DVD details for
A Bug's Life (1998) More at IMDbPro »

Michel Hafner (19 June 1999):
Pixar's "A Bug's Life" is the first DVD mastered directly from digital originals without analogue steps in between. No transfer from film elements. In theory this allows to circumvent some common image quality problems altogether. There is no noise and grain from film elements and telecine transfer. Color and contrast are optimal if they are optimal in the digital masters (apart from a probably necessary reduction to 8 bit quantization as required by the DVD standard), and images can be as sharp as the available number of scanlines allows. In addition the noise free images are ideally suited for MPEG-2 compression. Artifacts can be avoided entirely or kept invisible under normal viewing conditions. All this in theory.
So how is "A Bug's Life" looking? Is it as good as its digital origins promis? Yes and no. There are indeed no problems with noise/grain, color and contrast. It's very close to digital master quality (the compression prevents it from being identical) and clearly reference quality in our scheme. This is the first DVD to get full 10 points here, and it will probably be the last for some time, too.
Sharpness is excellent for a non 16:9 enhanced DVD. It seems the digital filter used to downsample the original to NTSC resolution was of high quality and has not blurred the footage beyond necessity. But, as the DVD is not 16:9 enhanced, it is not as sharp as we would like it to be. The missing additional 33% scanlines are noticeable, and so this DVD, fully digital or not, is no match for a good 16:9 enhanced DVD concerning sharpness. The obvious DVD to compare it to is, of course, Dreamwork's Antz (1998), which is not fully digital, but clearly sharper. I think Disney's policy of not enhancing any of their DVDs is very unfortunate and deplorable as it prevents customers from getting the best quality the medium can offer. In the case of "A Bug's Life" the end result is still very attractive, but usually it is not. A 16:9 enhanced "Bug's Life" would look fantastic!
Despite the all digital approach there are some video artifacts. The downsampling has occasionally introduced some aliasing. Probably the digital masters themselves also contain some aliasing from the rendering process. A good example is in chapter 14 from 0:05 to 0:07 (watch the texture on the grasshopper in the middle). Compression is not optimal either. There are some clear glitches that should not be there. Several times the encoder has some problems with slowly moving textures. An example is in chapter 10 at 1:05 ... The rocky ground is broken up in individually moving parts although it should move as one rigid object. The result is jitter and noise at normal speed. At reduced speed you can clearly see the individual parts moving against each other. Another example is in chapter 13: 4:48-4:49 where compression noise distorts the rocky ground again. It is a pity that these and some other cases were not fixed.
All in all "A Bug's Life" is a fabulously looking DVD that redefines the state of the art in several categories and is often close to the best in the others. If it were 16:9 enhanced and more carefully compressed, using a higher bit rate and two layers (e.g. skip the full frame version or use double side double layer or two DVDs) it would be as close to perfect as one can hope to get with DVD. Since it is not, there is still hope for others to get there first. Please Dreamworks, think hard about a fully digital Antz (1998), 16:9 enhanced and encoded with over 9 MBit/s. If that would not blow away the current "A Bug's Life", I don't know what would.
As supplement you get the Oscar winning Geri's Game (1997), also in very good quality.