Date: 02/27/2025
Mood: worried
Listening to: In Your Room - Depeche Mode
Live aus Berlin 2020 Rerelease - Metadata and Visual Comparison
A technical fan comparison of the Live aus Berlin rerelease, including raw DVD metadata, bitrates, PAL format nuances, color grading, aspect ratio behavior, and where the 2020 version improves or gets worse.
Quick summary
- The concert footage looks and sounds better overall in the 2020 rerelease.
- The color grading and aspect ratio changes are noticeably better.
- Some medium wide shots and bonus footage have ugly processing issues that can only be fixed from a film rescan.
- The bonus footage is the one area where the 1999 version may still be preferable. It retains letterbox and other issues.
I am here, once again, to nerd about videos, frames, bitrates, and pixels. You know it's gonna be niche and fun when I do it. Fun for who? Me specifically. For the people wanting technical info that doesn't exist online because the marketing for this refuses to elaborate. Here is the media info MakeMKV generated when I ripped it raw.
Raw DVD metadata
Click for technical data
Format : Matroska Format version : Version 2 File size : 4.27 GiB Duration : 1h 37mn Overall bit rate mode : Variable Overall bit rate : 6 292 Kbps Video Format : MPEG Video Format version : Version 2 Format profile : Main@Main Format settings, BVOP : No Format settings, Matrix : Custom Codec ID : V_MPEG2 Codec ID/Info : MPEG 1 or 2 Video Duration : 1h 37mn Bit rate mode : Variable Maximum bit rate : 9 800 Kbps Width : 720 pixels Height : 576 pixels Display aspect ratio : 16:9 Frame rate mode : Constant Frame rate : 25.000 fps Standard : PAL Color space : YUV Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0 Bit depth : 8 bits Scan type : Progressive Scan order : Top Field First Compression mode : Lossy DURATION : 01:37:03.720000000 NUMBER_OF_FRAMES : 145593 Audio #1 Format : AC-3 Format/Info : Audio Coding 3 Mode extension : CM (complete main) Format settings, Endianness : Big Codec ID : A_AC3 Duration : 1h 37mn Bit rate mode : Constant Bit rate : 448 Kbps Channel(s) : 6 channels Channel positions : Front: L C R, Side: L R, LFE Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz Bit depth : 16 bits Compression mode : Lossy Stream size : 311 MiB (7%) Title : Surround 5.1 Audio #2 Format : PCM Codec ID : A_PCM/INT/LIT Duration : 1h 37mn Channel(s) : 2 channels Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz Bit depth : 16 bits Title : Stereo
The good
My weirdest opinion? The audio sounds better too. Especially the 5.1 surround. I can't figure out why though or how to explain this. Many close up shots look really good and retain grain ("noise"). Also color restored and looks far more correct in most cases. (Most.)
This gif alone displays everything you'd want to understand. Mainly color grading fixes are so obvious this way. In actuality, in order to overlay this I had to manually adjust the 2020 disc's aspect ratio ("dimensions"). The 1999 disc is essentially letter-boxed (black bars) but somehow when this was done, it generated edge issues. However, when you remove the black bars and try to overlay the image to the 2020 disc you get this miracle.
1999 wants to default at 704x480. 2020 wants to default at 720x576 Europe style for 576p25 for being capable of transmitted to EU TV's 576i. Interesting. It essentially means the contents on this DVD is "EU TV ready". They can hand this to a broadcast station in some mannerism in this condition for b-roll. All the station has to do is make sure to display the odd field frame correctly. At this point just rescan it in 1080p 16:9 restoration like the Du hast music video from 2023 being remastered in 4K. This is silly! The framerate is far smoother at 25fps where it should be naturally for Europe. It loses a lot of the blurring and ghosting my eyes tended to catch. I really dislike telecine footage between NTSC and PAL. Even if I know why it was this way for technological limits of the past regarding TV standards across the pond, it still bugs me. I think the extra blurred C frame always looks awkward. Especially when dealing with gifs. (The tumblr girl in me making gifs will never let this go.)
This is a 2:3 pulldown when you telecine PAL and NTSC in gif format. Nobody knows what this means, sorry... uhh. It's the part where his hand is blurry looking. That's the extra fake frame called "C". A, B, B-C, C-D, D. His hand is not actually blurry or replicating at all. There is no smear or blur or anything wrong with the footage recorded. What this is, is NTSC hell. Whenever you see gross blurry stuff like that or like stuff is smeared/replicated, that's a sign of a C frame 2:3 pulldown. The frame called C doesn't actually exist. It's made up of B and D forcing it to exist. When you duplicate frames to make a fake frame, you get blurry and replicated imagery. Because you need to go from 25 to 29. How do you make a thing exist which was never originally filmed? You have to fake a frame. It's a gross antiquated process that I am glad we can do away with due to technological gains.
