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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Any Examples of shows shot on Film during SD times / Re-packaged 10-15 years later

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BigLu

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Any Examples of shows shot on Film during SD times / Re-packaged 10-15 years later.

RE-done for a 1080 HD re-distribution or DVD HD DVD marketing distribution?

I am looking for shows that chose to go FILM back in the day and benefited with this for todays deliveries

and im looking for TV shows that chose to shoot SD and do not have these benefited options.
Shows from the
70s 80s and 90s please

thank you very berry much.

Luis
 
I don't have SD samples done for TV but we currently do BD re-releases of movies from the 80's (mostly 35mm but some also incorporating 16mm and even 8mm footage) where SD DVD-releases or VHS releases were done years ago and I can definitely confirm that you get out a lot of sharpness and detail back from a good film scan in HD when compared to the SD release (the DVDs)... so film was never that bad -> but of it really depends on the stock, the focus puller back then and also it depends a lot on how the films were stored and taken care of (or not -> we need to fix a lot of things with restoration software)...
 
"Space: 1999" was shot on 35mm in the 1970's and is now on blu-ray, as is the 1960's "Star Trek". Recently the "Next Generation" episodes from the 80's-90's are coming out in blu-ray -- these have taken longer to remaster, at much greater cost, because they decided to recreate the visual efx composites in HD, since the original composites were done from 35mm elements to SD. It's unusual that they are spending the money to do this, but they believe that the market will pay for it.

Many old shows shot in 35mm with SD video efx will probably just uprez the SD efx and cut them into non-efx 35mm footage rescanned to HD. The original "Star Trek" did their composites in 35mm using dupes and an optical printer, though the blu-ray contains both the original effect and new ones digitally created with CGI. "Space: 1999" did almost all their effects in camera with double exposures and miniatures so only the few opticals have now aged a bit more than the surrounding footage. But I can see it becoming problematic to remaster a 90's show like "Babylon V" with so many SD efx in them -- either they spend the money to redo those efx or they just uprez them to 1080P and cut them into the non-efx scenes transferred to HD.

A quick online search shows that "Friends", "The Dick Van Dyke Show", and "The Twilight Zone" are also out or are coming out on blu-ray.
 
Thank you guys,
So I heard Friends did something like re-masterd for 1080p and benefits of yet another distribution chance.
Any thing like that any other shows like that?
 
There are many, but the biggest challenge for those shows is not resolution, it's aspect ratio. Anything done for television prior to about 1995 was composed exclusively for 1.33:1. This often means considerable compromise when trying to fit into 16x9. Consider a show like "Miami Vice," for instance. They often used very wide compositions to place a foreground character right up against one side of the frame, with a background character (usually facing the other way, and usually with a rack focus at some point in the shot) hugging the other side, Cutting either headroom or legroom severely compromises the integrity of a frame like that, and some shows are full of them. Besides, since about 1988 nearly all shows have been post produced electronically, regardless of origination format, by most of the major studios (Warners and Universal were holdouts until the early 1990's, at least on dramas). Recreating those shows requires recovering every piece of film involved, and since Warner Bros. was the only studio that religiously assembled negative even when shows were finished on videotape, it is very likely that on any given episode, there are going to be pieces that cannot be located (believe me, I speak from experience on this..). So simply originating on film doesn't guarantee that the show can be recreated in another format, at least if it was made in the "in between" years of about 1987-2001, in which many, many shows were shot on film and posted electronically in standard definition video. And often in 1.33:1 aspect ratio, especially prior to 1996. Of course, if the show is perceived to have enough future value, the studio/distributor/owner will be a lot more willing to spend the rather substantial money required to create an HD (or higher) version. Shows such as "Seinfeld" and "Star Trek TNG" come to mind as being in that category. But make no mistake, it is very, very costly to do that, particularly if the studio did not archive the original elements with an eye towards recovering them for possible restoration. And in most cases, I can pretty much assure you that they did not.
 
I'm sure there are more old TV shows that have been remastered, just that they are being broadcast on some HD channel with no immediate plans for blu-ray release. If they remastered "Friends" in HD, I'm sure they will tackle some other shows of similar popularity.
 
