Freshly processed laserdiscs (Patreon)

In the past few days, I've processed & uploaded a few more Playboy laserdiscs, namely the 1989-1991 Video Calendars, and the 1992 Playmate Review. A couple of them unfortunately join Winds of Change as the latest in a string of disappointments...

The 1989 and 1991 Calendars were two that I'd recently acquired third copies of. Having 3 copies of a disc means that the captures can be stacked together, filling in signal dropouts and possibly improving the image quality a bit further. Except in both cases, some signal dropouts remain, which means that at least two copies had dropouts at the exact same locations, which may also mean that those dropouts were in the original master.

1991 has a noisier image than expected, and a type of wavy noise that could be a sign that my player needs to be adjusted, if not for the fact that I've only seen this type of noise on Playboy titles.

In this case, stacking three copies didn't help, because all three copies have the same mint marks. That means they were all made at the same place, from the same master. I could seek out more copies, but there's no guarantee that I'll find one with different mint marks or from a higher quality master.

The 1992 Review is another one with a fairly noisy image. I know where I can get two more copies, but again there's no guarantee that either of those would be any better than the one I have. Better to save my money for when/if another copy of the Swedish Winds of Change appears, I think.

Something else I may need to reconsider, is how I encode these captures. So far I've been scaling up to 1080 not because I think doing so will make them look better, but to try to prevent them from looking worse. Noisy images don't compress very well, but making the image larger and increasing the bitrate can help. But it also eats up more storage space, and my Mega account is running low. I may need to delete some older uploads, and replace others with smaller versions.