Doctor Who: Tom Baker Complete First Season (1 Viewer)

[dana martin]

WB while we are waiting to see what the next Archive release is, i was on the other site and saw that this is happening, looks like all the restoration work the BBC has been working on is finally gong to be seen.

Think a lot of fans will be happy, that the Dr. is in!

 

[Lord Dalek]

Sounds utterly useless if you have the individual releases.

 

[David Weicker]

Unfortunately there is currently zero information about this release.

The original listing showed up on Best Buy, as a March release. That was pulled, and other retailers showed an October release. Now they’re back to a March date.

And big questions.

Is this HD, or SD on a Blu-Ray?
If HD, is it 1080p or 1080i? 50i or 60i?
Is there a UK release planned
If HD, will it just be an upscale, or will the film segments be rescanned at HD resolution? Would any upscaling be from the UK or Us versions?
Will any of the prior extras be included? Any new extras?

So much unknown

 

[Lord Dalek]

It would most likely be SD on Blu-ray. The only classic-era serial they can remaster for blu is Spearhead from Space and that was done a couple years ago. Furthermore the only film that exists for this season is for the title sequences. Robot, The Ark in Space, and The Sontaran Experiment were shot and assembled entirely on Quad, and the rest only has its original telecine.

Honestly I think what happened here was somebody misidentified the upcoming Shada blu-ray as a full season release.

 

[The Obsolete Man]

It would most likely be SD on Blu-ray. The only classic-era serial they can remaster for blu is Spearhead from Space and that was done a couple years ago. Furthermore the only film that exists for this season is for the title sequences. Robot, The Ark in Space, and The Sontaran Experiment were shot and assembled entirely on Quad, and the rest only has its original telecine.

Honestly I think what happened here was somebody misidentified the upcoming Shada blu-ray as a full season release.

No, it's available for pre-order pretty much everywhere now, including Amazon. And I'd certainly hope Shada wouldn't be $69.99 MSRP.

I'd wager they've upscaled the episodes for HD.

 

[Blimpoy06]

And I'd certainly hope Shada wouldn't be $69.99 MSRP.

I have the Shada blu-ray from the U.K and it looks fabulous. I think these could be good.

 

[Tom St Jones]

Even upscaled, unless they've found a way to bring out information that's not there and never was, the most you'll likely get (overall) is a slight bump in picture and sound quality, and maybe a few new featurettes (it's not like the existing discs are bare-bones, or anywhere near it). For folks who bought many/most/all of the DVDs, those will probably continue to fit the bill just fine.

 

[Lord Dalek]

I have the Shada blu-ray from the U.K and it looks fabulous. I think these could be good.

Shada's a special case though as all the raw elements for that serial that were finished before strike action still exist. Can't say that about any show from Series 12.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

I'd wager they've upscaled the episodes for HD.

I agree, much like they did for the Ninth Doctor episodes of new-"Who" and the Tenth Doctor stories from "The Christmas Invasion" through "The Next Doctor".

Probably not a huge difference for UK fans, but there is a bit of a visual bump for US audiences since the SD masters had 576 lines of information but the R1 DVD releases have been downscaled to 480 lines of information. And of course the professional upscaling should have a better result than the on-the-fly upscaling done by one's player or display.

Unfortunately, much like the new-"Who" upconverts (other than "The Next Doctor"), that probably means slowed down 1080p24 releases instead of a 1080i60 release for North America and a 1080i50 release in the UK.

 

[Blimpoy06]

Shada's a special case though as all the raw elements for that serial that were finished before strike action still exist. Can't say that about any show from Series 12.

The raw elements for Shada were still video tape. The entire run of Tom Baker stories was shot on 2" videotape. The only film elements were used for location shooting. Robot being an exception having all exterior scenes on tape. So the studio bound material from the era should all be consistent.

 

[Lord Dalek]

The raw elements for Shada were still video tape. The entire run of Tom Baker stories was shot on 2" videotape. The only film elements were used for location shooting. Robot being an exception having all exterior scenes on tape. So the studio bound material from the era should all be consistent.

The final 2" tapes (which btw, none of the Baker dvds were mastered from as the Beeb donated them all to the BFI years ago) were usually two to three generations off the initial raw studio sessions. This is why they suffer from various levels of picture noise that had to be reduced digitally (occassionally to an extreme level as with Genesis of the Daleks and Talons of Weng Chiang). So even if they are upscaled, don't expect much.