We did a big international 3 hour documentary back in 2001 on film on super 16 at 16x9 and we recently went back and re-transferred all the original negative at 1080 and used a lot of the material in another project (the rest was shot on Red). I don't know if that's the kind of thing you are talking about, but in that sense the material was future-proofed because it was shot on film rather than digi-beta. Or if not future proofed, at least 10 year proofed, which ain't bad... That is an argument for shooting at higher resolutions than 1080 now.
 
David Mullen ASC said:
...
Many old shows shot in 35mm with SD video efx will probably just uprez the SD efx and cut them into non-efx 35mm footage rescanned to HD. The original "Star Trek" did their composites in 35mm using dupes and an optical printer, though the blu-ray contains both the original effect and new ones digitally created with CGI. "Space: 1999" did almost all their effects in camera with double exposures and miniatures so only the few opticals have now aged a bit more than the surrounding footage. But I can see it becoming problematic to remaster a 90's show like "Babylon V" with so many SD efx in them -- either they spend the money to redo those efx or they just uprez them to 1080P and cut them into the non-efx scenes transferred to HD.
Click to expand...

When I watch the original star trek in hd it is at 4/3, but it looks really great. I was wondering on the film, what is on the "sides" of the frame. i.e. was the film framed for 4/3 yet the actual film at 1.67 ... so is there is boom/set stuff on the sides of the film?
 
The original "Star Trek" was shot on 4-perf 35mm, which is native 4x3, probably just framed within a 10% "title safe" zone all around, so for all intents and purposes, there is nothing "outside" the frame other than the fact that the camera probably had an Academy aperture centered lens so there is an unused soundtrack stripe area on the left edge of the negative. Doesn't mean that a mic couldn't occasionally break frame though; these shows were shot on a tight budget so mistakes were sometimes made and left in. "Title Safe" aka "TV Safe" actually just means that everything important (like titles) had to be within the safe area because some CRT TV's would trim the outer edges off; it doesn't mean that anything outside the safe area would never be seen.

I believe "Star Trek: The Next Generation" was also shot in 4-pert 35mm and also framed for 4x3 (and the blu-rays are matted to 4x3) but by then, 35mm cameras used for TV productions used various frameline markings to deal with a future 16x9 version, though perhaps not "Star Trek: TNG" since even the blu-rays are 4x3. But some 4-perf 35mm cameras framed 16x9 across the width of the 4x3 negative (sometimes Super / Full, sometimes Academy) and then the 4x3 TV safe area either shared common top & bottom with 16x9 (so didn't use the larger 4x3 area possible) or overlaid a larger 4x3 over 16x9 in a sort of cross shape, and probably a few did what features were doing with 1.85, that is, sharing common sides and the widescreen version being less tall. But all of those 1980's and 90's shows would have been composing for 4x3 broadcast, just "protecting" for 16x9 (there were a few exceptions -- I read that "Law and Order" framed for 16x9 because they thought that the crop on the sides to 4x3 made the image look cinematic, like it was extracted from a widescreen movie or something.)

Then by the 1990's you had more TV shows shooting in 3-perf, which has a native 16x9 shape in full aperture, so in that case, 4x3 would have been extracted from the center in most cases, sharing common top & bottom with 16x9.

Mike Most was a post supervisor and colorist on many of those shows in that period so would have a more accurate description of the framing conventions.

Those 1960's and 70's color TV shows were lit for transfer using a film chain, a print basically running through a projector being rephotographed by a video pick-up. This added a lot of contrast, and caused some loss of sharpness, so often the original photography was quite well-lit, sort of hard glossy lighting with a lot of fill that would survive the broadcast process (didn't help that 1960's color negative was only 50 ISO until 1968, thus requiring fairly strong lights to be used, especially to accommodate slow zoom lenses of the day). So a new HD transfer off of the original negative produces a picture that in many ways is superior to how it looked to audiences back in the day. Certainly the original "Star Trek" never looked better -- back in the original broadcast, some TV stations were even using 16mm prints in their film chains.
 
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wow ... thanks David, rereading what you said about 4 times. I always get the "perf" confused between the 4/3 and 16x9, then the framing of a 4 perf allows a 16x9(so basically they framed things so they don't cut the heads off of people). So I'm going to memorize now ... if i get this right then s35 4-perf is 4/3, but some people framed it so it could be 16x9 ... while 3 perf always allows 16x9. Greatly appreciate your knowledge.
 