Additionally, the bitrate is much much better at 10k. It still suffers the limit of being trapped on a DVD and not remastered from a rescanned film. However, for what it is... yeah it's significantly better. No contest.
The bad
Medium wide shots are struggle city: blurry, out of focus, weird. Not appealing to see at all.
They aren't sized or scaled correctly. It looks like the way they were resized is wonky. Like someone used a resize filter such as bicubic, spline, etc improperly. This may be unfixable without rescanning the film reels. They are a huge improvement, but still show massive easy to spot visual flaws.
The "this is kinda a problem but only in a few shots" things:
So if you didn't notice the glaring problem in the start of Weisses Fleisch's pyro stunt with the shoes, I commend you for being blind. Yeah, the white sparks shouldn't be you know... GREEN lmfao. This has something to do with the color grading and filter used on the whole show. A rescan of the film may be the only solution.
They're post-processing issues. They happen sometimes on even clothing with pale reflective surfaces to display 'green' pixels.
Everyone knows the 2017 Paris disc concert is filtered, color graded, and stylized. But people don't stereotype Live aus Berlin for this. Even though, yes, it's color graded like Paris. The thing is, in 1998 the concept of doing that intense color grading on a concert probably sounded really really scary with technology limits. Imagine doing this work on a fat Apple computer or Windows 98 in some archaic version of Adobe Premiere in the past of some whack software nobody has ever heard of in 15 years. Sounds horrible nightmarish, right?
Live aus Berlin has massive "fuck it, we're doing it live" energy to it that Paris doesn’t have. I guess the filmmaking comparison is the difference between doing a practical special effect or a CGI effect. Live aus Berlin has practical effects energy. 90% of the show is practical effects via clothes and lighting in person to achieve the color grading. 10% computer work. That is why it's not nearly as obvious as it is on Paris' disc to know it was edited digitally and why you don't feel like it's obviously falsified. Whereas Paris feels like it's a Photoshopped concert.
You can look at this and feel the digital editing that is like... weirdly unrealistic despite it being a real image. It's like somehow they made a concert into a filtered tumblr gif set but it's the whole blu-ray. Live aus Berlin feels tangible, textured, and "real" despite being stylized. You know? The thing is, Paris still is great for its stage lighting and presentation, but obviously has a "we will edit this digitally later" to it. LAB has a, "we cannot edit this digitally later because it's 1998 we don't have computers for this and [Hank Hill voice] do I look like I know what a codec is? it needs to look good or nothing."
Where would we be without the flashing lights reflecting off Richard’s outfit to make it sparkly? This is also something in Till's coat from Wilder wein and Klavier.
Arguably, you can say the same thing for sweaty shirtless Till reflecting and being glossy haha. This matters. It really does.
The only thing that looks edited is the grading on the 'whites' tones and is the flaw causing greens and some rainbow issues. The green is blatant in WF but the rainbow happens a lot to Til'’s pants in any shot of him from far away. It also happens to his outfit in Spiel mit mir a lot. Also Buck dich especially visually suffers from the rainbow effect on white. This is also a really prominent issue on Richard's pants but only a few niche shots of it show that happening. (In this example, it's his thigh being a rainbow and almost green effect again.)
I guess I can lie down the biggest criticism: they did nothing to restore or remaster the bonus footage. In actuality, they made the bonus solo angle and interview footage WORSE than 1999. They did something to sharpen it and cause jagged, pixelated, and crunchy issues. It's horrible. This issue is present strongly on the literal edges of the footage. It's still letter-boxed from the 1999 version too. It's why it's not remastered at all. They took some jank 1999 files with the letterbox and slapped it into this DVD. And it shows. The hell is this??
Look at this atrocity. How is this even real? It's all sharp. Edges are jagged. The edge line of the letterbox are messed up. In motion, the jagged issue is even worse. It's borderline unwatchable. So I decided I am going to tinfoil my theories about this. They do not appear to have copies or genuine masters of the bonus footage anymore. Hence why they can't restore it properly. They have some kind of digital file but it's not proper enough to restore to 576p25 and nobody handling it knew what to do. It appears this footage is permanently saved in letterbox back in 1999 in some kind of digital format they cannot 're-save' a second time. The bitrate is better, but everything visually is worse. The interview suffers the same issues and is also trapped in letterbox.