, and Heavy Metal.

 

In my experience, "rot" gets progressively worse until the disc is unusable, whereas a bad transfer is bad from day one.

Some of the examples in this video I would consider a poor transfer and not rot:

 

I think this one is better:

 

This one looks like progressive, slow rot to me. Eventually, it will probably progress to Snow Globe LD and the audio will gradually go like the other video you posted.