PatrickFaith said:
wow ... thanks David, rereading what you said about 4 times. I always get the "perf" confused between the 4/3 and 16x9, then the framing of a 4 perf allows a 16x9(so basically they framed things so they don't cut the heads off of people). So I'm going to memorize now ... if i get this right then s35 4-perf is 4/3, but some people framed it so it could be 16x9 ... while 3 perf always allows 16x9. Greatly appreciate your knowledge.
Click to expand...

There are some diagrams here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_35
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-perf

4-perf 35mm Full Aperture is the largest area you can use in 4-perf, side to side and top to bottom (if you see me occasionally write "4-pert" it's just due to the stupid Auto Correct...) 4-perf 35mm was used in the Silent Era as is 1.33 : 1 (4x3). It's called Full Aperture, Edison Aperture, Silent Aperture (technically it is also Super-35 aperture though Super-35 was originally developed to use the soundtrack area on the left so often people think of it as a wider format than regular 35mm.)

3-perf, being 25% shorter, naturally makes a wider shape than 4-perf, and 2-perf is even more widescreen in shape by being even shorter in height.

But you can compose for any shape within these formats depending on how much negative area you want to waste.

When optical sound on film prints was introduced with Fox Movietone in 1927 (for Murnau's "Sunrise", a silent movie but with a film score on the print), the left side of the 35mm frame was taken up by the optical soundtrack, shaving the width of 1.33 : 1 down to something like a 1.20 : 1 ratio. This looked a bit too square-shaped for some people and eventually AMPAS recommended that the Movietone projector mask, which covered over the optical track, also cover a bit of the top & bottom of the projected image, shaving 1.20 : 1 down in height to a shape that was 1.37 : 1. This is called Academy Aperture.

Since most movies were contact printed from negative through to positive, eventually the lenses on 35mm cameras were shifted over to the right to be centered over what would be the projected area. Some cameras actually put in smaller gates that were masked to Academy but many others simply exposed Full Aperture as before, just that the viewfinders were marked for the Academy area and the lenses were centered over this area.

I'll jump over the widescreen era all the way to 1983 when John Alcott was shooting "Greystoke". There was a plan to release the film in a 70mm blow-up and Alcott didn't want to shoot in 35mm anamorphic, partly because he knew he'd have to use really fast lenses in the giant jungle set being built and lit for daylight. So he wanted to shoot on spherical lenses (Zeiss Super Speeds, which he had used on "The Shining") but frame for 2.40 for release in 35mm scope prints and 70mm prints (which were 2.20 : 1). He had this idea to use the soundtrack area of the 4-perf 35mm negative to gain a little extra width for an optical printer blow-up to 35mm anamorphic and to 70mm.

Using spherical lenses to get a 2.35 image was the basis of 2-perf Techniscope back in the 1960's, but that format only used the Academy width of the negative (22mm wide) rather than the Full Aperture width (24mm wide)... simply because by virtue of being only 2-perfs high, the Full Aperture was 2.66 : 1, which was too wide, so you couldn't use the full width anyway.

But since Alcott was using a 4-perf 35mm camera, he could also use the Full Aperture width, so he named the new process "Super Techniscope". However, he didn't really need the full height and I think to avoid exposing too much extra information up & down, he installed a matted gate that reduced the exposed height to a 1.50 or 1.66 area. I think "Terminator 2" also used a masked gate as well to reduce the recorded area in height. But soon after that, most people were exposing the Full Aperture area. The "Techniscope" moniker had too many associations to Technicolor Labs so the more generic term "Super-35" was used by the mid 1980's.

Anyway, the short version is that 4-perf Super-35 is generally the same as 4-perf Full Aperture and is 1.33 : 1 (4x3).
 
Hi David, Re original Trek episode Space Seed when they are inspecting Khan on Botany Bay, Shatner is making a speech when his arm accidentally knocks off his own phaser, barely visible on the bottom of the screen, and very quick. Deforest Kelly is listening but his eyes become distracted by the phaser on the floor, which is out of shot. One can see the actor wondering if he should interrupt and draw attention to the phaser, but they just roll with it and get it in the can. I haven't seen the blu-ray, but I hope they didn't tidy that up. Sorry, wanted to get that out of my system for years.

By the way, one show which interests me is a Canadian series called Lexx, but I am not sure how it orginated. Does anyone know ? Best.
 
