(Film-DVD) =

(Film-DVD) = is a 35mm film-loop installation that will demonstrate the actual difference between DVD and film image quality. The images will be created literally from color, motion and sound information discarded by DVD compression.

DVDs are popular for their convenience and low cost rather than their fidelity to the films they represent. Industry engineers have used psychophysical models to determine quality thresholds for compressing image and sound. Hardware design for DVD compression has been based on a compromise between fidelity to the original film media and economic viability. Industry engineers have relied on psychophysical models to determine quality thresholds for compressing image and sound. Designs have been based for example on psycho-visual profiles that have reported luminance levels at which the human eye is supposedly no longer sensitive. This has resulted in the blockiness we see in deep shadows and fades to and from black in DVDs. Additionally, it was determined that viewers are “most sensitive” to the color green; therefore, blue and red are allotted less color space in the DVD final product. What has been considered to be adequate in representing a 35mm film image has resulted in imagery containing artifacts familiar to us, which themselves have come to be considered an acceptable part of the look of a film on DVD.

While qualitative differences are necessarily subjective, (Film-DVD) = will exhibit the demonstrable quantitative ones. Employing the iconographic shot from The Wizard of Oz of Dorothy’s ruby slippers clicking together (selected in part for its importance in the history of color film), the 35mm image will be formed from what color, luminance and motion information is discarded by DVD compression. To produce this image, I will make a high-resolution scan of the ruby slippers shot from a 35mm print. (While it would be ideal to make the scan from the original Technicolor, for obvious reasons this will be impossible.) These frames will then be compressed to DVD quality. Custom software will then be designed to calculate the “difference” between the high resolution frames and the compressed ones. The results will then be output again to 35mm film, showing what is removed by the compression process. Since this information consists of precisely the subtleties of color and motion considered inessential by psychophysical models, the media must be exhibited on its original format, 35mm film.

There is no interaction specified in this installation, nor is there a computer in the room. However, it is a computer-mediated piece. DVDs send instructions which are interpreted by a DVD player. The media on the disk exists in a fully mediated state, so abstract that it may not be seen or heard without a sophisticated transcoding process that renders the digital bits back into photons and waveforms. The film projected in the room is the result of bringing the film frames into the digital realm, and then doing a mathematical operation that subtracts the compressed DVD frames from the digitized film frames, and then rendering that difference as 35mm film frames.