How would YOU like to see SD content released on Blu-Ray?

[Mondo-A-Go-Go]

There is a plethora of videotaped SD content unreleased on Blu-Ray from decades past. Imagine a show like All in the Family or a Dick Cavett collection or all those cheesy '70s holiday specials released on Blu with a vastly higher bitrate and superior encoding. It seems there's not much of a precedent, with every studio handling this differently.

How would you prefer they be presented?

• non-upscaled, interlaced 480i
  
• upscaled, interlaced 1080i
  
• upscaled, deinterlaced 1080p60

Is doing a beefy 1080p60 upconvert worth it (or sacrilegious), or is it better to let the player/TV do all the work?

[roxics]

Blu-ray doesn't support 1080p60. It only supports up to 1080p30. So 1080i is the best you'll get if you want that slightly smoother motion interlacing offers at sixty fields per second.

Other than that. I have mixed feelings on the matter. I'm involved in doing a 20th anniversary HD remaster of my first feature film right now. It's just a shoestring budget horror flick that was shot in 480i. I'm going mostly HD with it because it's just more compatible with modern streaming. I would love to do a Blu-ray release, but it doesn't make sense for the budget. It would cost me about four times more to do a proper factory replicated Blu-ray over a DVD. But I'm probably not going to do a physical release at all. As much as I want to. The audience isn't there. I may do a very small run on burned media for cast and crew. I did this with my limited run DVDs 19 years ago, (although we did sell some of those to the public) and surprisingly my copy still plays back. I don't know about the others.

I think SD content on Blu-ray is an interesting idea. But I think people expect HD on Blu-ray, so if you're going to release a BD it probably should be HD, even if it's just upscaled from SD. Although a purest may disagree. But then a true purest would probably want 2" analog tape for shows that old. Lol!

[i95]

Originally Posted by Mondo-A-Go-Go

There is a plethora of videotaped SD content

Most likely, it will be DVD boxset

my preference native 480i 5mbps on BD, let TV handle it.

Originally Posted by roxics

I would love to do a Blu-ray release, but it doesn't make sense for the budget. It would cost me about four times more to do a proper factory replicated Blu-ray over a DVD. But I'm probably not going to do a physical release at all. As much as I want to. The audience isn't there. I may do a very small run on burned media

MOD is the way to go, if you really need replicated disc then avchd on dvd dual layer.

[meremortal]

It's been done before with decent results. Fraggle Rock is an example of a release that was upconverted sd to hd and with lossless audio. Not sure if there would be any major advantage to the pq other than a much higher bitrate. But lossless audio can be a nice bonus, assuming it is also not just an upconvert. For things like tv shows not shot on film, it could be worthwhile for space savings alone if price is good. People on the forums tend to bash dvd, but it can still look and sound reasonably close to blu if using the same source. It's just a shame dvd authoring didn't adapt to more modern codecs like MPEG-4 or something similar to FLAC for the audio.

[apollo828]

I'm sort of in the middle. Properly deinterlaced & upscaled, 720p30 should be spec-compliant and should look fine. (I know 1080p30 is spec-compliant, if unusual. Can't imagine why 720p30 wouldn't be.) IIRC, people who do a lot of work with analog video recommend 720p60 for YouTube for many reasons, although as mentioned earlier, 60p isn't spec-compliant.

[KootiePie]

Originally Posted by Mondo-A-Go-Go

non-upscaled, interlaced 480i

This, always. Not that familiar with old tape, I guess 480i should be enough. Look at the recent Blackadder set, except the film bits it looks atrocious. It would had been much better if they crammed the previous DVDs as is on BD. Here I have the file sizes, the 24 episodes + specials in SD (with Back & Forth in HD) fit neatly on a BD50.

Then a 2nd disc in 1080p with the 1st series (to have the film parts in full glory) and extras would complete the deal. Any inconsistencies with the MPEG2 encode in the DVDs would be gone with H264 on BD. It would had been the perfect set.

Same goes for film no one can be bothered to restore. There are 1000s of DVDs that never made it to BD and probably never will. I'd gladly have sets of like 10 films per disc on one BD at a cheap price. 480i with pulldown gets you 23.976fps, so no issues on the framerate front.

Leave the upscaling to the player, sharper, softer, I get to choose.

Originally Posted by roxics

Blu-ray doesn't support 1080p60.

The UHD standard does. Along UHD it added a bunch of other resolutions, like 1080p25 and 1080p60. But I doubt anyone will ever release a disc that requires a UHD player for 1080, 60p or not.

Originally Posted by roxics

But I'm probably not going to do a physical release at all. As much as I want to.

I always liked the idea of MOD BD-R discs if it keeps costs down.

Originally Posted by roxics

But I think people expect HD on Blu-ray

I think this is the biggest problem. Even if you plaster "SD" all over the cover ppl will still ask why it looks like DVD.

Originally Posted by meremortal

but it can still look and sound reasonably close to blu if using the same source.

Not sure if "close", the DVD -> BD jump is pretty big imo. But I agree that DVD can look very good. I guess the main issue was that back in the DVD days many companies were throwing whatever crappy prints they had lying around with no second though to the encoding. Many did not even bother with anamorphic and you get a horrible letterboxed picture using even less than the few pixels DVD has to spare. Also PAL always suffers with film content.

But take a DVD [NTSC if film] from a good label and suddenly you don't mind watching SD, heck after 5 minutes you even forget you're watching SD.

[veritas]

I just want it to look the best that it can. I don't really care how they format it as long as its as clean, stable and color restored as it can be.

[Warm Gun]

Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog is the perfect example, except for having a single video file for the episodes on each disc, meant to dissuade piracy, but annoying for giving the user a seekbar on their BD player that's like eighteen hours long. Anyway, fifty episodes on one disc in 480i with superior (to MPEG2) AVC compression. It looks nice. I don't care for the look of SD upscales.