Some of this weird stuff with picture safe happens even with SD-DVD releases. The episodic 24 comes to mind when "Bauer" runs into a barn (completely by himself) and B camera walks right into the 4:3 / 16:9 safety zone. Then they cut, and A camera is visible in the reverse. I had to rewind, I was sure that was glowing cine-tape on the side of the frame but it couldn't be, right? Wrong.

That made it through to a consumer purchased DVD! Another side effect of delivering 16:9 (Even in anamorphic SD) from a 4:3 source (Even when that source was film).

Now 4:3 in pillar box HD is not bad. I recently watched the classic "Grapes Of Wrath" on BD and was stunned. The film jumped right out of the screen like I had never seen it before. Just because the current standard is 16:9 doesn't mean a remaster needs to deliver in some other ratio than the one they composed all their shots for.

Even ancient, 4:3 movies can really get a boost from the increased resolution and bit rate of HD, even when pillar boxed.
 
Dr Quinn Medicine Woman was shot on S16 film. It is in syndicated cable reruns, can't remember which channel.

Shot almost entirely with SR16's and Canon 11.5-138 zooms.
 
The BBC shot a lot of stuff on film that has or will be coming to HD. The Avengers springs to mind as dose Dr. Who.
 
David Mullen ASC said:
But some 4-perf 35mm cameras framed 16x9 across the width of the 4x3 negative (sometimes Super / Full, sometimes Academy) and then the 4x3 TV safe area either shared common top & bottom with 16x9 (so didn't use the larger 4x3 area possible) or overlaid a larger 4x3 over 16x9 in a sort of cross shape, and probably a few did what features were doing with 1.85, that is, sharing common sides and the widescreen version being less tall. But all of those 1980's and 90's shows would have been composing for 4x3 broadcast, just "protecting" for 16x9 ....
Click to expand...

I don't recall the "shoot and protect" edict coming into play until the early 1990's. At that time, Fox actually took the lead on 16x9 and required shows to be delivered in both "regular" 4x3 and 16x9 - both standard definition at the time, as HD hadn't really arrived yet (that didn't happen until about 1997 or so). Shows like "The X-Files" and "Ally McBeal" were both transferred and mastered in standard def, 16x9 for much of their run, and were broadcast that way as well on affiliates that passed the digital channel (Fox called it "high resolution" in their on-air banner). Fox was widely criticized for being late to the "HD" party, but in fact predated most of the other networks in delivering 16x9 to consumers (although as I recall, the pilot of "Lois and Clark" for ABC was actually the first show I recall being posted in SD 16x9 - but I digress....). At any rate, there were two methods that were commonly used to accommodate the dual framing. One was the "center cut" approach (essentially common center, common top, and common bottom), which was used by almost every studio. The one that didn't buy into that was Paramount, which for a time came up with a common sides approach. The way they did that was clever but a bit tricky. Essentially, film was transferred to 16x9 HD format, but with a vertical squeeze so that the entire 4x3 image was contained within the 16x9 frame, in essentially a "vertical anamorphic" fashion. To generate the 4x3 version, a simple standards conversion (i.e., no cropping) was done from HD to SD. Since SD is 4x3, if the image was displayed on a 4x3 monitor, the proportions "normalized" so that the image looked correct. For the HD version, the image was vertically stretched and then vertically "tilt and scanned" to set the framing, usually based on headroom. This approach was to some degree the opposite of the common center approach because the "processed" version - i.e., the one that required alteration - was the HD version, not the SD version. While this was arguably a pretty good way of retaining wide compositions for both versions, and certainly allowed shows such as multicamera sitcoms to avoid the "4 people in the middle of the frame and air on the sides" syndrome, it required a lot more work to account for legroom, and a lot more attention to the post processing required to create the HD version. In fact, the "tilt and scan" approach usually required a separate session to do the vertical panning, adding time and cost to the process. Eventually, everyone settled on the rather creatively flawed common center approach, which although widely disliked, did allow for direct control over both framings by production at the time of shooting.

(there were a few exceptions -- I read that "Law and Order" framed for 16x9 because they thought that the crop on the sides to 4x3 made the image look cinematic, like it was extracted from a widescreen movie or something.)
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My friend Mike Robin (later the executive producer of shows like Nip/Tuck, Popular, The Closer, and Dallas) was a big fan of letterboxing 4x3 broadcast, and got ABC to agree to it on his first show as a showrunner (a show called "C-16"). Unfortunately, the people at the network didn't fully understand what they were agreeing to, and when Mike started delivering the shows, they got cold feet, and asked him to go back to 4x3. The problem was that the show was framed for 16x9 in production, and "opening up" the 16x9 matte would expose things like dolly tracks, missing ceiling pieces, mic booms, and the like. So they agreed to air the letterbox shows as is, but made him go back to 4x3 after, as I recall, the 6th episode. But I believe that "C16" was actually the first show to be broadcast that way, at least on one of the broadcast networks.

