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Showing posts from February, 2024

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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Have the 60’s set have got even more complicated?

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It was about a year ago I last wrote on this blog about 60’s The Collection Blu-ray’s, celebrating the news that the animation was in fact continuing, despite BBC America pulling out of funding. With The Celestial Toymaker due to be released next month, it will take us over the 50% mark for number of missing episodes animated. Such an achievement. Also, with Season 15 coming out next month, we will appropriately be 15 seasons sets into The Collection, with another 11 seasons to go. We are reaching a sort of crunch time. Assuming the next Collection set after Season 15 isn’t a 60’s season, for an even spread of box sets throughout the remainder of the range, ever other set really needs to be a black and white season. According to The Mirror, The Smugglers was mentioned alongside The Underwater Menace for animation. Seeing as we haven’t had that yet, maybe we can assume it’s the next serial up for the treatment? This would leave 4 of the 5 remaining 60’s sets tantalisingly close to c...
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