 

[David Norman]

Is this HD, or SD on a Blu-Ray?
If HD, is it 1080p or 1080i? 50i or 60i?
Is there a UK release planned
If HD, will it just be an upscale, or will the film segments be rescanned at HD resolution? Would any upscaling be from the UK or Us versions?
Will any of the prior extras be included? Any new extras?

So much unknown

1) Almost certainly will be some sort of upscaled HD -- there's only so much that can be done from the originals. As far as I'm aware there are no SD on Bluray sets in the US (not sure that's even allowed). I know there are some German SD on BD

2) 100% it won't be released 50i in the US since about half the players in the US wouldn't be able to play. 60i is more likely though a slowed and pitch corrected 24p isn't impossible

I haven't dug through all he UK Doctor Who sites or gallifreybase.com but some more details are almost certainly over there given that some of the folks that worked on much of the remaster/restoration work post there.

 

[smithbrad]

1) Almost certainly will be some sort of upscaled HD -- there's only so much that can be done from the originals. As far as I'm aware there are no SD on Bluray sets in the US (not sure that's even allowed). I know there are some German SD on BD

2) 100% it won't be released 50i in the US since about half the players in the US wouldn't be able to play. 60i is more likely though a slowed and pitch corrected 24p isn't impossible

I haven't dug through all he UK Doctor Who sites or gallifreybase.com but some more details are almost certainly over there given that some of the folks that worked on much of the remaster/restoration work post there.

I recently played around with UK Alfred Hitchcock Hour sets because the PAL speed up bothered me more than usually. My guess is because of my familiarity with so many of the guest stars. I played with all the combinations of PAL vs. NTSC and adjusting the pitch vs. adjusting the speed. Ultimately, what I settled on was converting to a H.264/AVC blu-ray standard MPEG file set to NTSC 720p and a speed setting of 96% with no pitch adjustment. This approach allowed me to fix the audio/speed issue, maintain the higher resolution of PAL, support NTSC systems, 16:9 output while maintaining the 4:3 aspect ratio, and store 9/10 episodes per 25GB blank blu-ray disk (10 disks for the entire series). I'm very happy with the results watching on a projection screen.

Therefore, I think they can figure out a way to maintain the best of what it can be.

 

[Lord Dalek]

I haven't dug through all he UK Doctor Who sites or gallifreybase.com but some more details are almost certainly over there given that some of the folks that worked on much of the remaster/restoration work post there.

They're about as much in the dark about this as we are.

 

[Blimpoy06]

I noticed the Amazon pre-sale lists this blu-ray as a Warner release. Did they release the BBC line in the U.S.A. ? Or could this be a new licensing arrangement?

 

[Lord Dalek]

Warner has had the US home video rights to the BBC Catalog since their deal with Fox expired in 2000.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

If the first four seasons of new-Who are any indication for how the BBC might handle this (and since those sets do establish a precedence of sorts), I think it's a reasonable guess that they have been upscaled to 1080 and slowed down from 25fps to 24fps for presentation within a 1080p container. Those releases were pitch corrected to make up for the difference in audio playback.

I'm not a big fan of changing things that don't have to be changed, so I'd be wary about these coming out as a 24 fps release, but the history does point to that being a probable option.

On the other hand, if these were straight upscales presented in their original framerate, I'd likely be in. I think one of the things that MPEG2 DVD compression sucked at was presenting shot-on-tape material - I often notice compression artifacts galore in DVDs of material like that. However, for the few releases of such material that I have on BD, where it's been gently upscaled to 1080i at its original framerate, even though it's still coming from a standard definition video source, because the AVC codec handles the compression better, it looks far better to my eyes.

 

[David Norman]

Therefore, I think they can figure out a way to maintain the best of what it can be.

Of that I have little doubt as long as the original elements are reasonably good shape -- something that wasn't an issue with New-Who 1-4.

For $25 once the sale prices kick in, it's certainly cheaper than getting the DVDs at this point.

 

[Lord Dalek]

If the first four seasons of new-Who are any indication for how the BBC might handle this (and since those sets do establish a precedence of sorts), I think it's a reasonable guess that they have been upscaled to 1080 and slowed down from 25fps to 24fps for presentation within a 1080p container. Those releases were pitch corrected to make up for the difference in audio playback.

The old series actually runs at 50FPS (aside from Spearhead from Space of course) so that would be a complete disaster.

 

[David Norman]

The old series actually runs at 50FPS (aside from Spearhead from Space of course) so that would be a complete disaster.

Plenty of SD/PAL 576i/50 material or even HD 25fps looks perfectly fine being transferred to US standards IF it's done correctly -- not perfect, but it can be quite good. It all depends on the conversion competance