USA and UK UFO Blu-ray discs

From today's TheDigitalBits.com:

  "Finally, we've got a couple title updates for you. First, we've
   learned that Network doesn't currently have the U.K. release rights
   to Gerry Andersons' UFO and Thunderbirds so they can't release
   Blu-ray versions there. A&E does have the U.S. rights to both series
   and is considering releasing them on BD. However it's very early in
   the process so there's nothing concrete to report yet."

Looks like they did not check with ITV Studios, who has the
rights to release these in the UK.

Marc

In any case, I don't think we can expect restoration on the level BBC team did for DVDs, which is unfortunate. You can see the film grain spikes on every sfx shot on youtube trailer for japanese blu-ray set, although everything else looks great. A&E will certainly not do that, and from ITV we can expect even cropped 16:9. We were so lucky with Carlton DVDs even considering the speed problems... They look very good upscaled, it is such a shame they didn't ordered hi-def transfers right away... It is an irony that HD medium, that shows more of the blemishes and errors, will get the inferior transfer to the DVD, which, as media is inferior itself...



28.09.2012., u 03:10, "Marc Martin" <[hidden email]> napisao:


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

On September 27, Branko Vekic <[hidden email]> wrote:
> In any case, I don't think we can expect restoration on the
> level BBC team did for DVDs, which is unfortunate.

I'd hold off on declaring the UFO Blu-rays
to be not as good as the UFO DVDs.  That YouTube video
looks very good to me.  I even went back to my Carlton
UFO DVD and did the Blu-ray/DVD comparison myself, as
I wasn't sure if they were being honest about how bad
the DVDs looked.  But I concluded that they were being
honest -- here is the comparison I did:

  http://ufoseries.com/temp/dvdVsBluray.jpg

So if the 720p YouTube-compressed version looks better
than the DVD, then the 1080p Blu-ray is going to
look even better!

Marc

I would guess that when the restoration was done, they didn't just remaster
directly to the same resolution as a DVD. There are probably excellent
high definition masters lying around somewhere. Whether they can be used or
not is no doubt a political question rather than a technical one.

On September 28, James Gibbon <[hidden email]> wrote:
> I would guess that when the restoration was done, they didn't just remaster
> directly to the same resolution as a DVD. There are probably excellent
> high definition masters lying around somewhere. Whether they can be used or
> not is no doubt a political question rather than a technical one.

Well no, I had that discussion (long ago!) with one of the folks who
worked on the BBC Resources transfer.  At the time the UFO transfer
was done, BBC Resources did not yet have any HD equipment, so the
transfer for the UFO DVDs was done in PAL resolution.

They also (for the most part) didn't use the original 35mm negatives,
so their starting point was not as good as it is for these newer HD
transfers.

Marc