How To Get Into Laserdisc?

Not pure New Wave, but some stuff you may like:

Depeche Mode - The World We Live In and Live In Hamburg (Japanese LaserDisc in the link below has more songs than the US LaserDisc pictured below): http://www.discogs.com/Depeche-Mode-The-World-We-Live-In-And-Live-In-Hamburg/release/1508497



Depeche Mode - 101:
http://www.discogs.com/Depeche-Mode-101/release/1508462



The Cure - The Cure in Orange:
http://www.discogs.com/Cure-The-Cure-In-Orange/release/3629398



The Cure - Show:
http://www.discogs.com/Cure-Show/release/2372926

 

I could be mistaken but I think many of the "widescreen" editions are actually letterboxed (i.e. those black bars at the top and bottom of the screen are actually part of the movie). Again, if I'm not mistaken, there weren't too many wide screen TVs when laserdisc was popular.

I don't mean to threadcrap or be a party-pooper, but I agree with Vidiot. If you want the best home movie experience you can get, laserdisc (imho) isn't the way to get it. Blu-ray is the way to go. Seriously, "remastered movies" wasn't even a term during the laserdisc era. If you're just dabbling with it for the fun of it, without high expectations, then I say have fun. The prices for the discs are kind of all over the place.

 

There were "digitally remastered" movies on LD, and THX was a big deal. I think the Star Wars trilogy "faces" discs are a good example of this.

There were quite a few early releases that were reissued with digital PCM soundtracks, and some titles were later reissued as letterbox, but for the most part older movies weren't remastered.

At some point it became common for new releases to be released as letterbox on LD and pan and scan on VHS.

 

Of course. I'm not going to go out and sell my blu-rays for LD, this is just for funsies

 

It was a term BIG TIME

The same movies got released over and over. I think I must upgraded "Goldfinger" four or five times 90-97. CBS/FOX Pan & Scan, CBS/FOX letterbox, MGM letterbox, MGM box set, MGM Connery Collection, Criterion.

 

Same! Here's mine minus Blu:



To the OP: simply have fun with it. Here are some of my ground rules discovered after becoming hooked on the format a few years back in college when trying to see the unaltered Star Wars trilogy and Bonds the way I remembered them from childhood.

1. Discs from the late 80's onwards are vastly preferred. By the mid 90's they had perfected the pressing quality for the most part. Additionally most older discs were pan n scan so typically the later disc will at least be nearer the correct aspect ratio. And there is far less chance of rot.
2. Digital PCM soundtracks. LD is arguably still great in terms of SQ, simply due to usage of higher gen unfiltered theatrical mixes at times and because every digital track was 16/44.1 PCM. Blu-ray is without a doubt technically superior, but many times LD tracks can still give them a run for their money.
3. The AC-3 and DTS discs are stellar. The latter is full bitrate and is on the digital tracks with no decoding required. Dolby requires an ac-3 rf demodulator, (very hard to find these days) but if you do manage to locate one and have a later player with an ac-3 rf out, the resulting 384 kbp/s 5.1 tracks are very good and usually a touch hot. Both of these are typically reputed to be theatrical audio, and it would not surprise me. The Mission Impossible disc you previously mentioned is reference for LD and blows the pants off all the DVD and Blu-ray iterations of the same film.
-Further note about ac-3: On these discs there is digital PCM stereo matrixed surround, analog left has either a mono folddown or commentary, and the analog right has the encoded 5.1. On non capable players such as yours, selecting the right analog track on discs will result in noise.
4. Remember LD is a composite format. It's not going to work well with modern displays, and sometimes S-video is not the way to go. If you get serious about it later on, a good CRT with a comb filter results in near and sometimes equivalent to DVD.
5. CAV discs are better than CLV ones but the latter are typically near equivalent.
6. Collect what you like, whether it be artwork or exclusives etc.

