Pointless releases for HD DVD/BD (1 Viewer)

[Scott Calvert]

It's not a poor choice. This isn't really a subjective thing. Sanford & Son would be a pointless release on Hi-Def. So would All In The Family. So would any TV show or movie shot and/or edited on SD video. Picture quality-wise, these would be pointless as Hi-Def releases. They would probably look worse on Hi Def with all of the scaling involved.

 

[TonyD]

well i would like to see first, then decide how it looks.

 

[Stephen_J_H]

So you think that all releases should be mastered for HD, regardless of source material, and let the buying public decide? I respectfully beg to differ. A better use of the storage capacity of BD or HD DVD would be to transfer the SD masters in SD. You could put entire series on 1 disc this way.

 

[TonyD]

i said that earlier in this topic.
the slip doesnt say what the resolution is for that to work

do we know it wouldnt look good?

universal hd is airing some old shows that i guess have been remastered in hd. they look pretty good.

 

[Niko Nykanen]

Where? Can´t see the announcement anywhere?

 

[Vincent_P]

The shows in question were likely shot on film.

Vincent

 

[Scott Calvert]

Yes, exactly. Anything before I guess 1970 or so should be ok on HD, outside of really old TV shows where only the kinescopes survive. After 1970, it depends. Most dramas were still shot and edited on film, whereas many half-hour comedy shows and variety specials were videotape affairs. Then in the 80's, you get into lots of shows that were shot on film but then scanned to standard definition video where they were edited and then broadcast. Most of these would not benefit from HD unless they went back to the original film elements and made new edits in high resolution video or film.

All of this has been discussed before on this forum and even in this very thread but from the looks of it, it bears repeating.

 

[MatthewA]

It was around 1985/1986 that the big switch to video post-production came about for filmed shows. I discussed this in a "MacGyver" thread some time ago. I mentioned some titles there of which well-known shows at the time were filmed and which were taped.

But unfortunately those shows on Universal HD are cropped to 16x9. That's something I do NOT want to see for any 4x3 material of any kind.

 

[Douglas Monce]

Many shows in the mid 80s were being protected for 1.85.1. I remember reading an article in TV Guide around 1981 about The Fall Guy and several other shows being shot with the wide screen format in mind for future use.

Doug

 

[TonyD]

at least one show, northern exposure, is not cropped.

 

[Stephen_J_H]

In some cases, there were series and TV movies that were shot protected. In fact, some series were converted into features for release to the European market. Titles that come to mind are the Ewok films and Twin Peaks, which wound up with an alternate ending for its European release.

 

[TonyD]

the origional version of salem's lot may have been like that.

 

[Douglas Monce]

I remember the article on The Fall Guy very clearly because they were specifically talking about the future of TV and the fact that high definition television was coming, they thought, in the next 8 to 10 years. I was 16 at the time and that was the first I had heard of HDTV.

Obviously that idea was abandoned when most TV shows went to doing post on NTSC video.

Doug

 

[ChristopherDAC]

In 1984 and 1985, things were really looking up for HDTV. The Japanese had demonstrated a whole suite of studio equipment, including cameras, video-tape recorders, a practical transmission system, even an electron-beam film recorder, and they had secured the backing of the US and Canada and about half of the European countries for making the 1125/30/2:1 system the world HDTV production standard. They brought it to a meeting of the CCIR (Dubrovnik) and put it on the table, and were horrified when the Europeans voted it down.

The European Commission had decided that adopting a standard from overseas would harm European economic interests, and had issued a directive to the national bodies to vote against it (despite the fact that at least RAI and one French broadcaster were actually using the Japanese equipment for production purposes). The Europeans then began working on a 1250-line 50 Hz system, which proved to be a total abortion after consuming hundreds of millions of dollars, while the American broadcasters who had initially been enthusiastic (because the need to allocate new TV channels would stop the FCC taking unused spectrum for the use of other services) began to hem and haw about the increased costs and difficulty of using High Definition video.

In Japan today, something like 90% of TV production is done in High Definition, despite the setbacks caused by not having a larger market (which keeps prices high and advances slow). For a little while in the middle '80s, it made sense to work on the expectation of that kind of development being the norm. It's a classic case of lost opportunity.