I'm talking about official releases like sign of the times there's so many amazing shows that where filmed over the years I'd love to be able to experience in remastered hd.

All those Montreux Festival concerts would be awesome as blu-rays. We have bootleg SD versions circulating (DVD quality).

Doozer said:

More? Has there been one since his passing?

Sorry I phrased it wrong I meant the only live dvds I know that have been officially released are sott and rave un2 theres so many superb concerts down the years that were filmed I dont understand why they arent remastered and released for example tokyo 1990 features my favourite version of purple rain and I know the whole thing was filmed surely whoever owns this stuff must know fans would buy it so it financially makes sense.

ufoclub said:

All those Montreux Festival concerts would be awesome as blu-rays. We have bootleg SD versions circulating (DVD quality).

Yeah I know there are loads of great concerts you can watch but the quality and sound isnt the best would love to have official releases with the latest mastering technology involved.

Tokyo 1990 was before HD was a normal shooting format. It was most likely shot in regular SD interlaced video (It's definitely not film, unfortunately). So that concert in particular would only really be good for a DVD not a blu-ray. Same with Lovesexy '88.

Other legs of that tour were possibly filmed in 16mm, and that might be good for blu-ray.

ufoclub said:

Tokyo 1990 was before HD was a normal shooting format. It was most likely shot in regular SD interlaced video (It's definitely not film, unfortunately). So that concert in particular would only really be good for a DVD not a blu-ray. Same with Lovesexy '88.

Other legs of that tour were possibly filmed in 16mm, and that might be good for blu-ray.

Oh right I didnt know that I thought the film used what be the same as they used in making films like films from years ago are all now being released in hd or ultra hd because even though it was years ago the actual film used is way higher resolution than hd of today its just home technology has took years to catch up if you understand what I mean I dont really explain it very well.

lonelyalien said:

ufoclub said:

Tokyo 1990 was before HD was a normal shooting format. It was most likely shot in regular SD interlaced video (It's definitely not film, unfortunately). So that concert in particular would only really be good for a DVD not a blu-ray. Same with Lovesexy '88.

Other legs of that tour were possibly filmed in 16mm, and that might be good for blu-ray.

Oh right I didnt know that I thought the film used what be the same as they used in making films like films from years ago are all now being released in hd or ultra hd because even though it was years ago the actual film used is way higher resolution than hd of today its just home technology has took years to catch up if you understand what I mean I dont really explain it very well.

You're right about older movies shot on film, but the Nude Tour concert was shot on videotape with videocameras. You can tell because it feels more live, just like the Purple Rain concert.

SOTT the concert film was shot of 35mm film like older movies. And many of his music videos were also shot on film and could be remastered to HD ( A lot of Beatles videos shot on film in the late 60's have been mastered to Blu-Ray... but The Beatles Ltd gots the $$$$$$$$$).

lonelyalien said:

Doozer said:

More? Has there been one since his passing?

Sorry I phrased it wrong I meant the only live dvds I know that have been officially released are sott and rave un2 theres so many superb concerts down the years that were filmed I dont understand why they arent remastered and released for example tokyo 1990 features my favourite version of purple rain and I know the whole thing was filmed surely whoever owns this stuff must know fans would buy it so it financially makes sense.

Right…I'd echo what ufoclub posted. Anything shot on film could be repurposed for an HD release. A great example with this is how "Seinfeld" looks on Hulu - because the show was shot on film, its conversion to HD format is pretty stellar.

[Edited 7/5/18 10:59am]

lonelyalien said:

Doozer said:

More? Has there been one since his passing?

Sorry I phrased it wrong I meant the only live dvds I know that have been officially released are sott and rave un2 theres so many superb concerts down the years that were filmed I dont understand why they arent remastered and released for example tokyo 1990 features my favourite version of purple rain and I know the whole thing was filmed surely whoever owns this stuff must know fans would buy it so it financially makes sense.