I'd recommend anything Criterion due to level of detail put in and also for the fact that many were derived from older elements. This is the best thing about LD: the fact that the elements used could vary and at times can even be print sourced. I find it it both fun and fascinating.

To sum up quickly, find a good Pioneer player with digital output if you like these big beauties. And lddb.com will become your friend.

This is a list of my currently owned madness. http://www.lddb.com/collection.php?action=list&user=sdraper

Reccomended titles:
2001 Criterion CAV-Kubrick supervised transfer, different coloring, dialog panning in mix, uses 70mm 6 track audio.
Apocalypse Now-1991 WS. First version to incorporate 70mm original audio.
Batman
Blade Runner Director's Cut-great video, great audio and far better than the old DVD.
Any of the Bonds. If you grew up with them, these are how they used to be presented.
Hunt For Red October
The Shadow DTS
Temple of Doom-WS. While I also love the Raiders LD, the one for Temple is staggeringly good for old NTSC and features a roaring Dolby Surround track.

Star Wars is more complicated. As I've said before, to truly get the best video experience of the original trilogy there are a few options:
1. Buy the expensive Japanese Special Collection CAV discs. This was the first widescreen transfer for video, with great color and sound. They do have burnt in subs on the bottom letterboxing but these can be covered if too distracting.
http://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/11017/SF148-1196/Star-Wars:-A-New-Hope-(1977)
2. The JSC was re-used for the US widescreen debut, on the Fox CLV discs. They will get you about 85% or more towards the JSCs but for far, far less money.
http://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/00862/1130-85/Star-Wars:-A-New-Hope-(CBS)-(1977)
The sequels are fine, but the first film had a flaw initially which made the aspect ratio shrink over time. (Weird!) This was corrected in later copies but leads to..
3. For the first film only, a smaller pressing company called Technidisc made a new transfer from a great element which has fantastic color. If you can find one of these it is better then the JSC and absolutely wonderful.
http://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/36787/1130-85/Star-Wars:-A-New-Hope-(FOX)-(1977)
4. All other copies came from the Definitive Collection in 1993. These are less desirable because the trilogy was remastered, the sound remixed and changed, used an intepositive with less color, and utilized a very early version of DVNR which is so bad it leaves motion trails. The master for this was put onto DVD in 2006.

The 1997 SE set is the best home release for that version and pretty good on the video side. Audio is brilliant.

 

Noted Hollywood pundit Mark Evanier has cracked me up for years by saying, "the only reason new video formats are introduced is to force me to buy Goldfinger again." You figure between VHS, Laserdisc, deluxe Laserdisc, pan/scan laserdisc, letterbox laserdisc, remastered laserdisc, original DVD, deluxe DVD, limited edition DVD, Blu-ray, original boxed set Blu-ray, and anniversary edition boxed set Blu-ray, it's been out at least a dozen times. Get ready for the 4K version.

 

You have a lot of errors and misconceptions here, but I'm too tired to list them all. As far as I know, the original 1977 Star Wars was transferred about five times:

1) original pan/scan version mastered from 35mm IP at Modern Videofilm (original Melrose building) by Lou Levinson around late 1980/early 1981.
2) a replacement pan/scan version mastered from the same 35mm IP at Modern Videofilm (later Sunset building) by Levinson around 1982 to replace a master tape that was shredded
3) a later standard-def letterboxed version and a pan/scan version mastered by Levinson in the late 1980s (originally released in Japan)
4) a high-def version done by Levinson at Universal Digital Mastering in North Hollywood around 1995 or so (not sure where this one wound up); I suspect it was also done from IP.
5) a 2K version done by me at ILM in San Rafael between January and March 2004, done from the 1997 digital negative, pin-registered pieces of the original camera negative, and new digital VFX shots.

I suspect there is also a 4K version done in the last few years, but I don't know the details. Neither Criterion nor Technidisc did the transfers; Fox paid for them all because they own the movie and they own all the film elements and all the master tapes and digital files. There were so many sound remixes, I don't think even Lucas himself can remember them all. And in many cases, there were theatrical mixes made separately from the home video mixes in different eras.

