Rabu, 22 Januari 2014

THE X-FILES gets a HD makeover

Back in 2012, CBS began re-releasing Star Trek: The Next Generation on Blu-Ray. At great expense they went back and remastered the series from the ground up, extracting a HD image from the original 32mm film and redoing all of the effects from scratch. A labourious, expensive and time-consuming task - taking six months and approximately $9 million per season - the work has paid off with the series selling very well. Seasons 6 and 7 of the remastered Next Generation are expected to be released later this year, with Deep Space Nine hopefully to follow.

Before...

It's unsurprising that other companies are now looking at doing the same thing. Warner Brothers have confirmed that they are 'looking at' Babylon 5 and, hopefully, the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (Buffy's first two seasons were particularly poorly mastered and if they can redo them in HD, I think everyone would be grateful). But it's Fox who are the next out of the gate, launching a completely remastered version of The X-Files.

...and after.

Oddly, the HD version of the series isn't launching on Blu-Ray, Netflix or in the States, but on German TV, where ProSieben Maxx have already started airing the series. Picture comparisons posted on various sites already show a huge improvement in image quality, although sadly the effects footage has only been upscaled, not redone from scratch like ST:TNG's. On the one hand, big effects sequences are rare enough in The X-Files that this is not too jarring a problem. On the other, since there are relatively few scenes it's rather baffling why Fox didn't shell out to redo them. Another problem is that stock footage used by the show, particularly of locations in places like Washington, D.C., remain in SD, resulting in occasional-but-brief drops in image quality.

However, one very nice bonus is the fact that the show is now in widescreen. Star Trek: The Next Generation was 'shot for TV', meaning that whilst widescreen cameras were used, only the middle section of the camera view (i.e. what a late 1980s TV audience would see) was kept clear. This means that the widescreen shots often have crew, props, extras, actors waiting for cues, the edge of the stage etc, in view, so it was impossible to get a usable widescreen image. The X-Files, however, was launched after the Laserdisc and early widescreen TV boom of the early 1990s when TV companies realised that widescreen was the way forwards. As a result, it was filmed with widescreen in mind and this new HD release is the first time viewers have been able to see the show in this way. That said, the pilot was shot somewhat differently, with the result being that some cropping was necessary to get it looking right. How Fox are going to handle this on Blu-Ray is unknown, since cropping images to eliminate information just to get a widescreen effect is generally frowned on. The rest of the series, which was apparently filmed to account for this, should not suffer the same problem.

No timeframe has been given for the release of The X-Files on Blu-Ray, but it seems like it's a safe bet for later this year. It's also rather unclear why Fox have slipped the show out on German TV like this before confirming a US release date.

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