Around the World in a Daze just doesn't look great on either disc. The image is overly soft and while the Mill Crick version seems to have more fine detail, there is more evidence of mpeg compression in the image. I'd guess it comes down to bit rate and cramming one too many pictures on one dvd. Suffice to say, my 16mm print is razor sharp with scads more detail than what is presented in either dvd. (You can really see the railway satchels under Moe's eyes on the film!) They're not horrible discs, they look better in motion! But they're not what they could be.
The Sony disc of
Hercules looks just fine to me, even though it does have that windowboxed look when you see the whole picture. There is grain present, and it makes for an overall sharp and well contrasted/saturated image. The Creek disc has the grain squashed more, which makes the picture a bit softer. Not bad for either one, and the Creek disc does, again, have more picture area showing.
For
Rhythm, the MOD disc is the clear winner. The images are almost identical for both, but this time the Mill Creek has
less image, which seems consistent with the previous full screen entry,
Rockin' in Some Rockies. Grain is present in both copies, but softened a little for the Mill Creek. Once again, I think this comes down to compression more than digital scrubbing, as these Mill Creek discs have, overall, less space available for each film.
While getting these screen grabs I did notice that the locations of the various frames in the run time were off by seconds, sometimes nearly a minute between discs. Without running each video file side by side for a comparison I can't say if there's any footage missing in either copy, or if it's just a matter of black space at the head of each video file, minute speed differences or whatever. Sometimes when mastering films for video like this the techs redo fades, trim out noisy frames or make adjustments for sych and junk. (Remember, stuff like that happened with the Stooge shorts sets!) Never can tell, but I'd bet nothing is missing. Just something I noticed, though.
Daze Sony disc
 | Daze Mill Creek
 |
Hercules Sony disc
 | Hercules Mill Creek
 |
Rhythm MOD disc
 | Rhythm Mill Creek
 |
