HD version of en Concert

[lilly]

I have the en Concert DVD already but the resolution is kind of small for my new tv, so it looks really grainy. Is there any high resolution version or better a 720p or 1080i!! ? Like, a well re-encoded version, I dont mind coughing upto $100 for it, or even just downloading it from some torrent...
Also, where can I get high quality videos of alizée? i used to download them off stage6 but its now shut down....Please gimme me a good site Thanks!

[Ali]

Unfortunately, HD is not as prevalent in Europe as it is here in good ol' America. It was even less prevalent in 2004, when the DVD came out. So it is highly unlikely that you will find an En Concert video in 720P let alone 1080P/i. Most of the vidoes that you will find has the standard televsion resolution or even lower. I thought to myself too that it would be great to see her in HD, unfortunately, there are hardly if any HD videos of her, even now.

Your best bet to find HQ videos would be torrents.

[lilly]

Damn! Then im stuck with the grainy picture!? I wish they would re-release that DVD!...Actually if any of the forum's hardcore fans gets their hands on the original scene release of that DVD, someone on the site itself can re-encode it!

No, torrents of Alizee are mostly dead, lack of or no seeders,(at least the english torrent sites) previously I used Azureus for HQ vids, it had some really good mkv formats but I downloaded everything from there, nothing left.
does anyone know a good french torrent site!?? Please!

[heyamigo]

i've heard it was actually shot in HD camera. but i wonder if there is enough demand for them to release it in 1080p blue ray. tbh, i don't think so.

[The Cap]

En Concert WAS, indeed, mastered in HD ... 1080P, I believe. The original DVD source files are 720x576 at 25fps interlaced, if my memory is still working. I've done a conversion for NTSC compatibility which resulted in a 720x480 at 29.997fps progressive with internal flagging to 24fps using playback hardare pulldown. Aside from a few minor compression artifacts here and there, it looks pretty good on a Sony WEGA CRT and a few plasma wide-screens I've tested.

Certainly it's possible to re-encode the original video, but that's very likely to only exacerbate whatever "graininess" you're already seeing. Even so, the resulting up-scaled data file would be HUGE; as is, the concert video exceeds 5GB without any modifications. How would you transport it ? What media besides BluRay HD could you usefully record it onto ? I don't know anyone (outside of video production houses) that can record onto BluRay HD media in their homes as yet. And if you can routinely download well over a dozen GB of data via torrent, well ... good for you, but personally think that's borderline insane, myself.

[lilly]

Oh data size does not matter, Im a guy who has downloaded 56Gb of bulk data at one go (all 6 seasons of 24 the series in 720p)....so a 12-15 Gb is nothing, if you can provide the links it would be appreciated! Thanks!
Also, can you tell me what you used for NTSC conversion, and how did you manage 30fps, I cant go over 26 without ruining the res!

[Ali]

Originally Posted by lilly

Oh data size does not matter, Im a guy who has downloaded 56Gb of bulk data at one go (all 6 seasons of 24 the series in 720p)....so a 12-15 Gb is nothing, if you can provide the links it would be appreciated! Thanks!
Also, can you tell me what you used for NTSC conversion, and how did you manage 30fps, I cant go over 26 without ruining the res!

56Gb in one go! Thats crazy! How many hours did it take?

[The Cap]

Originally Posted by lilly

Oh data size does not matter, Im a guy who has downloaded 56Gb of bulk data at one go (all 6 seasons of 24 the series in 720p)....so a 12-15 Gb is nothing, if you can provide the links it would be appreciated! Thanks!
Also, can you tell me what you used for NTSC conversion, and how did you manage 30fps, I cant go over 26 without ruining the res!

See, the reason I said that downloading 12+GB - even via torrent - is borderline insane is because I'd NEVER do such a thing. Over here in the U.S.A., we just don't have the digital infrastructure to support such things. Our "hig speed" service providers have a tendency to throttle and delay large uploads and downloads, all the way to the point of stopping the transmissions completely. Only a tiny percentage of internet users even have access to bandwidth that would sanely accomodate huge file transfers.

And, more to the point, re-encoding the original wouldn't remove or reduce the "grain" problem you claim to see. I have a legitimate DVD of En Concert from France and I can tell you that the original 720x576 video isn't grainy at all, and that's when displayed on high quality equipment that would make such "grain" very easy to see. I suspect what you're looking at is a bootleg copy with an inferior video conversion or transfer.

Unless you buy a legit copy from Europe, you'll never get the quality you're looking for. When I did my own re-work of the DVD to make it fully NTSC compatible, I used the original French release as my raw data source, and the output I got still has a few occasional digital artifacts and some small amount of color noise (what you might call "grain"). However, for the sake of native compatibility with my video equipment, it was very much worth the effort.

[The Cap]

Just realized I screwed up on the frame rate conversion explanation. I didn't actually change the native data source's "real" frame rate at all. I re-flagged all frames of the final re-mapped (scaled, new color space, etc.) video output internally to tell the player firmware that it should use 2:3 pulldown during playback, which eliminates the "judder" and skip effects that often happen during PAL to NTSC video conversion. The net effect is 25fps native PAL video (converted from interlaced to progressive) playing perfectly on 29.997fps (progressive) NTSC equipment.

[lilly]

Originally Posted by Ali

56Gb in one go! Thats crazy! How many hours did it take?

14 days......