AndyMcKinney
Senior HTF Member
I don't think they ever did a replacement for that disc so the 2D and 3D encodes were normal 1080p24.
Yes, the only disc exchange/replacement done was for the 50th Anniversary Boxset. Due to the way BD-3D works, there was no way to have a 50i version of the 2D on the same disc as the 3D. The entire disc has to be encoded all one way, so that's why the BD-3D disc is 24fps for the entire disc. And, of course, the disc exchange was only done in "PAL" countries, since most consumers in "NTSC" countries likely would not be able to even play a 50i disc.
Honestly even that was still far from the biggest screwup
Doctor Who the Movie (1996) hold that honor. As I understand the sequence of events this was a US/Canadian TV movie which was produced at 1080p24 on 35mm stock in hopes that it would lead to enough buzz to lead into a New Doctor Who TV series with some North American TV contract and money.
Umm, not quite. 1080p HD wasn't around in 1996, so it was not 'produced' in 1080p. It was produced the same way other US television was at the time (like Star Trek: The Next Generation): The live-action was shot on 35mm film, and it was edited/assembled on NTSC videotape. Like Next Gen, there were also probably many video-generated effects which were probably created and/or rendered in NTSC/standard definition only, rather than made on film.
When it aired in the UK of course they converted it to normal PAL 576/50i to show on UK TV.
When they produced the DVD years ago they used the PAL Master with the 4% speedup not only for the UK R2 DVD, but eventually also for the US R1 DVD with the PAL speedup despite it actually having a correct US master that could have been used.
As far as I remember, the BBC did not have access to the original NTSC master. That would have resided with Universal Studios (who produced the movie and who also would have been in possession of all the original film elements).
A couple years ago they did a Bluray in Europe so the easiest and most sensible thing to do would be to go back the 24p master and put in on disc at the correct speed for the first time , but instead they went back and did an upscaled 1080i/50 based on the PAL master so it still has never been seen at the correct speed in Europe and nowhere since those first US/Canadian TV broadcasts.
There is no 24p master. There are individual bits of film in the Universal vault (without the video FX), there is an NTSC assembled master (with all FX and titles) and a PAL conversion of the assembled NTSC master. That's all.
For a "true" HD presentation, they'd have to go through the exact same process as CBS did for Next Generation: 1). locate and scan all the individual film elements (with Universal's permission and cooperation), 2). re-assemble all the film to conform to the broadcast master, 3). re-do all of the video-generated FX and titles in HD.
That is a time-consuming and expensive proposition, and all for a single 90-minute movie that isn't likely to make anyone much money. Not only that, but you have all of the original film elements stored by another owner (Universal) in another country, and who probably wouldn't turn that footage over for free.
Trust me, it ain't happening.
Here is what the DW Restoration Team had to say about the TV Movie when they were preparing the original DVD release:
The movie was shot on 35mm film at 24fps and then the negatives were transferred to 30fps, 525-line videotape using the normal '3:2 pulldown' technique which inserts twelve repeated video fields per second (two fields equals one video frame) in order to bridge the gap between the two standards. This give a characteristic slight stuttering effect on motion, particularly noticeable on camera pans. The show was edited on video from these neg transfers, so the final movie only exists as a 30fps video master - there is no complete physical film print. In 1996, the movie was initially delivered to BBC Worldwide as a normal video standards conversion from the US video master. As well as retaining 3:2 pulldown artefacts, this also showed the normal problems associated with video standards conversion, such as motion blur and judder. On advice from the Restoration Team, BBC Video producer Sue Kerr asked for a DEFT conversion to be supplied instead, and it is this conversion that forms the basis for all of the released and screened BBC versions.
Steve Roberts (of the Restoration Team) also had this to say about the potential of pitch-correcting the release for BR:
I suspect that if they do that they will take the existing 25fps master and slow it down to 24fps. Without getting very technical, the original 525/60i master doesn't have coherent pulldown cadence - ie the 3:2 pulldown sequence changes on edits rather than being constant throughout. This means that extracting coherent frames back out of it is difficult. We had to do an awful lot of work on the Regenerations version of the TVM to correct frame coherence (essentially ensuring that one frame of PAL video only came from one frame of film, rather than from two). If they went back to the UK transmission master and tried to slow that down to 24fps directly they would find themselves in a world of pain...
If the BBC had involved the Restoration Team in this release, maybe we'd have gotten a pitch-corrected slowdown of the existing 25fps master as outlined in the above paragraph, but the BBC did this one themselves, so just took the easy way out.