Classic series blurays

[Phil]

Red Dwarf series 1-V are up for pre-order on bluray, it looks like:

I don’t see 6, 7, or 8.

[Phil]

Enjoy my hideous link.

[(deleted)]

Those links have been up there since early last year – I have a strong feeling it’s an abandoned project. Good if so, no-one needs bad 30i upscales of Confidence & Paranoia..

[PFML84]

These are for Asia are they not?

[Phil]

Interesting. I hadn’t seen these before. My bad.

[JamesTC]

I had assumed these were abandoned but the price was updated just over a week ago. It has been at around £25 for a year before dropping to £20 on the 2nd of June according to CamelCamelCamel.

[JamesTC]

The release date has now been changed to the 16th of October.

[Phobos And Deimos]

The one good thing about these editions is that I’ll have new video transfers to work and restore from instead of relying on the DVDs.

Unless Grant Naylor uses their 2001 transfers as the template which is sadly not an impossibility.

Or discards alternate frames, or releases poorly converted NTSC 1080i60 editions for the entire market, or fucks with the colour and grading, or crops for widescreen, or releases the Remastered editions only, or generally fucks it up somewhere along the line.

Because they will fuck it up somewhere, that’s how they work now.

Not that I’m complaining.

[(deleted)]

If they do actually do it, my money’s on a single, worldwide 60i master. That alone makes it worse than the DVDs. The BBCWW policy for PAL>60i used to be frame blending (very common on music releases and gives a slight visual ‘echo’ effect), but now is to slow down to 23.97fps and then do jittery pitch correction just to ruin the sound as well. This leaves everyone sounding slightly drunk.

Most UK BBC Blurays of native 50i material are true 50i, but it depends on which the primary and secondary markets are. The UK upscaled Blurays of the first 4 new Doctor Who series are hideously destroyed 60i slowdowns. And also absolutely bloody pointless.

I still don’t think this will happen. Especially not at the point they’ll be plugging the XII Bluray.

[Phobos And Deimos]

Oh well, it was a nice idea while it lasted (8 hours and 32 minutes).

It’s astonishing to say but the best version of each Red Dwarf episode publicly available for fan restoration is still the VHS editions as DVD MPEG compression knocks the hell out of the image. The frame is competing with multiple tape generations, basic colour grading and tape masters which aren’t exactly the best sources available.

[Katherine881]

Obviously these links have been abandoned….

[Stephen Abootman]

“This title will be released on February 26, 2018.”

Oh well.

[Katydid]

So…do we know if this is actually happening? It just seems like a really weird thing to do for a show shot on video tape where a full series already fits on a single DVD.

[Ben Paddon]

I vaguely recall demand in the Japanese market being the impetus behind the decision to release the show on Bluray, and I’ve definitely seen some stuff labeled “SD on Bluray” on Amazon.jp, so apparently there is a market for it over there.

[Katydid]

There has to be some sort of difference in the releases for this to make financial sense. DVDs work in Blu-Ray players, so I don’t understand why anyone would be rushing to buy a Blu-Ray. Even if they present the program in a higher bit rate than on the DVDs, that’s only something a miserable pretentious cunt of a videophile like me would care about.

The best I can come up with is perhaps the original DVDs are out of print in Japan, and they feel a Blu-Ray rerelease would be more commercially successful than a reprint of the DVD.

[Katydid]

If the release is the same content, you could fit the whole thing on one disc and cut the production cost in half while charging the same price (or higher) for it. This is making sense now.

[(deleted)]

Japan is an NTSC region – so a Bluray upscaled from the PAL originals is a resolution upgrade. Also the Japanese DVDs are based on the Remastered and/or edited versions, so these would be a big deal to Japanese fans.

To British fans however they are completely pointless, and if they’re slowdowns or conversions to 60i they’ll be literally worse than the DVDs, as per the Doctor Who series 1-4 Blurays.

[Tranter]

For a man who puts great emphasis on the newer series harking back to the classic era, Doug really doesn’t give a damn about presenting the best episodes in as good condition as possible.

[Ben Saunders]

I have the Just The Shows DVD, and it looks fine to me. A bit too good, actually, because you can really notice when the quality degrades because they’re into the fourth generation of video tape, and you can see all the blue screen fringing and where all the split screen lines are. Bring back my choppy, low quality telerecordings of the original transmissions.

The blue screen fringing on, I think it’s the Cat walking towards the Blue Midget model in series II, and/or Ace’s ship in series IV, was always -dreadful-, though, even to my child eyes. How could they broadcast something so shit? Doctor Who had been doing much better blue screen work for years by that point.

My original point, anyway – what’s wrong with the releases we’ve got?

[MANI506]

I always thought the cat walking up to Blue Midget was just partially obscured by space atmosphere – never looked that bad to me. Lister’s hat and locks going transparent during the observation dome scenes bothered me more.

[JamesTC]

>I have the Just The Shows DVD, and it looks fine to me.

That has made me finally get round to something actually.

I got the anniversary set extremely cheap a few months ago and I’ve been wondering if the lack of animated menus and commentary meant the episodes are of a higher bitrate and therefore look better on the “Just the Shows” discs over the original releases.

Just did a quick comparison of The End. Absolutely identical as far as I can see.

[Plastic Percy]

I always figured the Cat-Blue Midget moment in Kryten was down to:

A) The complete lack of budget for the series at that point.

2) The complete lack of equipment and resources at the antiquated BBC Manchester.

[(deleted)]

Very low light, past-their-best tube cameras with visible faults, 1-inch rather than 2-inch VT, dubbed across multiple generations. It’s a miracle you can see what’s going on at times.

[Plastic Percy]

It’s what makes III such a strange beast. The sets and costumes of the far better looking IV and V, but filmed on twenty year old cameras that make it look washed out and grainy.

[Mr-Stabby]

I seem to remember one of the cameras used in the studio on Series 3 had this horrible green line on the left of shot.

[Ben Saunders]

I’m exaggerating with the “how could they broadcast this” obviously, but it doesn’t look great. I can forgive it I GUESS, but it’s interesting that at age 7 or whatever I could recognise a fault like that, as a technical fault.

Also
>Space
>Atmosphere

It’s cold outside….

It’s possible it is a higher bitrate, but only slightly, to the degree that it’s pretty much unnoticeable. If you can find the individual files, shouldn’t a right-click -> properties sort this out?

[Author]

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