Then by the 1990's you had more TV shows shooting in 3-perf, which has a native 16x9 shape in full aperture, so in that case, 4x3 would have been extracted from the center in most cases, sharing common top & bottom with 16x9.
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We actually started using 3 perf at Lorimar in the late 1980's. The first show to use it was "Max Headroom," which was a show that needed to be shot at 30 fps to allow for "live" video playback, but had already been budgeted for 4 perf. By going to 3 perf, we were able to shoot the show at 30fps but use essentially the same amount of film stock as 4 perf at 24fps. So that was the original motivation, but after some testing, we found that we could get pretty good results with 3 perf at 24fps as well, so we changed all of our shows over to that format over the next year or two. That included shows like Dallas, Knots Landing, Falcon Crest, Our House, and numerous sitcoms. The sitcoms were especially receptive because it allowed them to keep rolling for 25% more time on any given mag, something that is very useful when you're shooting in front of a live audience. Because all of these shows were posting on videotape, the only real bottleneck was getting 3 perf support from Rank Cintel, the leading telecine manufacturer at the time. There were a number of other technologies we both used and encouraged that I won't get into here. At first, the only other production company to adopt it was Viacom, who used it on shows like "Father Dowling" and "Matlock." The major studios, particularly Fox, Warners, and Universal, were all still cutting many of their shows on film at the time, so they were much slower to adopt these kind of things. What really got 3 perf to be the norm was two things. One was the introduction of 2000 foot magazines for the Panavision PSR's that were used on many multicamera sitcoms (they later introduced them for the Panaflex GII as well). If you used those on a 3 perf camera, you got almost 25 minutes of running time, allowing fewer reloads in front of the live audience. The other was the eventual adoption of 16x9 as the primary framing, which as David mentioned, 3 perf is uniquely suited for. That didn't happen for a few years, though, and it wasn't until the introduction of HD broadcast that it was really "cemented" as the standard production format.
 
Simon Dunne said:
The BBC shot a lot of stuff on film that has or will be coming to HD. The Avengers springs to mind as dose Dr. Who.
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Hi, I believe the Avengers was made under ITV, but would be a great candidate for blu-ray.

Only one Doctor Who story Spearhead from Space was shot entirely on film. In 1970 BBC staff were on strike and that story had to be shot entirely on location on 16mm. Most of Who is PAL video, with some 16mm location inserts. The BBC purged the archives and destroyed many stories, but some were subsequently found to exist copied to 16mm in black and white, maybe giving the false impression they were shot on film. Of course, Who is shot on HD now, I believe at 1080i50.

One thing which does annoy me is that a chunk of the UK blu-ray releases for Who and spin-off series Torchwood were at an altered framerate optimised for the US, introducing unnecessary artifacts. It is only the recent episodes which has rectified this. Some of the comments here touch on this.
 
Saied_M said:
Hi, I believe the Avengers was made under ITV, but would be a great candidate for blu-ray.
Click to expand...

Spot on. (ATV specifically). It was made by ITC entertainment who also made the afore mentioned Space 1999. The follow up show UFO. The Saint, Randall and Hopkirk (deceased), Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, Stingray, Fireball XL5, The Prisoner, Danger Man, Sapphire and Steel and the Muppet Show amongst others. The last two were sadly videotape productions shot at Elstree Studios which was a studio owned by ATV. It was in fact Elstree that lead to the demise of ATV and ITC entertainment as the government of the time were not happy that so much of their output was shot at Elstree when ATV at that point was the contractor for Birmingham and the Midlands. Given what followed this all seems very ironic.

Anyway, a lot of the ITC productions were shot on film which has helped their longevity.

Freya
 
BigLu said:
Any Examples of shows shot on Film during SD times / Re-packaged 10-15 years later.

RE-done for a 1080 HD re-distribution or DVD HD DVD marketing distribution?

Luis
Click to expand...

Seinfeld has been re-packaged to HD, as has Law & Order.
 
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