Dark Shadows: Special Edition DVID

[kuanyin]

I just saw this for the first time. It was rather funny when Dan Curtis talked about how if he really liked an actor he would bring them back for role after role, "like Roger Davis." Isn't that an amazing admission?  

I was further shocked by another element of it.   When they were on "On Location" it was narrated by Nancy Barrett. They showed the "Evans cottage" along with a clip. They actually used Mark Allen instead of David Ford playing Sam Evans! What was he in three or four episodes and David Ford was on for about two years?

I'm not intending to break the rules here, though I am probably getting close. The Barrett/Ford marriage is a matter of record, therefore not gossip, right? And the choosing to ignore Ford as THE Sam Evans in the DVD would be pretty public too. I can only surmise that there was a lot of animosity after the marriage broke up, which isn't surprising, what surprises me is that it would apparently continue for so very long. The DVD is probably two or three years old at most and Ford died in 1983. IF any comments can be made, I would find it most illuminating. If they can't be made here, perhaps I could get an IM?

[Mysterious Benefactor]

And the choosing to ignore Ford as THE Sam Evans in the DVD would be pretty public too. I can only surmise that there was a lot of animosity after the marriage broke up, which isn't surprising, what surprises me is that it would apparently continue for so very long.

To surmise is to assume - and you know what they say about assuming something.

Anyone who's been around fandom for more than five minutes knows that when it comes to choosing clips for the MPI videos/DVDs, Jim Pierson is the person who's in complete control of those choices. Nancy may have taped her portions of that segment without any clue whatsoever as to what clips might have been incorporated into it later on. So to read dark motives into a clip choice which might have been included simply because it's one of Pierson's favorites or because he wanted to include Mark Allen simply for the heck of it, actually seems more than just an assumption to me - it's a giant leap, with little or no substantial evidence to back it up.

A good way to possibly find out the reason that clip was chosen would be to go up to Pierson at a Fest or some other DS event and simply ask him why he chose it - not to speculate on the state of either the Barrett/Ford marriage or divorce.  :-/

[Darren Gross]

The clips of the Evans cottage were used to compare with the modern day actual shooting locations.
The clips featured were primarily used during the early days of DS and as such were probably only shot with Mark Allen, as the location footage idea was scrapped (unfortunately) later on. Using clips of Ford would probably not have made sense.

D

[Stuart]

Mark Allen went on the first location shoot to Newport -- although only one shot was ever seen onscreen due to his rapid recasting.  

But yeah, that's almost certainly the reason he was chose to represent Sam Evans, as David Ford never actually made it out on location.

[doombuggy69]

I was a bit disappointed with the Nancy Barrett segment of the DS DVD special edition.   The sound of her voice was off sync with her mouth movements throughout the entire program, as if they re-dubbed her lines in the studio later on.  I know this was not the fault of the DVD, because I have the VHS tape of this and it is off sync too.  I would have expected better production values from MPI.  

There is also the MPI problem with "digital artifacts" on the DVD discs which show up on my 35 inch high quality SONY WEGA TV. "Artifacts" are problems that occur on some dvd's during the compression of information on the disc. On WEGA and High Definition TV's, the picture shows up as flickering mosaic patterns, with line crawl over the images. This can be very annoying. MPI has not corrected this problem yet, and it has happened to me on the new episode DVD releases too!

[kuanyin]

Mark Allen went on the first location shoot to Newport -- although only one shot was ever seen onscreen due to his rapid recasting.  

But yeah, that's almost certainly the reason he was chose to represent Sam Evans, as David Ford never actually made it out on location.

But, the clip was of the inside of the cottage, where David Ford spent many a moment! Oh, well. If I ever do make it to a fest, I will try to remember this intensely important question ....(though in reality I would probably just wet my pants over seeing the stars!) [shckd]

[Dean]

<<<I was a bit disappointed with the Nancy Barrett segment of the DS DVD special edition.   The sound of her voice was off sync with her mouth movements throughout the entire program, as if they re-dubbed her lines in the studio later on.  I know this was not the fault of the DVD, because I have the VHS tape of this and it is off sync too. >>>

This is in fact what they had to do.  When they taped Nancy on location - they did not account for the sound quality.  Nancy went to a recording studio in Chicago after the footage was shot to  reloop her dialogue with what she shot on location.

Dean

[doombuggy69]

>>>>>>>>>This is in fact what they had to do.  When they taped Nancy on location - they did not account for the sound quality.  Nancy went to a recording studio in Chicago after the footage was shot to  reloop her dialogue with what she shot on location.

Dean

Hi Dean,

Thanks for clarifying that point on the Nancy Barrett segment for me. I thought that is what they had to do but I wasn't sure. I guess it's very hard to get the audio to match it any better!  

[Stuart]

Agreed, the quality of Nancy's lip-syncing for the redubbed dialogue isn't what it could be, but that's true of most aspects of that disc.

It's also true that the new series discs do have a fair bit of artefacting, though nothing like the horrendous "Special Edition" disc.  The quality is still far better than any of the previous releases, particularly on the kinescope transfer, but it could have been really stunning had they not chosen to cram so much onto each disc.

[doombuggy69]

Hi Stuart,

Thank you so very much for noticing the "artefacting" problem with the MPI DVD's. I thought I was the only one who had that problem and noticed it!  Yes, I will agree with you that the artefacting is slightly better on the episode dvd's as opposed to the Special edition one.  The picture quality of the special edition was absolutely horrendous!  I also have MPI's "Hullaballoo" and "Music Scene" DVD's, and the quality of those is just plain awful.    I was very hesitant at first to get this new episode set. But even with these slight picture problems, I won't rush to get the next releases right away until they fix this problem 100%.  I almost thought about telling them at the MPI booth at the Festival, but I thought they would think I was crazy.  This is unfortunately only a problem with people like me with High resolution TV's.  

