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Showing posts from June, 2020

AI on Classic Doctor Who. Why it's bad.

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   I can’t believe I am writing a post like this, but I really fear for the future of The Collection.     The restoration work carried out on Classic Doctor Who had always been to such a high standard. When the show started coming out on Blu-ray in 2018 I was incredibly impressed how the picture looked. Free from DVD compression, allowing the master tapes of episodes shot on 2” or 1”inch video tape to shine through. There was picture noise, a bit of blurriness at times, but that was ok. No-one complained because we all knew how the episodes were made back in the 20 th Century. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. So I have to question why BBC Studios decided to risk all of that by starting to use AI to upscale the footage? In principle it may sound good, maybe even beneficial to the episodes, but the problem is AI is just what an algorithm thinks an image should look like, leaving in its wake a huge number artefacts that change how an episode looks. P...
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Why The Crusade might not ever get animated.

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  When reading online discussions about the animation and The Collection ranges, one of the most common wishes from individual fans is for the BBC to animate the two missing episodes for The Crusade.   Just by animating those 2 episodes it would complete the 4 part story and the whole Season 2, enabling a complete watchable run from An Unearthly Child through to Mission to the Unknown (if you count the cut-down recons on DVD of Marco Polo and Galaxy 4 plus the brilliant UCLAN recreation of Mission to the Unknown). But sadly, it is not as simple as that. Back in the days of the DVD range, the general rule for animation was if a story requires two or less missing episodes then it might be feasible.   This rule led to the animation of missing episodes from The Reign of Terror, The Tenth Planet, The Moonbase, The Ice Warriors and The Invasion plus the animation for The Underwater Menace which was never completed. When it comes to The Crusade, the biggest ...
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