Why I collect LaserDisc Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Format

as the title says this is all about how I got started into laserdisc why I collect them and why should one collect laserdisc so let's keep it simple I got started kind of by accident I've always had a love of looking at vintage technologies whether it be gaming consoles about especially video formats I always loved finding out how things worked what the the best possible quality you can get at the particular time that the format existed and of course namely because it's much cheaper later on so a lot of things I grew up seeing in stores that I could never possibly afford or didn't know too much about later on I started tinkering with when I find them in thrift stores or various comic shops video stores you name it so I started with various video game consoles and then I moved from VHS like a lot of people up to DVD and then to blu-ray and everything but Beca knows in college I first started dabbling around with really learning how the various video formats worked for from different codecs to audio encoding and the different soundtrack types and because I am a film historian and I like to learn how things work and how they're transferred from one video to the other so I always knew there was a jump between well the jump between VHS and DVD there were a couple things in between and after doing some research I suddenly remembered seeing laser discs on the shelves in stores and I was a kid wonder what these big giant boxes were these big fantastic looking discs that also had a fantastic astronomical sticker price on them I was just always told by the very store associates that they were laser discs and they were far too expensive for me being a little 5 or 10 year old and I shouldn't even bother with them because they were only for the rich people but anyway so it was simply because I wanted to see two particular films while two particular films series the way I grew up with them and but in the best possible quality meaning letterbox in the correct aspect ratio with the original soundtracks with as little compression involved those being the original Star Wars trilogy and the James Bond series because both of those when they're remastered DVDs came out I noticed all kinds of things being sending different from what I was used to watch them on tape and broadcast and I had grown up with him I knew every inch of them and also because I wanted to see the old 1997 Star Wars special editions which of course are a completely different version from what was later released on DVD and then the even newer special edition that came out on blu-ray so there's multiple different editions and I wanted to see what came out in 97 again without going back to my VHS copies so that's what led me to looking at laserdisc and really that's what got me to go down the rabbit hole and I still am falling and now have almost 600 titles Oh what you quickly find out is when you're buying laserdisc you go for one and you I don't having to pick up entire Lots because people just give them away for practically nothing they don't really know what they're worth they don't know about them and they don't seem to want to know they just think they're large movie records you'll find a lot of times they get miss price or mislabeled as records but anyway so that's how I got into it and just for a brief technical specifications the discs are twelve by twelve here's one for example this is MGM's King Solomon's Mines so you'll see it does look very much like a record LP because it practically is the same dimensions same printing type but the jackets are always usually a little bit thicker and a little bit stronger because the discs themselves are not lightweight like an LP slide this out of course they have nice poly line dinner sleeves a lot of times you'll find they have to pour plastic ones but you want to replace them with ones like this but just so you know this is what one looks like of course basically looks like a 12-inch CD or dvd and it's double-sided just like early DVD flipper discs were or DVDs that have two sides with multiple features now people will always complain that you have to flip the movie over well yes that's true and there are two different types of laserdisc there's the C AV format for constant angular velocity and the CL v format for constant linear velocity and I could get into a big scientific breakdown between the two but essentially what it boils down to is CL v disks are usually more common they hold about an hour per side but they don't allow all of the trick play features of the CA V format CA V disks can only hold about 30 minutes per side but it does give you direct frame access so you can do actual frame by frame motion in an extremely smooth manner it's absolutely perfect so nuts but it is perfect because the each individual frame is stored separately so it's still used today by a lot of animation collectors who want to go and look at animated films because it's a lot smoother than DVD and even in a lot cases in blu-ray bag good thing going frame by frame however on later players they instituted a digital field memory system that allows you to do the same thing on clb discs but it's nowhere near as smooth and you'll have some noise generated by the player but it is doable on later good players that have that feature but CIB discs eventually they were reserved for special editions box sets loaded with special features so then you