Live at the Aladdin Las Vegas was also an official DVD release.

sexton said:

lonelyalien said:

Sorry I phrased it wrong I meant the only live dvds I know that have been officially released are sott and rave un2 theres so many superb concerts down the years that were filmed I dont understand why they arent remastered and released for example tokyo 1990 features my favourite version of purple rain and I know the whole thing was filmed surely whoever owns this stuff must know fans would buy it so it financially makes sense.

Live at the Aladdin Las Vegas was also an official DVD release.

Yeah I thought I'd forgot one I havent seen that actually.

lonelyalien said:

Will there be more live blu ray releases?

.

Eventually: yes, perhaps.

But as the Estate or whoever has so-called `rights` does not share their strategy and the Prince market thus stays on a one release per annum schedule, please do not hold your breath.

Sadly there is a lot of missguided information about film and video and what can and cannot go onto blu ray.

I suggest you ignore most of it as it is wrong.

Initially there is only one factor you need to consider and that is disc SPACE and COMPRESSION rates.

In simply terms source material is large, storage space is low so compression has to be very high indeed therefore quality is also low.

So large storage means less compression which means better quality.

DVD is an expremely bad format and should be discontinued. Content is massively compressed to get on these nasty little discs.

Blu ray is great but storage is still very limited. Naturally 4K, 8K and 16K discs expand space exponentially and as such compression is less and less and quality is much highter.

You next have to consider the recording medium and the post production process.

In Prince's early career videos and concerts would have been recorded on either 16/S16mm film / 1inch tape and edited using linear production suites and mastered down to umatic tape and ferous oxide tapes.

In Prince's mid career prior to digital, videos and concerts would have been recorded on 16/S16/35/S35mm film and edited using non-linear production suites meaning no generation loss and mastered down to digital beta tapes for maximum broadcast quality.

Finally you have to consider the broadcast engineering specifications which every broadcast producer has to abide to otherwise their content would not be broadcastable. This extremely complex science relates to the chroma levels for all colour channels, the luminance levels for light and dark and all shades of gray in between, screen size (typically the number lines and pixels recorded and mastered), audio channels / mix / DB levels and the recording system being used, for example NTSC or PAL. NTSC is an extremely inferior system and is frowned upon. Conversion from NTSC to PAL is complex as the colour red in the signal has to be reconstructed to be a constant value.

So to answer your question, YES, old Prince content such as concerts can go onto blu ray and will look great. This is simply because broadcast tape is of much greater quality than DVD. The recent Syracus concert should have been released on blu ray and would have suffered less from being less compressed. Sadly the Syracus concert suffered from some key production errors in lighting and camera set-up that effected it's quality but this would have not prevented this concert looking great on blu ray.

There is a very good way for you to see proof of this. These days there are many 80s music shows being shown on HD channels. If you have the opportnity to see these you will see have amazing studio performances and music videos can look in HD on 50+ inch TV screens.

darkroman said:

Sadly there is a lot of missguided information about film and video and what can and cannot go onto blu ray.

I suggest you ignore most of it as it is wrong.

Initially there is only one factor you need to consider and that is disc SPACE and COMPRESSION rates.

In simply terms source material is large, storage space is low so compression has to be very high indeed therefore quality is also low.

So large storage means less compression which means better quality.

DVD is an expremely bad format and should be discontinued. Content is massively compressed to get on these nasty little discs.

Blu ray is great but storage is still very limited. Naturally 4K, 8K and 16K discs expand space exponentially and as such compression is less and less and quality is much highter.

You next have to consider the recording medium and the post production process.

In Prince's early career videos and concerts would have been recorded on either 16/S16mm film / 1inch tape and edited using linear production suites and mastered down to umatic tape and ferous oxide tapes.

In Prince's mid career prior to digital, videos and concerts would have been recorded on 16/S16/35/S35mm film and edited using non-linear production suites meaning no generation loss and mastered down to digital beta tapes for maximum broadcast quality.

Finally you have to consider the broadcast engineering specifications which every broadcast producer has to abide to otherwise their content would not be broadcastable. This extremely complex science relates to the chroma levels for all colour channels, the luminance levels for light and dark and all shades of gray in between, screen size (typically the number lines and pixels recorded and mastered), audio channels / mix / DB levels and the recording system being used, for example NTSC or PAL. NTSC is an extremely inferior system and is frowned upon. Conversion from NTSC to PAL is complex as the colour red in the signal has to be reconstructed to be a constant value.

