Classic BBC sitcoms on Blu-ray
#1

I was pleasantly surprised to hear a little while ago that The Young Ones was being treated to an anniversary release on Blu-ray, containing a bunch of new special features. I was a little curious as to why they'd released it on BD instead of DVD, considering the majority of the show was shot on videotape. Nevertheless, according to the reviews, everyone who's bought it seems happy with it.

Amazon have since recommended a bunch of other Blu-ray releases - Red Dwarf, Fawlty Towers, Only Fools and Horses, Flying Circus... Some of which are proudly proclaiming on their front cover that they're on Blu-ray for the first time. I guess it's set off some kind of trend.

I haven't exactly combed through every episode of these shows, but I'm pretty sure they were all mostly shot on video which, as most of us know, cannot be natively upscaled like film can. Does anyone know if any upscaling tricks are being used on these releases to render them in HD? Or are they simply relying on the higher bitrate to get better quality out of the final product?
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#2

They won't be HD, simple as.

Especially if they were shot on tape, which most of those would have mostly been (your usual "tape in the studio, film on location" type arrangement) To be honest the only things that would possibly be HD is any extras.

The disclaimer says "These episodes have been restored and remastered using the existing film where available, with any standard definition content upscaled during this process. The special features in this release are a mixture of standard and high definition. Due to the age of the original materials, the technical quality of the extras may vary in places. "

Now we already know remastering is supposed to mean "recreation" - ie where you dig out all the studio tapes and edit it all from scratch again. But considering its probably safe to assume most of those don't exist anymore, the cheaper remastering option comes into play... Which doesn't make it better.
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#3

The advantage of Blu-ray isn't higher resolution in these cases, it's the ability to have more content on a single disc. What would be a six disc box set on DVD could be two discs on Blu-Ray.
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#4

The BBC archive that was originated in PAL exists as SDI having been clean
(Weston) PAL decoded so there is no footprint ...a good place to start to upscale
The inserts are 16 mm which is not acceptable as HD ....but can be rescanned
At a higher sampling structure .... and will be better graded !
so (potentially) these  blurays are  of quite high quality ...
And certainly better than many upscaled programmes,
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#5

(07-03-2023, 08:23 PM)Neil Jones Wrote:  They won't be HD, simple as.

Especially if they were shot on tape, which most of those would have mostly been (your usual "tape in the studio, film on location" type arrangement) To be honest the only things that would possibly be HD is any extras.

The disclaimer says "These episodes have been restored and remastered using the existing film where available, with any standard definition content upscaled during this process. The special features in this release are a mixture of standard and high definition. Due to the age of the original materials, the technical quality of the extras may vary in places. "

Now we already know remastering is supposed to mean "recreation" - ie where you dig out all the studio tapes and edit it all from scratch again.  But considering its probably safe to assume most of those don't exist anymore, the cheaper remastering option comes into play...  Which doesn't make it better.

A lot of it won't be HD, but I will say this: A lot of those shows will have done some shooting on film, which would be in HD. I know the Red Dwarf model shots were shot on film, and they do look impressive in Blu-Ray, but the majority of the show was filmed on tape. I am being pedantic, mind, but worth mentioning

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#6

(07-03-2023, 10:19 PM)JAS84 Wrote:  The advantage of Blu-ray isn't higher resolution in these cases, it's the ability to have more content on a single disc. What would be a six disc box set on DVD could be two discs on Blu-Ray.

Resolution is only one part of the equation when it comes to picture quality. MPEG1/2 compression is 25-30 year old technology at this point and is lossy; liable to introduce visible artefacts which would not be present on an upscaled Blu-ray.

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#7

I got The Young Ones Blu-ray for Christmas, and the vast majority of it, is just upscaled and tidied up quite nicely. However, the film sequences in episodes such as Nasty and Summer Holiday are native HD, and they are crisp perfect. There’s also bonus HD material from the film roll for Summer Holiday, which again looks perfect. I’m guessing that would be the same for other series such as OFAH, which did have some episodes on film, either in part or fully, like To Hull and Back.
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#8

It does depend on if the film inserts still exist to be rescanned in HD though, in many cases they don't. I know when it came to the Monty Python Blu-Ray, only a handful of the live action film inserts still existed (Terry Gilliam had kept hold of the animations though).

OFAH have released a Blu-Ray of the 1985-89 Christmas specials (which includes the uncut Royal Flush in addition to the terrible edit that ended up on DVD), and while I haven't bought it, from what I've read, the Frog's Legacy is entirely upscaled SD, even the film sequences, so presumably the film no longer exists.

Though many of these 70s and 80s telecine transfers were so poor that even just a rescan in SD would probably be massive improvement. It's amazing how blurry many of them are, and how much dirt and scratches there are on the film.

(08-03-2023, 10:16 PM)WillPS Wrote:  
(07-03-2023, 10:19 PM)JAS84 Wrote:  The advantage of Blu-ray isn't higher resolution in these cases, it's the ability to have more content on a single disc. What would be a six disc box set on DVD could be two discs on Blu-Ray.

Resolution is only one part of the equation when it comes to picture quality. MPEG1/2 compression is 25-30 year old technology at this point and is lossy; liable to introduce visible artefacts which would not be present on an upscaled Blu-ray.

Doesn't even need to be upscaled, you can have SD content on Blu-Ray, and with better codecs and higher bitrates than DVD (MPEG-2 up to 15mbps I believe, when DVD peaks out at 9.8mbps, and most DVDs won't get anywhere near that, and H.264 up to 12mbps, I think, not to mention the better choice of audio codecs, including lossless). Certainly in some countries they release Blu-Rays of (non-upscaled) SD shows and you can get 20 or more episodes on a disc at the same or better quality than DVD.
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#9

Those two episodes of Mr Bean that were shot on location would (if rescanned/remastered properly) look wonderful, having been done on film in the first place. But of course the rest of the series was mostly done on tape so it would look a bit out of place.

The Mr Bean DVDs (the Brilliant boxset) were "restored", which is code for put through some processing algorithm to attempt to make it look better. There may be a limit as to how good you can get videotaped material to look no matter what type of processing you chuck at it. It was after all a limited resolution, the trade off of being cheaper and easier to edit versus film. Film you can rescan to any resolution you want (in theory), if it was good stock in the first place.

Still processed videotape is better than the cropped dog's dinner that goes out on ITV2..
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#10

There were a few Mr Bean episodes with location work done on film as well, not just the two entire location episodes- was quite inconsistent really how it bounced between film and video. Then again Ab Fab was the same with the seemingly random pieces of location work done on film.

Of course when these shows were made, the idea of them being upscaled to HD and seen on big screens is not something that ever crossed the producers minds anyway, whether they choose to shoot on film or video, there'd never have been any thought of it being seen at any better quality than those old telecine transfers (especially considering many of the film inserts were thrown away after being telecined). Being able to make HD remasters is an unintended side effect in most cases. Plenty of occasions where the HD remasters of old show flaws in the sets, make up, effects etc. due it it never being intended to be seen in that quality- the original Star Trek is full of it, so is the 60s Twilight Zone Blu-Ray I have.

Interestingly in the Twilight Zone case- there were 6 episodes of that in the second season shot on video. Even discounting the inability to upscale to HD (which wouldn't have been a consideration in 1960- in fact the picture quality of the 1960 telecine transfers of the filmed inserts in those episodes is significantly worse than the video shot footage), the technical limitations of video at the time severely artistically limit those episodes (which is the reason why they stopped using video), you'd have to wait around another 20 years until you started to get the same creative freedom with video as you did with film.
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