DVD details for for
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)

Michel Hafner (12 November 2001):
The long awaited first Star Wars DVD is here. It took petitions and countless letters to make it happen, but the fan base has succeeded. Coming from George Lucas, the guru of digital cinema, the mind behind ILM, the leading sfx shop and THX, the quality program for image and sound in cinemas as well as in your own home cinema. He surely will give us a reference quality DVD that will blow our socks off, won't he!?
If you want to know, read on.
The film master used is indeed a film master and not the digital master all print material has been derived from. More about this later. The master is clean and steady.
Contrast and color rendition are, well, not state of the art. Colors look good, but not more. Some shots are too contrasty and the superior blacks and shadow detail of excellent DVDs are not here as well.
What about sharpness? Disappointing. Outright mediocre for a new 16:9 enhanced transfer. There are no really sharp images on this DVD.
But then surely the noise and grain level is low, no? Not really. It's at times distractingly high.
Compression is good, but that's not a consolation. Well compressed mediocre quality pictures look, you guessed it, mediocre.
And now for the hard to understand final blow. There is edge enhancement on this DVD that every videophile can only start pulling his hair and wondering if Mr. Lucas actually has watched his own DVD or not. There are many shots that look outright hideous because they have been enhanced up the wazoo. In addition the noise and grain level has been reduced by digital noise reduction creating the all too familiar processed video look. Fine image detail is never sharp, looks noisy and jittery all the time or is totally absent. This DVD is a major catastrophy in the area of video artifacts when you consider what film we are talking about here. Nonetheless this DVD has the THX seal of superior image quality. A sad joke once more.
Image quality is on average really disappointing but uneven. Some shots look very good, but the majority does not. The best looking parts are the CGI parts.
What on earth has happened? I don't know, but if Mr. Lucas would watch his own DVD on the DLP projector used for post production of the all digital Star Wars 2 he would have a rude awakening.
The main problem seems to be that the DVD master has not been created direct digital from the high resolution master but telecined from a film element which added unwanted and unnecessary grain and noise. The sharpness was not so good, so the godawful edge enhancement was applied. And the transfer was too noisy, so it was noise reduced. Official statements from Fox that little or no edge enhancement was used are absurd. The pictures tell you otherwise. (As of December 2002
after the release of an EE free Star Wars 2 DVD from the digital source the official statement from Fox is still that no EE was applied for "Phantom Menace"!)
When the trailer looks better than the film itself (which is a major anomaly as anybody used to watching trailers on DVD knows) it's obvious that something went seriously wrong.
But why was the digital master not used? I have heard two explanations which make both little/no sense:
- to allow for better color rendition and a more film-like look. Excuse me, but all the colors you ever want you can get from the digital master and additional color correction. And a film-like look is by definition excluding overenhanced edges and noise reduction artifacts, both a video phenomenon and not film-like at all.
- to allow the film to look more like the first three films will look when released on DVD. Oh God, please don't tell me that the upcoming Star Wars DVDs will all have overenhanced edges and the same problems as this one.
If anybody from Lucas Film or Fox can give me a better explanation I'm all ears.
The DD sound is very good, though, and there are lots of supplements to keep fans happy.
Can I recommend this DVD? No! If you are a videophile looking for superior image quality you will be disappointed. If you are not it may be all you ever hoped for. The disc sells like hot cakes. Videophiles are a tiny minority among all DVD customers. And George Lucas is probably a marketing genius. I wish he were a DVD mastering genius as well.