From the Earth to the Moon

[scarecroe]

I'm curious as to why From the Earth to the Moon has never been released in HD. Does anyone know how to contact HBO home video?

For a Ron Howard/Tom Hanks production, you'd think it would be a no-brainer.

Wikipedia: From the Earth to the Moon (miniseries)

[MifuneFan]

Because HBO sucks

[stdepriest]

Because it was released in standard definition for TV. They would have to either upscale the existing special effects shots or recreate them in higher definition.

CBS took this route with Star Trek: TNG. While the results are generally fantastic, the sales were less than expected. I am sure CBS will recoup the costs from syndication, blu-ray, and streaming revenue, but it is unlikely there is a large enough fan-base for From the Earth to the Moon to make it worth the effort involved.

[rickah88]

Dammit!! Why did I even bother getting excited when I saw the thread title!

[MifuneFan]

Originally Posted by stdepriest

Because it was released in standard definition for TV. They would have to either upscale the existing special effects shots or recreate them in higher definition.

CBS took this route with Star Trek: TNG. While the results are generally fantastic, the sales were less than expected. I am sure CBS will recoup the costs from syndication, blu-ray, and streaming revenue, but it is unlikely there is a large enough fan-base for From the Earth to the Moon to make it worth the effort involved.

Assuming there are no HD sources for the special effects, I think fans would rather have the show on BD with upscaled effects, than no BD at all. The series itself was shot on 35mm film.

[lee7n]

Originally Posted by MifuneFan

Assuming there are no HD sources for the special effects, I think fans would rather have the show on BD with upscaled effects, than no BD at all. The series itself was shot on 35mm film.

That would not look any better, upscaling is not the answer.

[trevanian]

Originally Posted by lee7n

That would not look any better, upscaling is not the answer.

Upscaling is not an ideal answer, but it has to be better than what they went with. The ideal answer was the TNG solution -- you keep the great original 35mm vfx elements, and recomp them with new backgrounds as needed. Discarding most or all of the 8month motion control miniature shoot in favor of this whole-cloth CG approach seems disgraceful to me, to say nothing of just plain stupid given the apparent quality drop.

If you have a perfectly good live-action scene of an actor walking across frame, but it was shot against a visibly inferior looking RP background, do you reanimate the actor in CG so you can have a uniform quality image of actor walking and background?

[scarecroe]

Originally Posted by stdepriest

Because it was released in standard definition for TV.

Aw, phooey. HBO went HD only a year later. [src]

As HD wasn't so far away, I wonder if the production team had the foresight to create the FX at a higher resolution and that there's no need to re-render or upscale.

.

[AmishParadise]

Figured this thread could use a bump. Come on HBO. This would sell like hotcakes on Blu-ray. Make it happen! Whatever it takes to serve this up. I'm sure the end result would still beat the pants off the DVD's.

[Mr Kite]

And another Bump.........has to come at some point surely?

[CouncilSpectre]

Loved the soundtrack

The DVDs look OK upscaled, but the PQ would certainly benefit from a proper HD scan.

HBO have been pretty good of late with getting their catalogue out onto BD - The Wire, The Sopranos, Deadwood etc - fingers crossed for this, and Carnivale.

[rickah88]

They could just releases the discs in envelopes and I will place them right in that gorgeous dvd digipak.

[scarecroe]

Maybe if Ron Howard & Brian Grazer's Mars mini-series does well, HBO might get inspired to do an HD scan of FtEttM for Blu-ray. *wishful thinking*

[AmishParadise]

Back when this was released on DVD years ago I created some pretty fun disc selection pages for the Philips ProntoPro NG TSU7500 remote (Display Resolution: 240x320) I was using at the time per selecting and initiating playback of a given disc from the boxset. See below.



For this title once browsing and selecting the boxset you were taken to the above series of screens. Normally I designed pages for the normal portrait orientation of the remote. For this title and some others I went with landscape instead once selecting the given boxset. Each page above is one large button. Once deciding on a disc you just tapped anywhere on the screen to play it. The remote in turn would display loading pages while it prepared the system and particular changer to play the DVD. Just as the disc would start to play you'd be taken to the activity for controlling the DVD changer, the lights in the room fading to black.

In any event, had the above animated gif sitting on my hard drive. Just thought I'd share. Would absolutely love to see this title receive the Blu-ray treatment. Whatever they could put together would certainly be appreciated greatly by the fans.

[shmn]

Since I don't see a BR version arriving in the near future...I want to purchase the DVD set but see so many different versions. Anyone know the differences? I would prefer the original 4:3 ratio since the 16:9 is just a crop.

I see there are a 2016 and 2009 "Standard Edition" and a 2009 and 1998 "Collector's Edition".

Anyone know what the different versions offer?

[AmishParadise]

The original release in 1.33:1 was a 4-disc set and released in 1998. See below.

From the Earth to the Moon (Four Disc Collector's Edition)

The remastered version in 1.78:1 was released in 2005 and is a 5-disc set. All the other sellers on Amazon appear to be offering 1.78:1 version.

[shmn]

Originally Posted by AmishParadise

The original release in 1.33:1 was a 4-disc set and released in 1998. See below.

From the Earth to the Moon (Four Disc Collector's Edition)

The remastered version in 1.78:1 was released in 2005 and is a 5-disc set. All the other sellers on Amazon appear to be offering 1.78:1 version.

Thanks for the help.

[HelmutNewton]

My buddy has been raving about this lately. I guess I'll just pick up the DVD.

[Oliver Gigacz]

For anyone interested, the show was just recently shown on the Box Sets channel here in Australia, it was broadcast in 16:9 and HD. It looked great. Special effects obviously are nothing compared to todays standards but the actual 35mm elements look really good remastered in HD. So hopefully we will get either a BD or Digital HD release in the future.

[thorr]

Originally Posted by Oliver Gigacz

For anyone interested, the show was just recently shown on the Box Sets channel here in Australia, it was broadcast in 16:9 and HD. It looked great. Special effects obviously are nothing compared to todays standards but the actual 35mm elements look really good remastered in HD. So hopefully we will get either a BD or Digital HD release in the future.

Awesome! I went searching about an HD version of this and saw on another forum that it was shot in 35mm and post processed and edited in HD. I hope it makes its way to Bluray or Amazon Prime. I own both sets of DVD's and they both have their advantages. The 4:3 version looks heavily interlaced (watch it with VLC without deinterlacing turned on to see what I mean), and the 16:9 version doesn't have this problem. The 16:9 version adds picture to the sides and crops from the top and the bottom. The cropping on the top and bottom is sometimes a problem (like when Alan Shepard is watching the film making fun of him not being in space, the words on the film are cut off on the bottom). The perfect version would be a reframed 16:9 version where it doesn't cut off important things like that, or go back to the 4:3 version. They could make it 16:9 most of the time and add black bars where needed to get more of the picture in. Maybe the perfect perfect version would be to include the entire 35 mm frame with the rounded corners, then crop it in just a bit so the corners are not rounded and have black bars on the sides. Here are some comparisons for the two DVD versions (scroll down): http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/17788...ature-edition/

Edit: I did my own comparison of my copies of the 4:3 and the 16:9 and I would say there is more picture information on the 16:9 version gained on the left and right than there is lost on the top and bottom on the 4:3 version. In other words, the 16:9 version is slightly better. I actually started out with the intention of overlaying the two and producing a new video containing all of the available picture information from both versions but the color is different and it is sort of all over the place and would take forever to make it line up and look good, so I quickly gave up. As I said above, I would love to have most of the 35 mm frame in the HD version with black bars on the left and right. I am sure it won't happen though. If anything, we would get the 16:9 version.