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Showing posts from February, 2023

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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What a difference a year makes - The Future of 60's Who on Blu-ray

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  About a year ago The Mirror reported the end of Doctor Who missing episode animations because BBC America had pulled out of co-funding them, with the final release being The Abominable Snowmen last September. It was very disappointing news. It felt like it was the worst time to stop. We were just 5 episodes away from being over the half way mark in terms of animated episodes. But thankfully situations can change. 11 months after the original article The Mirror reported that funding had been sourced and that the completely missing Hartnell story The Smugglers and 50% missing story The Underwater Menace are next in line. If that wasn’t exciting enough, the article also stated that colourisations of Hartnell and Troughton episodes are planned including “An Unearthly Child”.   Of course this is a newspaper we are talking about, and sometimes the stories they report aren’t always true, particularly on the entertainment front. However the journalist Nicola Methven has an ext...
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