Somebody MUST be fired. The continued incompetence, idiocy, cluelessness must not be forgiven. I'll show some names using the credits at the end. In fact, whoever responsible for the screw-up should have been fired long time ago before s/he could mess up last year's live DVD (Live Skipper).
So, I looked at end credits for all of the three live DVDs. Note that only the original (Live Attraction) was produced properly.
Video Team Live Attraction Live Skipper Live Rainbow
========== ================== =================== ===================
Director Satou Urara Satou Urara Yagyuu Masaya
---------- ------------------ ------------------- -------------------
Producer Yagyuu Masaya Yagyuu Masaya Yagyuu Masaya
---------- ------------------ ------------------- -------------------
Engineer Onishi Akira Kiyota Shin'ichi Kiyota Shin'ichi
Kataoka Touru Harada Akane
Matsumoto Kazumi
---------- ------------------ ------------------- -------------------
VTR Hasegawa Makiko Hasegawa Makiko
Shirakawa Jun
---------- ------------------ ------------------- -------------------
Editor Miyata Kenji Nishiyama Kazushige Nishiyama Kazushige
Tanaka Tomohiro Hamano Motohisa Nagayoshi Hirofumi
---------- ------------------ ------------------- -------------------
I say double the salary for Onishi Akira, Miyata Kenji, and Tanaka Tomohiro and fire a bunch from engineers and editors in the second and third column. In the end, I can't really draw any kind of conclusion from all this, but all I know is that there are too many incompetent idiots in the video team. KUBIKIRI!!!
It's a lossless PNG showing how horrible it is. Every one of the 30 frames in each second only has 240 lines of vertical resolution (720x240). In a properly processed (fully interlaced) video, we get twice that number of data because we're getting 60 times 720x240 every second. In reality, we actually get more information out of those fields because there are algorithms to extrapolate intermediate frames using both spatial and temporal data from 4 fields (2 previous and 2 later) around the current field. In this DVD, there is absolutely no data in the even fields! Because we only have odd fields, intermediate frames can only get useful data from 2 fields (one from 2-fields ago and one from 2-fields later). That means, we can only get temporal data, not spatial data! You can actually see the process when watching this kind of video through Faroudja's FLI2x00 chip. When things are moving, it prefers temporaral interpolation, so things look pretty good, but as soon as things slow down, it switches over to spatial interpolation and we end up with horrible quality image.
Last three images show people who may be reponsible for the botched up production of this DVD. Yagyuu Masaya was apparently the producer as well as the supervisor. I say that makes him responsible for this shitty production even if he didn't actually do the work.
I'm not sure what exactly "video engineer" and "VTR" is, but these four people (Kiyota Shinichi, Harada Akane, Hasegawa Makiko, Shirakawa Jun) may be candidates for firing as well.
These two "editors," Nishiyama Kazushige and Nagayoshi Hirofumi, are likely to be the culprit for this fscked up production. I say that because I highly doubt the video was shot this way. The most likely place where it got messed up is in editing. Wasn't IMAGICA the source of "Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi" color calibration fiasco, too? Of course, all companies have good and bad people. A good company wouldn't let those bad people stick around.
Takano Marie (left) and Ushirokawa Mika (right). By the way, I'm a fan of Mika-chan.
Specially made (probably carbon fiber) light-weight extension just so she can look cool. Note that it's not a mic stand.