could slow down and go frame by frame on various action sequences or you know dancing numbers whatever it may be but it was reserved for the more hardcore collectors who wanted the best possible quality possible-- and if you're curious about what they look like to the naked eye is ca V really better in motion when you've seen as many just as I have you can tell a difference on a good CRT you know it's our good screen with scalars and everything whatever you're doing you know especially if you go from COPD see AV and it's a really good transfer yeah you can tell a difference but with a really good player most of the time you're mean you're not really gonna notice much of a difference it's only once you've seen a whole lot of laserdisc then then you kind of spot the difference between CL v and c AV so don't you know feel bad that you have a CL v copy instead the C AV version you can eventually you know replace your CL v with the C AV but you know only if it's something you're really into or you really really really really want the best quality possible-- and then there are some cases where you know the reissue was seal v only and it's a better transfer so you'll want that one so it's it's really it just depends on the transfer it's just like any release on the ending format depends on the transfer and how it was made so the picture quality on a laserdisc is it's roughly about 420 I so you know it's it's not quite what a DVD is but it's pretty darn close and especially since these were designed for you know CRTs and the time in the 70s when laserdisc originally came out of course back then it was called disco vision of course that title wouldn't last very long but anyway so was designed for CRTs at the time it's an analog video format which means it is a composite video format so you're stuck with composite video some players have s-video you can use this video on some setups it can help but most of the time you want to stick with the plain composite and you know I stick with CRTs for laserdisc a lot of people you know there are people who invest in a lot of scaling equipment and hardware and it can be done and it can look great but you're the best bang for your buck is going to be getting the best CRT you can and getting the best player you can because unlike digital formats where the players pretty much just the digital data laserdisc the better the hardware well better hardware's gonna make a heck of a lot of difference because now I started with one player and then I realized that each player has its own quirks it could have all kinds of you know one player can have CLV smear one player can be prone to crosstalk there's all kinds of little things that you have to look out for because it is an analog format it's not going to be 100% always pristine across the board like digital formats can be so the other side so picture quality 420 I roughly and of course the older transfers are not going to look as good as a newer transfer because equipment got better quality got better quality control got better and so roughly any of your discs from starting about the late 80s through the 90s and the format kind of it died in the late nineties the last couple discs came out in 99 2000 in both the US and Japan so basically the the later your copy is going to be the better the transfer is usually going to be so basically if you're getting a laserdisc and it's from the late 80s onwards it's gonna look really good provided that the transfer was good and the element they had access to was good and you're gonna get roughly very close to an average DVD quality on an equivalent CRT if you're not going the route of using a scaler and a really good high quality external scaler but ultimately don't expect to be able to plug this straight into a flat screen or even a 4k television and have it look really great you're gonna have to do some work that being said a lot of 4k televisions I've heard reports that some are having actual pretty decent comb filters put in so if you work around with it you can get a you know a decent image but it's going to be very similar to if you run your VCR right into your flat panel and right out of the right plugin looks pretty terrible this won't be quite as bad but you're gonna experience many of the same problems now on to the audio side Lisa just started out with analog tracks believe the correct term is f and modulated so you know they're pretty good but they're also susceptible to noise so that's why they started encoding them with the CX noise reduction system so you'll see that moniker and a lot of players and discs and stuff and once that's on there you know that helps with the background noise so basically it's going to be equivalent to the basic VHS audio that you get out of your VCR before the advent of hi-fi VHS audio so you know it's it's not bad it's not the greatest either the really big thing that happened and what got me to start collecting these and really really pushed me over the edge was when they added digital soundtracks because they realized even though the discs and the technology was an analog video format once the advent of the CD came around they used the same 16-bit 44.1 kilohertz mastering levels of the metric levels but quality levels of the CD and applied it on to space on the laserdisc so then they could carry a digital soundtrack with the same quality you got from a CD and the great thing about that was when studios would go and pull elements or companies would pull