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After years of only releasing individual stories, BBC is finally releasing full seasons of the first seven Doctors.
They are starting with Tom Baker's first season.
Worth mentioning this is on Blu-Ray, which is quite handy. Because the original show was shot on video, there's hard limits on the degree to which they can improve things (don't go in expecting this to be a ST:TNG level of quality increase), but it does look a fair bit better on a HD TV than the old DVDs.
There's also the option to watch with some new effects, particularly on REVENGE OF THE CYBERMEN where they replace the space station's displays with newer, more impressive effects which are still true to the original aesthetics. Unfortunately they only did that one story.
Chief Technical Officer
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Because the original show was shot on video, there's hard limits on the degree to which they can improve things...
Location shooting and many optical effects (especially models) were usually shot on film. Original film inserts still exist for some episodes (mostly later ones), so they could be rescanned in much higher quality than back in the day (though this gets tricky if postproduction effects were added).
They did this for the DVD release of Castrovalva; you can read about it—and see the improvement—here. (They also did it for the blu-ray of Spearhead in Space, which is the one classic BBC story that was shot entirely on film.)
I'll be curious to see if they ever do that for this line.
Location shooting and many optical effects (especially models) were usually shot on film. Original film inserts still exist for some episodes (mostly later ones), so they could be rescanned in much higher quality than back in the day (though this gets tricky if postproduction effects were added).
They did this for the DVD release of Castrovalva; you can read about it—and see the improvement—here. (They also did it for the blu-ray of Spearhead in Space, which is the one classic BBC story that was shot entirely on film.)
I'll be curious to see if they ever do that for this line.
Oh indeed, but for some DW stories it's not possible because the original film elements have been lost. But I was more referring to this season in particular, where they experimented with using location video shooting. That's most evident in The Sontaran Experiment, which was entirely shot on video outdoors (IIRC, the location shoots in Robot, Genesis and the cave sequences in Revenge were mostly shot on 16mm) so there's not much they can do to improve that episode, although apparently they have had some success.
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Chief Technical Officer
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...IIRC, the location shoots in Robot, Genesis and the cave sequences in Revenge were mostly shot on 16mm...
Apparently they first used Outside Broadcast video on some of the Robot location shoot; I gather mostly for the parts that used CSO (aka "blue screen"... though the screens were actually yellow for this story).
If you ever want way too much detail on which episodes were shot in which format, and what bits are still held by the BBC and in what form, see this page. (It's 20 years old, and a handful of episodes and other bits and pieces have turned up since then, but it's the most thorough document I know of.)