D-Theater Mastering
Dear Gary: I hope this isn’t a stupid question, but one thing I’ve not been able to find out about the D-Theater mastering is whether there is any extra vertical filtering applied during mastering/transfer to reduce interlace artifacts, as happens with DVDs, I believe. I would expect the answer to be no, as such artifacts wouldn’t be terribly distracting with 1080i, but it would be nice to have an authoritative comment. As a rider, is there also minimal horizontal filtering applied, i.e., does the format use the full bandwidth capability available to it, in the expectation that people who buy into the format will have systems capable of extracting every last nuance of horizontal and vertical detail (including deinterlacing the film-based material to 1080p)? I’ve been fortunate enough to have seen some D-Theatre material here in the UK, on a 9-inch CRT projector, and compared with DVD upscaled to 720p, at an event organized by Gordon Fraser of Convergent AV and Stereo Stereo, Glasgow. The video improvements were easy to appreciate, and X-Men, in particular, I thought looked fabulous.
Chris Bellamy
Editor-In-Chief Gary Reber Comments:
understand from JVC that it’s basically not their policy to hand out authoring and duplication information to the public since, unlike DVD, D-Theater is a proprietary format and technical information is treated on a need to know basis. Nevertheless, here is what I found out. In comparison to DVD, D-VHS’s transfer rate is high, enabling recording of virtually whatever comes with the master “as is” and therefore ensuring that the film or content’s “original” look will be preserved. It is the policy of D-Theater to process at a fixed rate without filters, in order to faithfully reproduce the original content. Therefore, if the master arrives with film grain, unlike DVD where film grain is eliminated during the pre-mastering stage because encoders and capacity have difficulty coping with such information, D-Theater software content fully shows the film, with film noise and all if that is how the film was transferred. Therefore, such things as pre-filtering and variable rates are not used. The master is not processed, and recording is made at the fixed rate. JVC tells me that in all of their tests to date, they have ascertained the capability to record everything without losing data contained in the master. That statement appears to be true, as in our own comparisons at WSR of D-5 studio masters to their D-Theater counterparts, there is virtually no discernable difference, except for the very slightest softer picture image.
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