I have a toddler that’s starting to get into Disney, so I’ve been expanding my collection. Last week, I got the Masterpiece Lion King boxed set. I already have a lot (probably a dozen) Disney Home Video CLV discs, I think I’m going to try to get the CAV releases instead.
Sure thing! So, laserdiscs are not digital like you’d think. Frames of the video are encoded on the disc. And there are two methods of doing this. Constant Angular Velocity, and Constant Linear Velocity. With CAV, the disc spins the same speed from beginning to end, and each revolution is one frame. This is awesome, because you can very accurately pause frames, and move forward and backwards. Downside is, they are 30 minutes per side. Even if you have a two-sided player, you’re going to have to get up and change discs.
With CLV, the speed of the disc changes from inside to outside. This lets you get more frames per rotation as the disc gets bigger. They can fit 60 minutes per side! But, the quality suffers. And there’s no frame by frame.
A lot of movies will be a combination, side A will be CLV for the first hour, and side B will be CAV for the climax. That way, you have better quality for the action, and that’s where you’d probably want to frame by frame things. And it fits on one disc.
Thank you very much for the explanation. I didn’t know this technology existed and how it worked.
I learned a few things thanks to you. Have a pleasant day.