Are digitally remastered DVDs a thing of the past, due to new formats coming?
 

I saw Columbo Series One in the shops this week, as was very disapointed to see it had not been digitally remastered, just like Miami Vice wasn't.

Cheers (so far) has been, and it's great.

I was wondering if you DVD gurus thought this was perhaps due to the emergance of new DVD technology on the horizon and that publishers were maybe not keen on the extra expense of remastering, when maybe they will be re-releasing all these popular DVD sets AGAIN in the new format...?

Thoughts?

Old TV shows are very expensive to remaster from the original film elements due to the sheer volume of material in every season. This is really only done for shows that are expected to have very high sales potential (i.e. Cheers, Seinfeld). Most series are just transferred to DVD from the original broadcast masters.

This has nothing to do with any new video formats coming out. It's just the way it's always been. Catalog movie titles are still actively being remastered. Newly remastered editions of Titanic, The Wizard of Oz, and all of the first 4 Batman movies are due by year end, for example.

I doubt it, but who knows. However, I'd say that the act of not remastering has more to do with the lack of care they put into the sets. Being old shows, with modern niche markets, I doubt that the studios would put that much effort into remastering them.

One recent example that I have is the 1987-1990 series Tour of Duty. The first two seasons look like shiite. Barely VHS quality, which is ashame because the first season was probably the best with Season 3 right behind. Season 2 sucked. But that's not important. Anyway, however the 3rd Season looked pretty good with just compression artifacts in the sky shots. About as good you'd expect a show that aired then would look on DVD.

Yep, that's pretty much what I was saying. Old shows that won't sell as much as well as other popular titles won't get the remaster treatment. Like the Tour of Duty example I gave above. Great show, but not remastered. I'd love Lowry Digital to do restoration on it and upmix the DD 2.0 mono to at least 2.0 surround, but it ain't gonna happen.

Although Miami Vice may not be in the same league as Cheers, it was ripe for remastering IMO - that's what I couldn't help but wonder if a few months down the line (or whenever) the new standards are released we'll discover they were holding out on us by releasing (for example) "Miami Vice Fully Remastered Deluxe BlueRay(*)" version, hoping to get sales even from people who already have the set on DVD but hanker after better quality.

(*) I'm not up with the upcoming formats, I might have that wrong heh.

"Digitally remastered" is a meaningless term. The worst of the worst 9th-generation VHS-sourced grey market DVDs claim to be "digitally remastered." Just because you're using digital technology to make a new master, it doesn't mean it'll be any good.

DJ

The Miami Vice issue is more based on studio than anything else... Universal tends to cut corners on stuff like this. They figure (probably correctly) that people will buy it no matter what.

I did buy miami vice it knowing that it was a poor quality release. It was Universal's way or no way.