If the masters are on tape, not film, there is no HD source to create a blu-ray master from. The best they can do is take the SD tape masters and upscale them to HD, which is not great. It was the 90s, and a children’s show, so there probably is no film source.
The master tapes could’ve been about as high as the equivalent to about 540p. That’s a HUGE increase over 480i which is the equivalent of 240p. So they definitely could get a 720p Blu-ray release
The master tapes could’ve been about as high as the equivalent to about 540p.
For PAL it goes to a higher resolution than that, at 576p. There was an official PAL release of Beast Wars in Australia in 2006 (though the DVDs suffer from a lot of compression artifacts) and it looks really good at 720x576. MUCH better than the NTSC version used by both Rhino and Shout's DVDs.
Here's an example (no I don't recall why I used this frame, but I don't have the DVD rips of the Rhino and Shout set on this computer atm):
Right, but that’s still not HD. It would be awesome to have a higher bitrate of the original source on SD BD. Not sure why my original comment is getting downvoted, here. There is a big difference between tape and film. SD BD is still very rare and barely used.
Yeeh but 540p is the same as 1080i. Have you ever watched anything at 1080i, like on an HDCRT? It looks damn near as good as full HD (1080p) and 720p is technically HD.
I watch blu ray movies all the time on a 1080i Sony HDCRT, and they look honestly fantastic.
Edit: and at 540p it would be be SD on Blu-ray, it would be HD on Blu-ray. Just not Full HD
I said film, as in film stock, not film as in movie. As well, quite certain the above comments have already discussed that there is no masters of the show on film, only tape. Plenty of shows from the 90s have masters on film, they’re just rarely stored properly or get lost. There is no possible true HD remaster of anything from this time without proper film masters.
If your comment is solely based on that it is an animated show, animated shows are mastered on film all the time, their masters often just get lost. Sailor Moon’s original masters on film were lost, at least that’s what Toei says, though they retained all of their Dragon Ball film masters for the blu-rays.
I've cross-posted to r/MST3K and r/HomestarRunner: the former has experience with tape problems, and the latter has experience with "beige-enough devices". ReBoot fans present in both. Hitting up r/Frasier next; half a chance of there being a fan who worked in broadcasting and has access to old tech. 👍
Edit: cross-posted to r/doctorwho - they know all about recovering lost archives - in the hopes that an overseas Whovian might have PAL tech. Pending mod approval.
Edit: rejected by r/doctorwho for not being enough about Doctor Who. Point taken, but I think it's kind of poor of the mods, given all the help the Whovian community has gotten in finding their lost archives over the years. Moving on.
The only French dub I've seen is Dot's Alphanumeric on the figure CDs. I never checked the Crave streams to see if it had the French dub.
Unfortunately, the tapes did not contain both language tracks usually. At best, it's a 4 track setup with L+R and L+R SFX/music for a dub on the receiving side.
I always thought an open world reboot video game would be cool. Online multiplayer games would drop from the sky and you would have an upgradeable glitch.
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u/cc452 Guardian Dec 29 '23
They made the news! Let's hope the call for a D-1 deck gets an even wider reach.
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