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This is a wiki setup to collect information about the lossless series of films and videos initiated by Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin. The name for the series is borrowed from lossless, a technical term used to describe the perfect copy of one file to another. The opposite of lossless is lossy, a term which indicates imperfect file duplication. Our first desire was to see exactly what is discarded in the preparation of a Digital Video Disk (DVD).
Note that compression does not necessarily imply inferior media. The strategies that have been developed to put media on digital video disks seeks to address the perceptual system directly–bypassing critical and cognitive layers of perception. Cases are being made for this new media being even better than the real thing. Our experience looking at the scanned frames of the wizard of oz print and the new DVD surprised us. Frames form the DVD were clearer, crisper, more saturated, possessed wider range of color and luminance, and sounded much better than the 35mm print. So ended our assumption that the 35mm print of the wizard of oz would look and sound better than a DVD. So we found a way to capture the difference between the two media.
The strategies employed for removal of image and sound are non-intuituve and often strange. It starts with an appraisal of what we can and cannot perceive, first removing media outside the range of perception until enough information has been removed to afford satisfactory playback performance.
This project began in 2006 with a faculty development grant from the california institute of the arts. We rented a 35mm print of the wizard of oz, scanned the 48 frames where dorothy says there's no place like home and clicks her heels three times. We then extracted the same frames from a pal dvd and calculated the difference.
We need somebody to visually document the Sert Gallery show before it closes in December. Please contact Doug or Rebecca if you can help. Thanks!