I constantly keep an eye out for Blu ray bargains on ebay and quite often see a lot of much older films for sale. Has film always been recorded in HD quality and only recently have tv's been able to reproduce the quality or are they all up-scaled somehow. I have a lot of the films I'm interested in on dvd already and my blu ray player is capable of up-scaling them so i don't want to be buying these blu rays if the best I'm going to get is already achievable from my dvd's. Enlighten me
It all depends on how good the original film print is and how much money is spent converting the film. Some prints are presumably in a better condition from more careful storage, and with more time cleaning it up you can get some sensational results. Bottom line is there's no such thing as "HD" quality of film, realistically.
Product reviews on Amazon are often the best guide to the quality of a transfer (they would've prevented me from wasting my time with Black Hawk Down on BR, for instance - not an old film, I know, but a lousy transfer). They don't always mention it, though, and with some old stuff you have to wonder. For instance, this recently caught my eye: Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, Blu-Ray The show was awesome, but it might as well have been filmed on sandpaper given how it looked. I'm having a really hard time imagining that it's greatly improved by the BR transfer...but the off-chance that it is is making it hard to resist.
Well if the content was recorded in Anologue, and you can still access said recording then you can make a 'hd' version of it, which should be better than a DVD copy yes I do believe
If it was recorded on 35mm, it has equivelent of about 96MP so... films recorded on other medium like VHS or early digital are not going to be any better than whatever it was recorded at. Film transfer quality varies a great deal and of course there is only so much that can be done if they no longer have any pristine prints to work from.
Movie film stock is inherently greater than HD, and anything outside of home videos and low-budget porn was not recorded on VHS. VHS was an end-product format. To give a related example: currently the Johnson Space Center is digitizing all of the old film stock from the history of human space flight. All of the old 16mm film is being scanned at least 4K resolution. Theatrical movie film stock can be anything from 8mm to 70mm, depending on the year, studio, and desired format. I believe most typical 'Hollywood' movies are shot on either 35mm or 70mm stock. Whether or not a Blu-ray print is truly 'HD' depends on a number of factors. Before a film reel gets to your local theater, it began life as a negative from the camera. From that original camera negative a film maker would create an answer print (this is the stage in which certain adjustments are made - e.g. color is timed). After the answer print comes the interpositive, then the dupe negative copies. The dupe negative copies are used to make the release prints, which are distributed to theaters. In the recent history of film making, the digital intermediate took the place of the answer print. So the question to ask is at which stage was the Blu-ray created. Was it produced from a high resolution scan of the dupe negative or one of the remaining release prints? If it's a recent film, was it created from the digital intermediate? Was it just upscaled and transcoded from the old DVD release? Unless it's a major blockbuster movie that is of some significance, chances are the 'HD' Blu-ray copy is just an upscaled version of the old SD copy. Cleaning, re-scanning, and digitally re-mastering a movie is an expensive, laborious, and time consuming process. Few studios are inclined to make the effort (and spend the money) for most older movies. This assumes the film stock is even still available. Ever wondered why the old Disney animated movies aren't re-photographed from the original painted cels? It's because the cels had relatively low friction, and the original animators were known to surf down the hallways after the frame was shot.
That's some very in depth info there and exactly what I was looking for and kind of expected to be the case. Thanks.