I can tell you some stories about why the first Laserdisc of Jedi was mis-sized -- for many years, I've called it "the fat version of Jedi" -- but it's late and I gotta go to bed. Suffice it to say both the mastering company, Lucasfilm, and Fox were absolutely stunned when the mistake was found a week or two after release. I believe they quietly recalled all the first pressings and redid the transfer from scratch without any fanfare. That was a big mess.

 

Anybody that wants that much Goldfinger must be desperate for ***** galore.....

 

I pretty much refuse to get anything P&S

Were the Bonds Lucasized from their originals in recent years? I haven't got into Bond past Casino Royale.

I'm not quite too picky bout Star Wars, as long as it doesn't have this

Lucas sure went
I think I'm gonna pick up the face ones despite all the issues.

 

New arrivals!

 

Another thing that can be irritating is the "Laserdisc exclusive". For example: On King Crimson - Three of a Perfect Pair, Live in Japan 1984, the performance of the song "Discipline" only came out on the Laserdisc version, not the VHS. When this program was reissued on the Neal Jack and Me DVD, "Discipline" wasn't included, not even as an extra.

It used to be on YouTube, but I can't find it now.

 

By all means correct me if I'm wrong. I was just speaking from the LD general perspective and how to go about it these days. For watching a less altered trilogy at home, those are the three choices available outside the Definitive Collection/2006 DVD port remaster. Admittedly they're not 100% original, because of the ANH title and the 1985 audio mixes used on all three. Those are really confusing, since the sequels seem identical to the original stereo, but ANH very slightly reworks the stereo and adds 3P0's tractor beam line from the mono mix.

It seems they did a bit of recalling on these overall. I just wonder why a separate transfer was done and wound up only as that Technidisc release when Mitsubishi/Pioneer just issued a corrected version of the same transfer. The element they used is wonderful.

Your note about a 1995 transfer in HD is new to me. Seems like every time SW is brought up something new comes to light. The only thing I knew 1995 related was the possibility of the Faces CLV reissue discs being encoded with the Super NTSC process.

No, not like that at all. What happened was that somewhere in between Lowry Digital scanning the negatives of 11 films and processing video masters of the other 9; the resulting Ultimate Edition DVDs had numerous changes in color timing, contrast and the like throughout, in addition to a few cropping issues and several films being without original audio. These have largely been quietly corrected for the Blu-rays, but not every one is perfect. For example: The Spy Who Loved Me finally got a new in-house transfer which is stunning, whereas Goldeneye was reverted back to the old video master and is filled with DNR.
I grew up with the films looking a certain way so going back to LD prior to the Blu-rays was a no brainer. The audio is most impressive and in its original form as PCM. The only bit of revision that gets glossed over is the stereo remix on Thunderball which is good but not as good as the mono. It also introduced the differing dialog and score bits.

Either the Faces or earlier Fox discs will do you fine. You should be able to find them cheap. The good thing about the Faces reissues is that they have none of the rot issues that plagued the Definitive Collection set. But if you flip between them and the older Fox/Japanese discs there is a noticeable difference in clarity and color. The older discs to me simply *feel* more age appropriate. Here are some screenshots showing the two:
http://forum.lddb.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=4656&p=59933&hilit=star+wars+jsc#p59933

 

"Super NTSC" is a misnomer. Everybody I know of in the film mastering business was using Yves Faroudja-based encoders in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before an all-digital signal path took over. Some of these things are just buzzwords without any real basis in engineering -- it's more a marketing scheme than an actual breakthrough. We were working without encoders as early as 1990, maybe a little earlier. The problem for laserdisc is that it was always an analogue composite process; to my knowledge, they never went digital composite because of the limitations in the glass-mastering process.

