DVD Talk review of 'Doctor Who: The Beginning'

[Chris-K]

I read John Sinnott's DVD review of Doctor Who: The Beginning at http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=20936 and...

Nice overview of the set, though you've left out a featurette about the creation of the Daleks on disc 2.

One reason for the aliasing is that some of the prints used are surpressed field telerecordings. What this means is that when film copies were taken of the 405-line videotapes back in the 1960s, only one field of the tape was used to create one frame of film, rather than both, hence a horizontal resolution of less than 200 lines!

Perhaps you should mention VidFIRE? This is a technique invented by members of the "restoration team" that invents fields (remember that the film copies only have half the number of fields per second as the original tapes did) so that the image looks like tape again. It usually works incredibly convincingly.

[John Sinnott]

Thanks for pointing out the missing featurette Chris, I've corrected the review. There were so many bonus things, I guess that one fell through the cracks.

As for the technical reasons behind the aliasing and the VidFIRE technique, I don't really think that fits into the review. I feel that anyone who is interested in that aspect of the programs can read the Restoration Team's website. They do a better job of explaining than I could, and I really think that most readers wouldn't be too interested.

Thanks for your comments!

[Slumbering Fist]

Nice review.

Those restoration team guys are a good lot. I had a back-and-forth email with them regarding tech questions I never even went into detail about in my Doc reviews, for the same reasons: getting into some tech areas is impossible without being long-winded or using terms that risk alienating the average reader who just wants to know, "Does it look okay?"