elements for a transfer they would transfer those tape materials or vault materials onto the latest transfer and it would be done at full PCM quality without having any compression involved and they also either weren't or didn't have the ability to do much remix in back in a day so the real benefit is you're getting nice practically untouched audio tracks from the source even sometimes from the original magnetic stems from the recording sessions or the theatrical track masters and basically the best elements the studio have and a lot of times the same ones they have now they're used on later releases but without the modern practices of near-field remix a dynamic range reduction and the loss of dynamic range because the loudness war that has occurred in music over the past 20-30 years has also been kind of trickling over into the video world and very few people know of or even acknowledge this they just you know if you read a review of like a blu-ray they say oh the audio sounds great or you know it's the original mono or it's a remix of the original audio track and they don't even you know get get into comparing it to previous versions or even thinking about you know overzealous clean up in the digital realm or dynamic range reduction etc etc so that's what really got me hooked on these and then a lot of times if it's a classic like this film for instance King Solomon's Mines it's the same master and transfer as the DVD and this has a better audio track because it's the same audio track but it's PCM as opposed to lossy Dolby Digital on the DVD so if you're like me and you're you're as much of an audiophile as you can afford and your big movie geek a lot of times the better more modern releases can have a soundtrack that's not as good as the old release so that's another reason why you always want to double check something before you go to get rid of it when you upgrade because a lot of times you'll find that you have to keep multiple copies of the same movie and then you get to a point where you have 5 10 15 20 and 40 copies of Star Wars but that's just an isolated incident but anyway so the digital PCM tracks are a wonderful resource and then later on in the 90s they came up with a way to add Dolby Digital ac3 5.1 as evidenced on this release of strange days what they did was they took over the right analog track and by using FM modulation sorry RF modulation encoded the entire 5.1 digital stream onto that track and then if you had a player that had the correct output you ran that into an RF d modulator and then ran that into your receiver and you had the Dolby Digital 5.1 AC 3 intact and could play it back now of course this is limited to 16 bits at 384 384 kilobits per second just like the first version with Dolby Digital on DVD but the benefit is most of the time these actually sound superior because they're the original theatrical audio masters without dynamic range compression and ree mixing and a lot of times they still pack quite a wallop and you can make comparisons sometimes they'll sound the same if the later versions weren't remixed but there are a lot of cases where the laserdisc actually sounds really really outstanding even though it's a very small lossy Dolby Digital stream but of course that was still what was being played in theaters in the theatrical system when Dolby Digital aamir and when it was used before the digital changeover the Dolby Digital information on the 35 millimeter film print roughly translates to 384 kilobits per second so it's roughly the same now they still would maintain the digital PCM tracks so this release for example still has those and it would be the same 2.0 and but you still maintain surround by usage of the Dolby Matrix seeing process where you have to tell your receiver to matrix back out the center channel and the mono surround and of course that means on all 80's and 90's films that were mixed for that you have that original 2.0 Matrix mix on the laserdisc in PCM as opposed to having it velocity encoded on DVDs and blu-rays or just not present at all in favor of 5.1 or 7.1 remix remixes and as a big audio purist and a big purist for film in general I can't stand it when they mess around with anything I want to have it as it originally was that's a big benefit for me because the vast majority of releases do not have their original audio tracks or they have very crummy versions of them they're lossy encoded and they just they just don't sound the same they really don't especially when you go do an a/b comparison it's and with decent speakers and a good receiver it's or even on headphones it's it can be pretty laughable at times sometimes it can be great sometimes it's fine sometimes I'm just too nitpicky but there's there's a lot of times where it at least makes me feel better that I have way too many licenses so so that's Dolby Digital AC three and then a year or so later they add vented a way to put DTS sound tracks on laserdisc now they didn't make as many because this was later on the format but this just came from 97 but DTS took over the entire digital track and had a bit rate of about roughly about 15 I think 1536 kilobits per second somewhere around there still 16-bit but the difference in quality in terms of technical specs is massive and difference and this is roughly the same that the early DTS DVDs had their bitrate set at before they were cut down practically in half after they'd been about out about a year or so but anyway they work the exact same way except you lose the digital tracks with the 2.0 Matrix sound you have DTS and that goes right to your receiver if your receiver can decode DTS then you are good to go and you don't need to worry about any type of decoder or anything because they simply took over the digital tracks entirely they maintain the analog tracks which either have a mono fold down of the stereo mix or just the stereo mix on the analogue tracks or you know if there was a commentary they would put that on the analogue tracks so but I think they only I think they made maybe about a hundred DTS titles for America correctly it's not that many and these are still highly prized on the collectors market I only have two three of them but all three of these are fantastic extremely robust extremely dynamic and give their blu-ray counterparts are run for their money and actually I do prefer the three DTS titles I have to any other release including the blu-ray with the DTS HD ma but I think that maybe just a case where later releases you know that kind of get tamed down a little bit and the mastering stage is because a lot of discs today they go through quality control processes where they're gonna be you know spot check to make sure they play back perfectly fine on everything from an iPhone to a sound bar to streaming services to you name it so now with the lossless tracks on blu-ray that's not always a concern but it can be but if you put two things side by side and you level match them you know put a laserdisc and a blu-ray set aside and you level match them and you just kind of go back and forth you'll notice a little bit of variation but with these DTS discs I guess I only have three but all three of them I kind of give the slight edge to there's some fantastic so if you ever find one of these you know just give it a spin and because like I said they're not very common now that being said the other thing about laserdisc is you're kind of already seeing is that the packaging is much more extensive because you have to 12 by 12 frame and then you could have things like nice glossy covers you can't really see this but this is a very glossy cardstock here and then they used the original poster art of course it looks much more impressive than a DVD or VHS cover but then they could also have Gate folds like an LP and have everything from liner notes to production stills to some have letters from the director or producer you know it's it's much more of a you get you get a better connection to the to the film even if you realize you bought the movie you don't even like it you can still really appreciate the time and effort and care that went into it with such beautiful packaging and of course the back gives you more space for liner notes special features transfer notes and all kinds of fun stuff and then you get to the really interesting stuff like all the wonderful box sets that came out this is a classic laser just title that most enthusiasts have or have multiple copies of this is the special edition Terminator 2 box set it's got a nice metal plate on it when would you ever get that on a blu-ray this is a kind of a faux leather to this big box and a beautiful custom spine if you can't really kind of see that there but and then you slide it out and it's got this beautiful glossy holder for the dis inside and you have one version of the Terminator and then you have the other it's just absolutely beautiful and then you slide the discs out and they have their own customized jackets and sleeves and of course I mean the the artwork just really pops off because you have the same dimensions as an LP then you have chapter lists with all your chapter stops and st. here and then it goes into the special features here and then this release I believe like some others has custom disc art labels so you actually get custom customized dis labels for certain releases and that just always gives it such a an extra it's it's like a nut it's like a garnish you know it's it's it's kind of cheesy and silly but if you really got down to the nitty gritty but they just look so wonderful and they carry the various sound format logos and this was made by pioneer and it was a title mastered by thx so they oversaw the mastering process and it's just it's just another thing on the packaging that that really sells it and a lot of people still collect laser discs like they click VHS tapes simply for the artwork and packaging and in this era of everything being a Photoshop job of actor and actresses heads kind of a random title shove somewhere it does kind of it's kind of a lost art the art of the deal packaging even you know whether it be beta or VHS you know and then of course on certain boxes you get liner notes in this nice beautiful fold-out information sheet another beautiful beautiful panel another listing of all of what's included in here the additional so you can added in this version of t2 or document just wonderful stuff and of course there are more elaborate box sets less elaborate boxes there's all kinds most box sets were typically just kind of a holder for various discs that couldn't fit in a standard sleeve but anyhow that's just an example of box sets I'll get on to those in the collection video later on I just wanted to kind of make this as a kind of an introduction and kind of explaining what they were and you know the laserdisc is it's you know it's an interesting thing it just depends entirely on the element that was used the transfer you know how well it was done but you know it's it's kind of an artifact of of an earlier time this was the best quality you could get in the home for you know practically from the late 70s up through the advent of DVD and then the early DVDs were you know they were practically laserdisc masters and a lot of them were not very well made and full of compression noise and all kinds of other defects and you know the earliest ones were you had to flip them in half you know one of the movies half-over had to flip them over just like a laserdisc so it took them a couple years to really get all the kinks worked out and you know even even to this day I still find DVDs that are the exact same master as the laserdisc and you know that's not all if the DVD version is not always an improvement over the laserdisc a lot of classic titles it's still the same master it's a standard definition master and they just recycled it for the DVD and it'll either be the same or slightly better because it's in component 480p or it'll actually be worse because it shows that the defects of the older transfer or it wasn't transferred very well or it's compressed down and then of course the audio will be compressed so the laserdisc has the same audio in PCM so I've built up this collection it really hasn't cost me a whole lot of money I kind of started simply to find Star Wars and the Bond series the way I grew up with them and to actually have them all letterboxed with the original soundtracks in PCM because I was first researching relationships format and I got really excited that you had CD quality audio on you know later discs from the 80s and 90s and such and it kind of just snowballed from there I started buying criterion titles criterion collection actually started on laserdisc and kind of perfected the way they release classic titles will classic hang current titles starting with there and of course pioneered the special edition with their releases of Citizen Kane and King Kong creating the notion of the audio commentary and supplemental features and of course these were more limited when they first started but you know gradually progressed till they got to exactly what you expect and seeing on DVDs and blu-ray releases in these this day in era so basically the whole modern concept of Home Video the special edition commentaries special features kind of started with them and I'm lazy just culminated and releases like this this is their 1996 deluxe C AV box that release of Terry Gilliam's Brazil this is the first major release of his preferred final Director's Cut version and this is packed with special features talking about the extremely troubled production history of this film and also includes the infamous love conquers all version which is the 94 minute ultra cut-down happy ending makes no sense studio edit that was so horrendously bad it was never actually released and thank God it wasn't but anyway and this is an extremely thick box because it is C AV and pack the special features so you beautiful insert with information about the film and transfer but all printed on paperwork just like the film so just like the film this are really are really a nightmare world you can never get away from paperwork in more paperwork but anyway so this is what their deluxe releases eventually started looking like and they're they're they're just works of art it's really interesting to see what you could come up with in the video realm even at this stage in terms of trying to create if definitive film release and as you can see this thing is just jam-packed with this I'm just trying to show you this is in the everyone's favorite the lovely elephant condom sleeves yes they are called that I'm not making it up but you get the idea these are the really kind of cheap e plastic sleeves that get to kind of be annoying I'm hoping one day I'm gonna upgrade all of my inner sleeves not because I'm persnickety or anything but they do get tiresome over time but anyway so that's why this is a very thick very sturdy reinforce box because there's a ton of this in here but you know that's basically where the whole concepts that you take for granted in this day and age kind of that's exactly where they came from so that's where criterion got started and you know so it's it's it's an interesting hobby it's an interesting format once you start digging around in it you're you're gonna get either very interested very quick or it's you'll find it's just not for you and none of this stuff should be expensive you're gonna have people who are gonna try to charge you more because it's rare or they don't make this stuff anymore and it's harder to come by but you know if you want to do your detective work and you want to do some research you know as long as you get a good player and you know you see what works best for you you know just give it a chance and always check out the laserdisc database ldd be calm you can find out information about practically any release worldwide what soundtrack and carries see discard runtime look at different versions find out what's which one is letterbox which one is panning and you know what's the original aspect ratio you know all the technical information you want to find and copies for sale and it's free to make an account and start a collection or whisk that wish list and that's the easiest way to keep track of your collection and what you want to find and you know if you saw they come across the movie you want to see what laserdisc