It's all moot today, just a footnote in history. As to Star Wars, I'm positive that Disney is keenly aware of the possibility to milk more money out of fans, and I'm sure if they can work out a deal with Fox on the theatrical versions of the first couple of movies, they'll do it. To me, it's a win-win-win situation: Fox makes money, Disney makes money, and the fans get what they've asked for. But stuff like this sometimes falls apart when one side gets too greedy or too myopic.

 

That would actually make sense, and ol Georgie can't have that

 

Mr. Lucas has zero control over the Star Wars movies now. He sold all of Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012 for $4 billion, and Fox has owned most of the rights the first two movies for decades (but not forever). Doing a proper reissue would require some coordination between Disney and Fox... and there are some huge issues between the studio. For example, Disney owns most of Marvel, but Fox controls the movie rights to Fantastic Four and the X-Men characters. Fox has made it clear they'll sue Disney if they ever use the word "mutant" in a Marvel film, since it's a trademark within their movie properties.

 

When it comes to modern flat panels, look for a small LCD at Walmart, etc. or a Panasonic Plasma TV off of your local Craigslist or if you are lucky to find a Pioneer Kuro used, snatch it up, for LD.

 

When it comes to animation on LD, start with Fantasia as this LD uses the original Deems Taylor narration unlike the DVD and Blu-Ray issue, also if you are a fan of An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, go for the letterbox LD and forget about the current DVD issue.

 

There are many LaserDisc releases that never made it to DVD or Blu-Ray, so choose what you like. Unfortunately LaserDisc rarely looks good when played back on LCD or Plasma screens. If you have an older set with a decent comb filter for standard RCA composite inputs, then you should be okay.

 

Those covers remind me of how much fun it was to flip through all the new releases and see that big art. And remember those awesome box sets? At least vinyl is back so I get the experience again for music, amd I agree DVD is simply far more practical, but I do miss the "experience." And back then, on crt monitors, quite frankly they looked pretty darn good! Some are bringing up the quality of the sound. As an audiphile, that was more important to me than the picture quality, so I was quite reluctant to see the format retired. So, buy any concerts that have not been ported over to DVD...they will likely sound amazing unless it is an earlier release. I think a good rule of thumb is any concert with CX (is that the acronym?) encoding is likely an older title and probably won't sound that great. It was noise reduction technology that was definitely needed in the early days of laserdisc, but like DBX in the esrly days, I didn't like how it rolled off the highs.

 

That Fantasia box set was a beauty. I remember when Ken Cranes Laserdisc brought in a truckload of those things on closeout and blew them out for like $59. I don't remember the retail price but I think it was well over $100.

 

I've been able to get LDs to look reasonably well on my LCD. Running it through the scaler on my receiver helped considerably and was an improvement over just zooming in on the letterbox image on the LCD. Full-frame still looks the best though, so I tend to watch music videos or older classic movies over anything that was released as letterbox.

 

The only WS films I've watched on LD in a coon's age are It Came From Hollywood (which apparently is never gonna reach a higher format), Terminator 2 THX Squeeze which is 16 x9, and Return To The Valley Of The Dolls. I watch Academy Ratio films from the 30-40's mostly. That's what LD does best...and I have a whole lotta' of these films! I have my share of music LD's too. The last one I had out was Neil Young Unplugged.

 

Rachael, there are many kids and family movies that are only P&S on US DVD but widescreen on LaserDisc and R2 DVD in Europe and if they are on US Blu-Ray, the movies are widescreen in that format. For the longest time, Annie was a scarce movie in widescreen on any digital format except the very first DVD issue in the US and the Anniversary Edition in the UK (PAL) and also on R4 PAL DVD. The Anniversary Edition DVD currently available is pan and scan and the Blu-Ray currently available is widescreen.

 

I've also found that disabling a lot of the image "enhancement" settings on both the TV and the receiver helps. Settings like noise reduction are often set so high that a lot of the detail is lost and colors are reduced to a smear. I'd rather have a sharp image with a little noise than one that looks like it was shot through a lens covered in vaseline.