Lyris Lite :: Dragon's Lair on Blu-ray: film grain removal gone wrong, yet again

This morning a whole cavalcade of packages arrived in my chateau. One of them contained a Dell keyboard and mouse for my new PC, which means that I am finally saved from the horror of laptop keyboards. Hopefully the rest of the computer bits will arrive soon.

The other package contained something more curious, the Blu-ray Disc version of Dragon's Lair. Dragon's Lair was one of several LaserDisc games produced in the 80s. In case you don't know what a LaserDisc game is, they were a relatively faddish product of their time, in which an arcade cabinet would play high quality video from a LaserDisc and overlay basic graphics like a score counter onto the final video output. This meant that LaserDisc arcade cabinets could produce really high quality pre-recorded graphics, under the guise of a game. But, since everything was pre-recorded, the interactivity was limited. "Interactive movie" would be a better description.

The idea was that you'd watch the action on screen and would occasionally choose what would happen next. After a short pause, the Disc would then jump to another location and play video from there. LaserDisc games usually weren't really games as such, they were really just the video equivalents of "Choose your own adventure" books.

Dragon's Lair was one of those LaserDisc games. It was directed by ex-Disney animator Don Bluth, and seems to have a bit of a cult following. I've never played the Arcade/LaserDisc version of the game, but from what I've heard online, it's as incomprehensible to play as any other version. This Blu-ray Disc adaptation seems to be every bit as difficult to follow as those, as the "game" basically plays as a near-continuous loop of death scenes and shots of the lead character nonsensically appearing in new areas. (Is that how it's supposed to play, or does it not work properly?)

Anyway, I'm not critiquing the game itself. People who like Dragon's Lair are probably well aware of the fact that it's poor by "game" standards and is really more of a curiosity/cult interest item. My biggest gripe though is as usual, with the video transfer. The producers of this new HD version, Digital Leisure Inc, have gone back to the original film materials to produce this Blu-ray Disc (that's good). Unfortunately, they've gone a step further and tried to remove the film grain. If you read my site a lot you'll know that film grain is just a part of film materials and is best left alone (previous rant here). In an interesting interview, the producers of this new version brag about the job they've done:

And he's right, they do show it on the disc, and the un-tampered with version looks better! Yep, Dragon's Lair on Blu-ray is another example of film grain removal gone horribly wrong. Rather than use a video processing filter to remove the grain, the "restoration" team have taken advantage of the 2D animated nature of the video and have simply grabbed one frame from some scenes and digitally frozen it over the rest of the scene. They've then cut "holes" in this frozen image so as not to cover up the parts of the action underneath, the parts of the frame that do move. The result: totally static backgrounds, with movement allowed to peep through only when necessary (Lowry Digital - aka DTS Digital Images - used this same technique on Walt Disney's "Bambi").

There's two problems with that. The first is that there's an obvious grain pattern that's just been frozen. The second problem is much more annoying.

When films are normally being transferred to video, the print drifts around slightly as it travels through the film scanner, producing a very subtle movement effect called "Gate Weave". When films are normally played back, this effect is usually too subtle to notice - when you're watching a film that hasn't been tampered with, that is.

But because the background has been frozen still, with holes cut in it to "uncover" the moving parts on each particular frame, this random movement creates havoc and means that parts of the background get repeated twice and look generally mangled, around the boundaries of the "holes" that have been cut. Everything sort of "swims" around. It's very difficult to explain, but hopefully you'll see what I mean when you look at this video. Look at how the parts of the background that are meant to stay still jump around and shift position:

A lot of scenes haven't been messed around with though, and they look great, all things considered. But still, this is just distracting as hell. Better yet, the "Attract Mode" trailer on the disc has NOT been put through this cack-handed restoration process so actually looks better than the video in the game itself. Argh.

Guys, just leave the film grain alone. Aside from this mangling, the whole thing looks pretty good, even if there are the usual MPEG-2 compression artefacts. But Dragon's Lair was produced on FILM. That's a historical fact that you will never be able to change. Once again, attempts to dress film up as video do more harm than good.

That should be called 'manual compression'. Sort of like when mpeg compression detects a thing that doesn't move and uses that information to save space by repeating what was in the previous frame. Except it's humans doing it, and it look a hundred times uglier!

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