The Issue With Shout!'s MMPR DVDs

So, if you've read any of my rants on Twitter about the issue with Shout!'s MMPR DVDs you've probably heard this before. I'd like to make a long blog post, since the issue is hard to tweet about in full due to the 140 character limit. Here we go:

The essential issue is that the mastering facility Shout! Factory used (I could probably go find the name in the Mega Set booklet, but it's not really relevant) for the MMPR DVD set made a terrible mistake - they cropped and resized the video, which caused some nasty anomalies to occur.

The MMPR episodes that were released as "bonus features" on Lions Gate's DVDs (and the DVD of Day of the Dumpster Saban gave out at SDCC/PMC3 that year) are correct and do not suffer from this issue, so let's begin with some comparison pictures.

This is a screenshot from Day of the Dumpster, from Shout!'s DVD release. Now, take a look at a screenshot from the promo DVD Saban handed out:

The first thing you should notice are the black framing bars (on the left and right of the frame) on Saban's version - these are what the mastering facility Shout! used cropped off, an then resized the video to fill the frame. This is a big no-no for interlaced video (if you don't know what interlaced video means, don't worry, it's not important - just know that you can't crop it like this) - if you do it some nasty errors will occur. 

Look at "YOUTH CENTER" on the sign - notice how the letter's aren't as clear and now have little halos around them? Not only is the frame now stretched / distorted, the picture quality / detail has suffered greatly. 

As you can see, the picture wasn't just cropped on both left and right, but on the top and bottom, too. Let's move on to another comparison: 

This is once again from Shout!'s DVD release. 

This is once again from the promo DVD - notice how the black framing bars are similarly cropped. See the screenshot comparison link at the bottom, since it's *much* easier to see the errors with it. Look carefully at the lines on the Command Center.

There are once again halos surrounding the lines - they are now much more blurry, the fine detail is now gone. This is why you do /not/ /crop/ /interlaced/ /video/ like this. It creates these ugly errors in the video. This error should have never happened - and EVERY SINGLE episode of MMPR on Shout's release suffers from this. It's incredibly disheartening that this mistake happened, and wasn't caught by QC. Don't get my wrong, I'm still grateful for Shout!'s releases, but this is an error that should not have happened in the first place. 

Here's a link to screenshot comparisons for the two images above and two additional ones- look closely at text and lines in the images to see the errors this blatant mistake caused. 

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/113547/picture:0

Hopefully someday we'll get a re-release of MMPR that doesn't have botched video. It's a shame, really. We finally got Power Rangers on DVD but the mastering facility screwed up big time and no one caught the mistake. Oh well...

Catch you on the flip side~

-James (PR_Media_Info) 

MMPR Licensing Article from "The Licensing Book" (April 1994)

Here's an MMPR licensing article from the April 1994 issue of "The Licensing Book." Apologies for the iffy quality of the photos, as these are scans of copies of the original article. Still, a family interesting read. Enjoy!

Stay tuned for more! I have quite a few more articles scanned and I'll be posting them soon.