"Spaced": The Complete Series Blu-ray - TBA

[insomniac013]

even if it's just a minor improvement, i will buy it. It's Spaced and it deserves it.

[jimbean]

Never actually watched this properly but day one

[drush9999]

I almost bumped into Jessica Hynes on the tube a couple of years ago. She hasn't aged much in the intervening years.

[Mister_Kidd]

Is this actually coming?

[Vashetti]

Originally Posted by Mister_Kidd

Is this actually coming?

I imagine they couldn't get any discernible difference compared to the DVD release to make it viable.

[darrellmaclaine]

It would be utterly pointless - it's not even full res PAL due to the way those kind of shows were post-produced at the time, so even the upscaling algorithms wouldn't work. Same goes for The League Of Gentlemen, Little Britain, The Office, early Peep Show, Big Train, The Mighty Boosh, Dr Terrible, Phoenix Nights, Black Books, Catherine Tate, and dozens of other DVD-hit comedies and dramas of the day. You are literally dealing with a vertical resolution of 238 lines after the processing. It's closer to VHS than it is to Bluray!

The amount of filmlook UK comedy shows shot on actual film between 1996-2010 (the key 'filmised video' era) is absolutely minuscule. The Royle Family, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, and inserts in One Foot In The Grave and Only Fools And Horses - I think that's the entire list! The rest are all at a resolution which even DVD is overkill for.

[oddbox83]

Nonsense - the upscaling algorithms will upscale regardless. The horizontal resolution remains standard SD quality.

We've already got upscaled releases of shows with the "film effect" processing. Doctor Who series 1-4 and Red Dwarf series 7, and probably more I forget. Oh, and that Day of the Triffids travesty where they filmized the video material on purpose for the Blu-ray despite it not originally being done that way.

[darrellmaclaine]

Interlaced VT deinterlaced in an HD environment as per the Triffids folly will look slightly better as it has gone through the upscaler untampered. Virtually all of the filmised era of UK TV had artificial sharpening and added grain/noise, and the worst examples had a slightly pixellated appearance. These are huge barriers to an upscaler algorithm being able to work well, and when the screen is already full of video noise from heavy grading and lumpy fake grain and jaggies from the filmising effects, even the advantage of a better encoding algorithm is minimal.

The horizontal resolution is also compromised by the way due to the way PAL widescreen was an anamorphic 4:3 frame. There's so little to work with there - even the videolook stuff from that era looks way worse than the analogue 4:3 stuff.