Quality of DVD copies of laserdiscs

I played the LD, delicate sound of thunder on a Pioneer 909 and fed it through to a Dazzle DV Bridge and it came out grainy and pixelated and jagged. I used this device to transfer some DVD footage through a JVC player. Both times I used S-video connection, but the DVD turned out great and sharp. I wonder why I don't get a screen quality image when I capture. (using a Powermac G4 and iMovie)

 

Ooops, but you're right that in this case it is an appropriate misspelling!

 

The Pink Floyd disc may have looked grainy because of the rather subdued light levels of the concert - lots of wispy shadings, which are usually tough to compress.

On the other hand, I may have no clue as to why the LD looked bad but the DVD looked good.

 

Tim,
The LD looks good on TV, but when I do the import into the computer, that's when it looks grainy and pixelated, thus the same on the DVD copy.

 

A bit of a sidebar: Is it typically easy to edit out a "side change gap" from a laserdisc on a standalone DVD recorder with seamless results, thus reducing the number of sides/discs for DVD? (I realize this won't come up too often if you're running the DVD at the highest available speed for quality, but I can think of a few discs in my collection where this might be useful.)

 

"The LD looks good on TV, but when I do the import into the computer, that's when it looks grainy and pixelated, thus the same on the DVD copy."

The Laserdisc shouldn't look pixelated at all (and doesn't - it's a great disc!). Once you start to get close to the two-hour mark on a 4.7 gig DVD, though, the amount of compression involved usually starts showing artifacts. Anything that has subtle shading in it is going to suffer.

But if it's the DV signal that looks pixelated, that Dazzle is not too dazzling. I've used my DV camcorders as bridges and it always looks great. MiniDV should really show no artifacting at all. Perhaps iMovie has some setting in it to improve the capture quality, but I doubt it. Sounds like it's the DV Dazzle you're using.