I'm pretty sure all the rumours about Levine simply date back to the 80s, when he had uncut copies of Time Meddler 1 & 3 (whereas the BBC only had the censored Nigerian copies), but... ... people knew this because his prints were being circulated on the VIS fan circuit. It wasn't a secret then, and if he had stuff now I doubt it would remain secret for long.
Vast improvement. If Nicholas Briggs overdubbed the dodgy Cyberman voices here too, 'Revenge of the Cybermen' would easily become the equal of the rest of the season.
I'm not sure if it's blasphemy to replace those cheesy effects or not. I mean, that's what classic Who was about for many of us, good cheesy fun.
I'll probably get it since this is proper Doctor Who and the BBC wouldn't do it unless there were some noticeable improvements.
I would hope the Beeb would do it for the sake of us that didn't buy those 1 episode DVD's, but either way I'll be buying this set and hopefully the future sets. Until I saw that comparison video, I would've had a hard time remembering the original scenes.
Strange, it's coming up fine on my computer (and others are apparently seeing it too). Oh well, here's a direct link for you.
The SFX for Revenge sure are better than than those for the Ark in Space special edition. But regardless, I'd wager they could've revamped the Cybermen voices, not redub them, but play with their pitch, to make them sound more robotic and all.
I did buy the DVDs. The updated effects are optional and sympathetic to the original. However, new effects and extras are not enough to persuade me to shell out £40 without knowing if every other season will also be released in this format. I can wait a long time - as I did for the DVDs - for the sets to plummet in price.
Wow. The CGI is iffy in moments but even the iffiest of the iffiest if still looks better than the original. Pity they couldn't CGI the dialogue into something less pitiful. "Rockets in the nose cone so it must be alien!" *facepalm* The upscaling to HD was very well done, too. A really fantastic surprise. I'll be buying future sets for all Doctors they re-release for. Amazon had it for $70 originally, but the final release price was $48 - which was so much nicer. Depending on sales, it'll get down to $30 if it doesn't sell very fast. But Tom's era was the most popular and it's easy to see why. Speaking of that, the complete Capaldi era dropped from $110 to $75 on Amazon. And I thought $110 was a great price!
Currently unavailable on Amazon UK so I guess it sold out. In that case, I doubt the price will drop very fast when it's available again - supply and demand...
I'd read the Restoration Team is behind this season's blu-ray release as well. That explains a lot in terms of the quality. And future blu-ray releases, when possible, will have the 16mm film elements scanned in HD and video re-edited to include that. Not all stories have their original 16mm negatives, but many do. Season 12 (Tom's first) had virtually no filmed inserts (apart from a couple of f/x shots and a large portion of location work for "Genesis of the Daleks" - which sadly no longer exists (indicated from the RT's website and at the time of the DVD release, but I've not read anything more recent.) But even "Genesis" in the original VT edit will still look better on the blu-ray release compared to the DVD thanks to the better/lesser compression.)
I know what you mean. Although the CG for the DVD special edition of Enlightenment is actually pretty decent, it takes away from the cheesy fun of seeing actual sailing ships inserted against a space background of the original.
I watched Robot on the blu ray set. I was very impressed with the improved image quality. I wasn't expecting the difference between the DVD and blu ray to be that noticeable given the source material. A very nice surprise!
@Asbo Zaprudder, if nothing else, check out the new extras for the blu-ray release. It's still pricey, but the new bits and interviews almost make the purchase worthwhile on their own - particularly if one is a hardcore fan. I thought it was fantastic seeing Tom's companions (and Philip HInchcliffe) sitting through his season 12 stories and commenting on them. Neither was I and I knew there would be two improvements upfront after finding out the disc count- the lack of MPEG compression and improved sound. What I didn't expect was a FPS drop (it's closer to 24FPS filmic than fluid videotape (25FPS PAL or converted to 29.97FPS NTSC)), but the slight FPS drop/film effect would have been necessary for the deinterlacing process anyway, which looks phenomenal (even the most glaring examples don't look as harsh as one might expect) and is easily well worth the small tradeoff. Looking at the footage, I suspect they may have done some color enhancement. The edge sharpening halos are still a leftover from their initial remastering, but it's nowhere near as soft and jaggy as the upscaled TNG-R SD scenes were, moire is surprisingly limited given the circumstances, no chroma bleed, color saturation is fantastic, and the lack of visible compression blocks is a step up in of itself. And I'll say this: Compared to the DVD release, the Cybermat scenes where the prop was in front of a CSO screen were much more convincing; harder to detect the difference between prop and background. The RT may have been doing something else to make the Cybermat prop blend in better but it looks great either way. I still want to go back to the DVD and compare screencaps, since I'm that pedantic. But either which way, hardcore fans will want to double-dip and there's never been a better time to go Blu-Ray.
If you do that, it would be cool if you could post some comparisons here. I'd love to see that. I haven't had time to look at any of the new special features yet. But, they sound great! Definitely a worthwhile purchase for hardcore fans. I say that even though I was initially skeptical about this set.
My playback software might not do blu-ray screencaptures but I hope it does. If it's possible I'll put up a couple as reference; seeing MPEG compression blocks on a 48" TV screen was a bit of a downer so now seeing none is, to me anyway, big in of itself... I'll try for tomorrow. The extra new features are indeed great! I've not seen the hour-long interview with Tom Baker yet, but they added to existing documentaries and put him into those, as well as the "Behind the Sofa" segments I'd mentioned earlier.