So to answer your question, YES, oNot theld Prince content such as concerts can go onto blu ray and will look great. This is simply because broadcast tape is of much greater quality than DVD. The recent Syracus concert should have been released on blu ray and would have suffered less from being less compressed. Sadly the Syracus concert suffered from some key production errors in lighting and camera set-up that effected it's quality but this would have not prevented this concert looking great on blu ray.

There is a very good way for you to see proof of this. These days there are many 80s music shows being shown on HD channels. If you have the opportnity to see these you will see have amazing studio performances and music videos can look in HD on 50+ inch TV screens.

I would say that initially the one factor you have to consider is the resolution and format of the master copy. Not the space and compression of the end format.

DVD is the superior format for SD material that needs to be on a physical media. It can be progressive. Analog videotape is always interlaced and therefore has less fidelity with motion, and also less fidelity with resolution do to fields only showing half the resolution at a time. This is why you get jagged lines on a freeze-frame on a broadcast videotape master. You won’t get that on a progressive DVD.

However, these days you don’t need physical media to view a good image. You can have a movie file with great quality as long as you have a computer or playback machine that can handle a big data rate.

The compression on DVD is fine. you can test it by watching or freezing any frame in a complex scene of changing colors and light (such as a laser battle with lots of ship in a sci-fi movie). On something like streaming digital cable this kind of scene will break up into blocky pixels because of the huge compression on both HD and SD streams shrunk down for broadcast streaming. But on a DVD they will look intact, and compression artifacts will be minimal.

Where DVD is inferior is in resolution. The resolution is just not good enough for anything shot on 35mm film (or above) or HD video (or above).

What are you referring to by 4K, 8K, and 16K discs?

4K and 8K usually refer to resolution not disc space. With discs you have blu-ray media with dual layers as the most storage space on a disc. A dual layer blu-ray disc is 50GB of storage space regardless if it’s a UHD movie or an HD movie. So a dual layer disc that has an HD movie is the same type of disc as that which has a "4K" movie. I put "4K" in quotes because true 4K is not even a consumer format, but corporations like to use the term for UHD (which is actually under 4K pixels long) and even came up with the sensational "Ultra-HD" descriptor.

You are right in PAL having a stronger color signal than NTSC. But PAL is also at the unfortunate 25 fps, and almost all of Prince’s SD video stuff, unless it was shot with UK or European television cameras (Sacrifice of Victor, Lovesexy ’88?) are going to be at NTSC specs… on the mastertape. If you convert to PAL you are going to do a frame rate conversion. And worse, if its a conversion from film you are going to slightly speed it up and even pitch up the music a half note by going from 24 fps to 25 fps.

Anyway, we’ve already drifted away from old broadcast limitations to newer ones for Rec709 (HD) or Rec2020 for UHD. And now everything will shift to HDR which blows all those old standards away with rec2100! Any old NTSC or PAL signal can fit within Rec709 or higher easily in terms of color and contrast fidelity.

You might be wrong in saying “broadcast tape is much greater quality than DVD”. Again, broadcast tape is interlaced (showing half the resolution at any moment in time). DVD does not have to be, it can show a full 720 x 480 pixels in progressive mode. If you watched the original broadcast tapes of something including the Purple Rain concert it would look exactly as bad as it does on DVD.

The Syracuse concert is not exhibiting any kind of flaw from being on DVD. Those bad qualities are right from the interlaced master tape shot with cameras that could not handle extreme colors of blue or red and also had streaking of highlights. Going to blu-ray would do absolutely nothing for the image. It would never ever look great on blu-ray.

Rod once again talking out of his ass.

The estate was shopping around the First Avenue 1983 show plus the rehearsal footage for a documentary. You shop stuff around because you expect a big $$$ deal out of it. You don't trade something like that for a couple of beads and you don't self-release it.

If you believe the rumors, they already restored the show and the rehearsal footage.

[Edited 7/7/18 16:52pm]

Strive said:

Strive said: