Warner Home Video has announced that they will release the National Geographic film 'Journey to the Edge of the Universe' to Blu-ray on March 31st. Additionally, they have announced that they will bring the BBC program 'Cranford' to Blu-ray on April 14th. No technical specs or special features have been announced at this time.
Journey to the center of the universe would be well worth buying just to see in such a beautiful picture. I don't think that I'm going to buy it though I will just rent it.
True, DW (the new series, a.k.a. DW2005) is shot in "SD", but then again that's BBC-SD or 576i PAL, shot on Digital Beta Cam tapes. The old series was shot on a combination of 16mm film (mostly early 60s episodes and all outdoors scenes untill 1978, when they stated using [HUGE] outdoor PAL video cameras) and analog videotape (the big studio ones, much bigger than VHS or Beta) for (most of) the indoor scenes (it was cheaper than film, and could be taped over/ reused if needed). Now the 16mm parts (asumming they are still around and restoreable) do technicaly have detail equivalent to 2K digital cinema (2048x1080) and can be scaned with a 1080p or 2K or better telecine and will have more detail than a SD scan or downconversion. As for the 576i stuff (either analog or digital), it does have slightly more detail than a 480i DVD conversion, but it's not HD, however; they could use Toshibas (or another similar upconverter) S.U.C. that looks at adjacent frames for aditional detail (only works if there are adjacent frames that are similar but slighly different; ie. there is small movement of images that allow recovery of details that were "between" the pixels of the center frame) to try to extract as much detail as possible. Now, if a trained and experienced operator supervises the "adjacent frame detail enhancement" we could get 1080p video that looks like "almost" HD on most scenes, but falls back to "ED" durring fast motion or cutting (which is usually blurred or happens too fast to catch the drop in detail). It would not be True HD, but it would look a lot better than an upconverted DVD, and you could fit more episodes per disc, and have fewer discs per season/year.
I personaly looked most of this up when I saw 'Doctor Who' listed on Amazons "first to know" list (for notification once a Blu-ray is available for pre-order) and started to research what the show(s) (both original (1963) and extra crispy, um... I mean "new" series (2005)) was shot on. I orginally planed to just get the DVDs (a friend of mine, the one who turned me onto DW, lends me her copies from time to time) but after researching it a bit more, it is possible for the BBC (or BBC American and/or BBC home video) to put out an "Enhanced Definiton" version of both the old and new series on Blu-ray with "near" HD quality. As the man said: "I'd buy that for a dollar!" (or $60/season for DW2005+, $15-20/"episode" (usually 4-6 25min parts) of the DW1963+ show). Let's cross our fingers, and write the BBC or BBC America if you want them to do this, I know I will.
