|
Post by Mark P on Dec 17, 2013 14:01:47 GMT
Interesting to read that The Jim Henson Company (of Sesame Street and The Muppets) along with Channel Nine and Hallmark destroyed the original 35mm elements of Farscape so they have had to revert to the 625 line PAL copies, preferable to using the lower quality 525 line NTSC copies, for the upscaled blu-rays.
As with many shows of that era such as Highlander and Babylon 5 it was shot on film and then transferred to videotape for editing and effects. Unlike Paramount who have been able to locate most of the original film elements of ST:TNG to create new HD masters with new HD effects for those blu-rays it seems the Farscape film elements were disposed of to avoid storage so they can't be used for any similar blu-rays now.
Another example of storage costs and past junking decisions impacting future profitability and releases as with the BBC wiping in the 60s and 70s.
|
|
|
Post by George D on Dec 17, 2013 14:37:47 GMT
Terrible shame for something as new as that to be lost
|
|
RWels
Member
Posts: 2,854
|
Post by RWels on Dec 17, 2013 14:55:21 GMT
But that 35mm would have been raw footage or more specifically, without effects? Was the finished product not recorded on anything higher than VHS?? Don't they have digibeta or D3 or whatever's in use for master tape?
|
|
|
Post by Peter Stirling on Dec 17, 2013 14:56:39 GMT
This could turn into a major problem for shows made in the 1980s on when the edit friendly 1' VTR came on the scene and film programmes like Cat's Eyes, Dempsey& Makepiece ,New Alfred Hitchcock Presents etc were shot on film but mastered onto the rather inferior (to 2 inch) 1' videotape.
|
|
|
Post by Greg H on Dec 17, 2013 15:30:45 GMT
Fairly surprising that this still happens when something clearly has some form of commercial future. Perplexing. At least the shows exist in some form; that's an upgrade on the average 50s or 60s show.
|
|
|
Post by Mark P on Dec 17, 2013 16:02:56 GMT
Yes it would be raw footage but if the studio is willing to pay for restoration, grading etc..., new edits and new effects i.e. it's commercially viable as with Paramount and Star Trek then where it was originally shot on film and transfered to SD video tape for editing and effects it gives the best blu-ray finish.
Other 80s shows such as Robin of Sherwood from HTV/Goldcrest in the 80s were shot on 16mm film so I assume not much of an issue for that blu-ray release though16mm has less detail than 35mm. Same for CI5: The Professionals and Regan/The Sweeney also being released on blu-ray. Not sure about Minder.
The Friends blu-rays for example haven't gone down with fans as they used the standard edit masters for the blu-rays and not the extended edits that were previously released on DVD so many fans don't want to have them.
|
|
|
Post by martinjwills on Dec 17, 2013 16:03:52 GMT
People think that what we have today is the best we will ever have, and don't think of the future developments, so don't keep the raw footage etc. With the B&W T/Rs who would have thought in the 1970s and 1980s, that you would get colour information back out of them in the 2000s. I hope if film is recovered in a bad shape, and called unrecoverable at this time, it is kept, in conditions where it will degrade at the slowest rate, so if in 10 years, somebody comes up with a new way to recover the film, like the Chroma Dot recovery process, we wont have a case of we had it, but thought it was not worth keeping.
There should be a lot of off air copies of Farscape, as well as the DVDs produced at the time.
But you would have thought these days that the masters and location films would be stored for future technologies to use in the future. But TV companies never seem to learn from their mistakes.
|
|
|
Post by Mark P on Dec 17, 2013 16:10:17 GMT
This could turn into a major problem for shows made in the 1980s on when the edit friendly 1' VTR came on the scene and film programmes like Cat's Eyes, Dempsey& Makepiece ,New Alfred Hitchcock Presents etc were shot on film but mastered onto the rather inferior (to 2 inch) 1' videotape. Only if the fans want HD blu-ray or streaming/download releases or broadcasters want HD transmission assuming they don't upscale as ITV seem to if not and everyone is happy with SD and DVDs not an issue. The other possible issue with them would be the 4:3 framing and if broadcasters would be hapoy with that in this HD widescreen world.
|
|
|
Post by Mark P on Dec 17, 2013 16:16:00 GMT
The interweb says
...As the original 35mm prints used to create the series are missing, 576i/25 frames per second PAL master videotapes were used as the source material to create the transfer. State of the art software algorithms were used to upscale the standard definition image to Blu-ray's 1080p resolution specification. The PAL master tapes used were the highest quality source of the series in known existence. As a result, while the release is not sourced from HD negatives, it is widely accepted to be a significant improvement over all previous standard definition releases.
|
|
|
Post by Mark P on Dec 17, 2013 16:26:08 GMT
From a 2009 report prior to the upscaled blu-rays being released ...The series was filmed on 35mm, which is far superior to HD, said [Brian] Henson, but the visual effects were created for a standard-definition format, and when looking at the costs of re-creating the visual effects in HD, it would have been in the millions of dollars. Per season. Understandable for a series that holds the Guinness world record for the most digital effects in a TV series. Unfortunately, there was yet another cost that would kill the possibility of Farscape appearing in high-definition. At the end of each season, the original camera negatives were archived, which according to Henson left “a gymnasium of footage” that was particularly costly to store due to the volatility of the film itself. And so, I assume, the original 35mm prints of Farscape have been scrapped. Henson stated that the Farscape series was produced in both NTSC and PAL formats, and that PAL’s 576 horizontal lines of resolution (compared to NTSC’s 480) was the highest-definion version of Farscape available. This is a far sight less than HD’s top resolution of 1,080 lines, and a sad fate for such a visually stunning and complex series. www.timtoon.com/2009/11/07/farscape-will-not-be-released-in-high-def/
|
|