#superbit

SuperBIT

What do you get when you strap a telescope to a hot air balloon ? Amazing images of outer space !

The balloon has been doing the rounds in the Southern Hemisphere and returning images of some familiar nebula and galaxies.

The above image is the Tarantula Nebula, 160,000 light years from Earth in another galaxy (The Large Magellanic Cloud) and the most active star forming region in our local group of galaxies.

featured recently here on ZeSpaceBlog, the Antennae galaxies, the wide camera showing the full extent of merging galaxies arms sprayed out into space.

The telescope is capable of detecting optical to near UV, similar to Hubble but a wider angle range, and considerably cheaper to run !

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Superbit before, I certainly didn’t know about it back when it was out, but looking into this it really seems like a missed opportunity that it never really took off.  Instead of trying to include more detail like HD, its basis was less compression of the video file so there was less data loss compared to standard DVDs.  The discs could be played in any DVD player without any additional technology or equipment.  According to the comparison articles I’ve found -- which bear in mind are all twenty years old now -- there was a noticeable difference in quality.  Nothing as drastic as the switch from standard-definition to HD, but enough to qualify as an actual improvement.

The big drawback was that the size of the video files themselves had to be increased, so to fit it all on a standard DVD (Even a dual-layer DVD) they had to strip out pretty much all bonus content.  Even the DVD menus were static, since there wasn’t spare space for animated menus.  For most people, when given the choice between a slightly-improved-video version of a movie all by itself, and that same movie with deleted scenes and audio commentary and behind the scenes interviews, it’s not really surprising that people chose the basic video with more content.

Plus, according to those same old articles the improvement over the standard DVDs varied from title to title.  It depended on just how much compression they had to use for the standard release, so sometimes the improvement was very marginal.  There was always some improvement, but sometimes it was so minor that they themselves admitted they probably wouldn’t have noticed it if they weren’t looking for it.  For a few releases they endorsed buying it for a second time in Superbit for the improved quality, while for others they said it wasn’t worth spending the money again if you already owned it.

I’d love it if Superbit -- or a similar less-lossy format -- were to make a comeback.  Despite the visual superiority of Blu-ray, DVDs still occupy a huge percentage of the home video market.  Some of that is cost to the end user (Even with prices dropping significantly over the past few years, Blu-ray players and discs still cost more than DVDs), but a lot of it is also a question of video quality for the original source.  Without remastering of the original product -- which is expensive and time-consuming -- you can’t just release an HD version of an old TV show or movie.  But you could release them on this hypothetical DVD format for a better viewing experience than the original DVD release of the product twenty years ago.   To remaster an entire TV series takes time and money, and a pretty large amount for both, but this would just need to take the video source they already have and not compress it as much.

Just a few weeks ago I was lamenting the lack of a DS9 remaster when I bought the full series box set, and this could be a great middle ground to give the audience superior quality without requiring a big corporate investment.  Still an SD release, without any need to re-render CGI special effects (This is a big hurdle for all late-90s TV shows when it comes to remasters), but clearer, crisper, and smoother.

The format didn’t involve any proprietary technology or equipment exclusive to Sony, so it should be simple for another company to start doing the same thing if they wanted to.  The lack of special features on the same disc shouldn’t be as big of an issue now as it was then, since including multiple discs in a packet is very common now (Including Blu-Ray + DVD combo packs) so people wouldn’t be as hesitant to buy a two-disc set with the special features on the second disc.

I'll be honest, I'm a little underwhelmed. The video file is only 5.5 gigabytes, which means they left 3 gigabytes of wasted space on the disc. The entire gimmick of the Superbit format is that they reduced the compression they used so the video is as lossless as possible, with the tradeoff that they didn't have any extra space on the discs for special features and bonus content. But here they apparently just left off bonus content and that was it.

5.5 GB is a pretty standard file size for a full movie on a dual-layer DVD. I encounter movies 6 or even 7 GB in size on a regular basis, and they use the remaining space on the disc for the normal DVD special features we've come to expect. I don't see how this is "less compression" at all, it looks like middle-of-the-road to me.

Great Rework!