Video Artefacts

    DVD is a wonderful medium for home theatre. It brings a dramatic new level of video and audio quality to the consumer. It is unparalleled in its capacity to provide a professional-quality image to the home consumer, often with surprisingly little outlay. This new video and audio quality does come, however, at a price. The extra resolution of the DVD format can often show up deficiencies in the transfer processes used in the past to create video software. Just as the advent of CD showed up deficiencies in older audio source material, so too DVD can show up deficiencies in older video source material.

    For DVD to look its best, attention must be paid to all aspects of the DVD authoring process, from sourcing the best possible elements to make a transfer to optimising the compression of the image to the increased precision required at the replication plant.

    An understanding of the artefacts that can mar a DVD presentation is extremely helpful in allowing you to more fully understand and exploit the potential of this medium.

How To Use This Guide

    By necessity, this guide is highly graphical in nature. Most pages have anywhere between 100K and 300K of graphics on them, and even then many of the graphics are at the lowest size consistent with being able to see the artefacts. Of necessity, this means many pages will take a moderately lengthy amount of time to load. All of the images used are from available Region 4 DVDs.

    I have attempted to make this guide both Internet-friendly and appropriately detailed by placing each individual artefact on a separate web page. This should minimize page load times, and also allow relatively easy maintenance of this guide, which is intended to evolve as time passes. Use this page as the "home page" for this article, and use your browser "back" button to return to it after reading about each specific artefact.

Aliasing | Analogue Tape Tracking Errors | Chroma Noise | Colour Bleeding | Comet Trails | Cross Colouration | Digital Tape Dropouts | Dot Crawl | Edge Enhancement | Film Artefacts | Gibb Effect | Interlacing |  Low Level Noise | Macro-Blocking | Microphony | Moire Effects | Noise Reduction | Overmodulation | Posterization | Reel Change Markings | Splice Marks | Telecine Wobble

Feedback

    Spotted an error? Know of a better example of any given artefact to suggest for this guide? Have we left anything out? Your comments are welcomed.

© Michael Demtschyna (read my bio)
18th May 2001