[Stuart]

Well in fairness, the flipside is a case of trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear -- these are 35 year old analogue videotapes, which were not recorded with diligent attention to light levels and picture balance, etc.  The equipment was too crude and the time factors too stringent.

So the source materials have comparatively huge amounts of video and audio "noise" to begin with, which makes smooth digital transfer a lot harder.  You're probably never going to get a 100% artefact-free picture, simply because in many cases, the source materials are very low quality compared to contemporary standards.

Yeah, the DVDs probably could look a teeny bit smoother, but they're never going to have crystal clarity.  And it's a learning curve to get the best from the available material, which hopefully we'll see continue.  Either way, the quality is far higher than you'll see on any previous "Dark Shadows" release, and the very reasonable price is welcome to.

They're minor problems.  Yeah, we can split hairs over it, but I've enjoyed watching the DVDs immensely -- the added clarity and tweaks in the presentation make it like watching a different show at times.

[doombuggy69]

>>>>>>these are 35 year old analogue videotapes, which were not recorded with diligent attention to light levels and picture balance, etc.  The equipment was too crude and the time factors too stringent.  

That's very true Stuart, the DS tapes were not taken very good care of over the years.  But I am also getting the Doctor Who dvd's too.  Wouldn't you say the quality of those tapes, (especially the 1960's/early 70's episodes) were on a par with DS??  The 1969 Jon Pertwee episode, "Spearhead from Space" that was issued on dvd by Warner Bros in America, was digitally remastered and looked incredible!  I had absolutely no digital noise or artifacting when I played it on my 35 inch SONY WEGA.  Of course we are talking about  4 episodes of DW, vs 10 episodes of DS on one disc. So as you say, cramming too many episodes on one disc can raise many problems.  For the record, I also have the 1960's Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet sets from A&E. Those were beautiful crystal clear images on both dvd's.  As I said before, if I don't play the DS DVD's on a high definition or SONY WEGA, then I don't get the digital noise problems. And picture wise, it's just perfect. Someday, all we may have are HD TV's, and the DS DVD's may not hold up quality wise on them.

[Darren Gross]

Hi Doombuggy...

It's not the condition of the 2 inch mastertapes that's the problem. They have been well taken care of,  archived properly and are only accessed when absolutely necessary. The problems are with the format itself which is very limited and unforgiving of technical anomalies.

It's quite fortunate that the series is in as complete as it is (one missing ep. out of 1245 is a miracle, the kinescope copies are a minor grievance at best) when you consider how incomplete many other series are, especially Doctor Who, which has nearly 100 episodes which will never be seen again. The famous Joan Crawford replacing Christina episodes of her soap are gone for good, unfortunately wiped and recorded over as was customary those days.

As for Spearhead from Space, it was recorded entirely on film (16mm I believe, due to a BBC strike). I believe all the B & W Doctor Who episodes only exist as kinescopes, not in their 2 inch masters.

The Avengers, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and other Gerry Anderson series were all shot on 35mm and transferred from near pristine film elements. There's no way 2 inch (Quad) NTSC video could compare to film; PAL 2 inch video was even 100 lines higher in the resolution department. Quad is pretty low on the totem pole as far as video formats is concerned....Still twice the resolution of VHS, though...

Also, Doctor Who eps were usually shot with one 1/2 hour episode a week, versus DS' one ep per day, so technical quality suffered and lighting was either preset or fairly rough...

[doombuggy69]

Hi Darren  
Thanks for your reply and for clearing things up about the DS master tapes. Good to hear they are in such great shape.

However, the real point to my original post was the problems not with the master tapes of DS, or the comparison of film vs video.  But with the problems of MPI cramming so many episodes of DS onto one disc, that the result is a huge amount of "artifacting" when played back on HD TV's--and my own SONY WEGA. The age of the source material, even the quality has nothing really to do with the "artifacting" -- the digital mosaic squares in the picture. That is solely the result of the bandwidth MPI is using to convert the video stream to mpeg-2 format.  And the cramming of so much information onto one disc.  Interestingly though, I have no problems with digital "artifacting" on the MASH set from FOX. They  cram 8 episodes on one disc for that show, and the quality of the DVD compression is far superior to MPI's.   Again, I am not comparing 35mm film to 2 inch video transfer, just the compression of programs to disc.  I've taken MPI's DS DVDs and played them on my friends TV, which is a standard 1995 RCA monitor. The result on playback of the DS dvd's is a perfect looking picture, with no digital noise whatsoever!  However, when I play them back on my SONY WEGA, (with it's over 1000 line resolution) and plug it into the component video plug, the result is a very noisy picture with lots, and LOTS of artifacting.   I assume the same would happen on an HD TV as well.    As Stuart mentioned in an earlier post, MPI did in fact improve on the digital noise from the special edition one, to the episode disc's.  But like I said before, this problem only applies to people with HD or higher quality TV's.  However, I still think MPI can improve more on the bandwith recording to get a better overall picture on their DVD's.  It's probably the cost of $$$ that is holding them back.  Or most likely, this DVD format is still so new, most companies are not aware of this problem.

Thanks again for your always informative reply!  

[Darren Gross]

The DVDs are definitely acceptable, but they could be much better. High quality monitors are usually very unforgiving of low-quality material. VHS looks terrible on mine, but that's because VHS looks poor.

Although they've released a few DVDs, it really seems like new ground with MPI, and earlier releases have been quite problematic. Quality should become progressively better as these releases evolve and the company begins to grap a firmer knowledge of the format. MPI wants to put out a good product, and I believe that they'll be making steps to do so.

DG