version it has you can just look it up on there and then also check out the lasers forever Facebook page that is probably the other ultimate resource for laserdisc tons of wonderful people on their great Tibbets of information every day and lots of group sales so once I joined up there a couple years ago I started buying way too many this again this between fans it's it's very helpful and it's much nicer than rolling the dice on eBay and you get all kinds of wonderful wonderful items through the magic power of Facebook groups so check out the LDF page and you know I hope this helps I hope this gives you an idea what these magic shiny 12-inch video discs are like and what they're all about especially what they're about 2018 and why you might want to look into collecting some of them because a lot of times studios when they reissue stuff are they released stuff they don't always do a lot of detective work and stuff can go pretty wrong or sometimes horribly wrong and sometimes you have to go back quite a ways to actually get something the way it originally was supposed to be now it's it's always interesting to see what you're gonna get with a laserdisc you never know what the transfer is gonna be like you're never gonna know what they pulled off the shelf because back in that time it was before the advent of digital tools and remastering and restoration and video works so pretty much what you took off the shelf is what you were going to get on a disc provided that it was properly transferred so it's always interesting to pop in especially on classic films and see you know it was directly sourced from a film print or a fine grain master or a nitrate source or a you know some type of alternative to what's on later releases that are apps more cleaned up but in ways that pristine quality and newer releases isn't quite the same as what the original source was in a case in point just this past weekend a couple days ago I got to the chance to see a beautiful 35-millimeter print of Howard Hawks classic bringing a baby which I've seen a thousand times I'll see a thousand more times it's one of the great jewels of the American film medium I mean if you haven't seen it go see it immediately but epic said it was from the Museum of Modern Art a collection they have this vast archive and they also store titles for film studios because films do you store their preservation materials in different places across the country due to the preservation idea of separate things so in case something happens at one vault that your other stuff is safe because it wasn't all in the same place so they have all kinds of materials stored for a specially a lot of fine grain and preservation materials storm storage for Warner Brothers who of course owns the RKO library from the Turner deal and of course Turner's part my brothers they all it's all the same alphabet soup now but anyway so I have the later released laserdisc actually I think it's yeah I think it's right down here oh it was oh wait a minute this is what happens when you have way too many discs and then you're trying to find something and I hear this why it helps to have nice shelves this later image release with the RKO and Turner Heritage Collection thanks from about 96 or 97 but anyway this is actually sourced from a 35-millimeter print so it has scratches damage and cue changeover marks but it looks beautiful it's got a nice really really wonderful I hate to say analog quality to it but it does and because it is a direct film print transfer you know the DVD release is cleaned up a bit it may be the same element but it doesn't quite have the same luster that I get when I watch this especially on might CRT and my good player and I just I love the way the that this transfer is and lo and behold when I went and saw that print a couple days ago I was shocked to see the exact same damage marks the exact same acute changeover marks which leads me to suspect that this was probably mastered from that same source stored at MoMA and you know it's really wonderful to see things like that where you get pieces of history encoded on a laserdisc that you know are not necessarily going to be the same or gonna be different from what's on the later pristine version so that's part of the fun of doing detective work with physical older video releases you get to see all kinds of differentiations whether it's color timing or a different aspect ratio or you know an older transfer that was the best they could do back then you know compared to what I could do now so that's just an interesting tidbit that just happened to me just as a side note so of course I'm I'm kind of the person that the type of person that that stuff appeals to me and I like doing detective work with anything film related because that's the way my head works and then I filled my head up with all this stuff but anyhow I hope you enjoyed this be sure and check out the LD DB and laser just forever page on Facebook and hope you come back for the collection video I'm gonna do that in a couple parts so it's not a couple hundred discs all at once and then I'll talk about some transfers and you know some of the video history of some of these that have a more tumultuous one shall we say and thanks very much for watching and hope this helps some of you guys

Channel: Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader

Views: 15,812

Keywords: Laserdisc

Id: AlEU_5Sh0IY

Length: 37min 4sec (2224 seconds)

Published: Thu May 03 2018