What are some blu-rays that are not truly in HD?

I just watched the It's Always Sunny Christmas Special and there's a note from the producers about how it was shot on standard definition and upconverted before encoding (looked pretty bad, no better than just upconverting a DVD with my player).

I was wondering if this is a common practice? Has anyone else come across discs like this?

Others: Cannibal Taboo (shot on DV), 28 Days Later (shot on DV), Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy (webseries; produced in SD), and Gulliver's Travels (judging by all the ghosting and tracking errors, it's nicked straight from low-res analog video).

If that's not a complete list, it ought to be really close. It's definitely not a common practice.

Highlander Season 1 is upconverted from 480i because that's what the SFX were filmed at, and they didn't want to pay to redo them.

Firefly: The Complete Series - Any FX shots are SD, upconverted from 480p sources.

Samurai Champloo - 480p upconverted video

28 Days Later, while shot on SD video, it's worth pointing out that the last few minutes were shot on 35mm. That might inform your decision to buy, I don't know.

The first 10 episodes of The Simpsons Season 20 are SD upconverts. The rest of the season is HD as that's when the HD production cycle started.

I think we will start to see many Blu-ray discs coming out that are really standard-def but just capitalizing on the Blu-ray name brand.

"People want Blu-ray! We'll give it to them on a Blu-ray disc!" will become the motto for many smaller films, documentaries and TV shows using older content. Why bother even up-converting when they can play it on their Blu-ray players & it will up-convert it automatically.

Maybe the Blu-ray replicating factories have a screening process in place to assure consumers that what they are receiving is genuine 1080p HD?

Even with the high budget network TV shows they could conceivably go back to the 35mm film stock, which many of the sitcoms were shot on, and re-transfer them to HD.

Although I'm not sure how the process works whether they shot on 35mm, transferred everything to video and then edited the programs together on video? Maybe a complete, edited 35mm print does not exist for some shows.

Regardless, that's a huge expense and how many people are going to re-purchase "Seinfeld" in HD after they bought the DVD? Do you really need to see it in HD after watching it for years in its native SD?

It's a little like watching "The Honeymooners" in colour HD. You remember the show in grainy B&W, that's the way you would want to re-watch it? Wouldn't you?

The entire Seinfeld series has already been completely re-done in HD from the original camera negatives. It was part of the syndication package deal. Extremely costly, but Seinfeld commands so much in syndication fees that they went ahead and did it. The eventuality of a Seinfeld Blu-ray set is almost a certainty to happen. Once Blu-ray gets enough mainstream penetration, expect to be shelling out for the show once again on Blu-ray.

Related to the topic of the thread, Quarantine looks shot at a resolution below 1080p on digital video.

I didn't get that impression. It was shot with the Sony F23, the same camera used for Cloverfield, and it's definitely a 1080p camera.

A lot of sitcoms were recorded on tape, so any Blu's will be upconversions ( or just mega sets of series on one or two BluRay discs)

Star Trek TNG, DS9 and VOY were all shot on film but edited with the FX on tape, so any remastering will be a massive undertaking (over 170 eps each series).

Just wanted to point out that Seinfeld was also chopped to 16:9 when done in HD.

There are 4x3 and 16x9 HD masters. The cropped versions aren't the only ones in existence...actually, the 4x3 DVDs were culled from the 4x3 high definition remasters.

28 days later does have tad bit more resolution being that it was filmed in PAL format. Something like 576 lines instead of 480 (not positive about the difference.) So there is some to be gained with the BR, but not much at all.

I have heard this, as well as claims the entire first season's film neg was lost in a fire. I wonder if that was just an excuse to not have re-edit the entire episodes along with new effects.

There is a ton of work to be done on just about any series from the late 80's into the early part of the 00's. Most shows were shot on film but were edited on video/effects done for 480 resolution. The X-files is another that would benefit a great deal, but the effects would need to be redone. I only hope when this starts happening they stay as true to the original effects as possible.

They had the XL1 camera in 'frame' mode: to get a progressive image from a camera that was built to do interlaced stuff, and the way it works for that rig, the resolution drops. Between that and the matting, there are fewer than 300 lines of resolution.

Wow, so the image actually is less than SD? Didn't know that.
I had always heard they chose to go with PAL to gain resolution.
Thanks for the info.

Yes, but the movie was shot in dim lighting and (due to its handheld style) has erratic focus. In general, the movie looks to be about a 720p-ish level of resolution. That's not a scientific measurement, of course. But that's what it looks like to the eye.

The 16:9 HD broadcasts were not just straight crop-jobs. Like Hogan's Heroes, the original film elements were scanned to the edges of the frame, which exposes a small bit more picture on the sides than originally intended. The resulting image from that is slightly stretched and then slightly cropped. The overall effect is less distractingly distorted than a straight-crop or straight stretch. But it still looks "off" and is not the original composition or intent.

As Adam mentioned, 4:3 HD masters were prepared simultaneously.

No, they went PAL because Boyle wanted to shoot the movie with a consumer camcorder. And being in England, PAL was the standard there at the time.

He actually went out of his way to degrade the image because he wanted it to look as "ugly" as possible. In addition to shooting in Frame Mode, he applied all sorts of nasty post-processing effects. Had he shot the movie conventionally, that camera could have produced a (relatively) better-looking picture than what we got. It was Boyle's intent that the movie look really rough and video-ish.

Oh, I agree that it certainly doesn't gleam the way Cloverfield does (or Speed Racer, which I was surprised to read was shot with the same model of camera). I was just saying that it didn't look like standard-def to my eyes.

I don't think the local standard use of PAL was really a factor. It was actually common practice to use PAL cameras for video-to-film (before the 1080p days) because it's easier to transfer 25 FPS PAL to 24 FPS Film (either using Frame Mode or de-interlacing and just speeding the film up a frame per second during transfer) than it is to transfer 30 FPS NTSC to 24 FPS Film.

Looking through some of the cheap Blu-Rays we're seeing in the $7.99-$9.99 bargin bins with titles like Cutthroat island, Basic Instinct, Reservoir Dogs, Point Break, Tequila Sunrise, Robocop etc. I wonder whether these titles are really re-mastered for Blu-ray or just an SD up-convert.

These titles were basically released as bargin-bin Blu-ray titles, so would they really take the trouble to go back to the original 35mm print and strike an HD transfer only to place it in the bargin bin?

Are these titles up-converted to 1080p from their original SD glass master (that was used for the original DVDs) and placed on a Blu-ray disc?

Lionsgate Blu-rays may be cheap as you can find most of them for $8 - $10 at Wal-Mart, but most of them are rock solid BDs. Lionsgate is easily one of the few studios who constantly have been putting out solid transfers and uncompressed audio after their initial first batch of "blunders" (which every studio had).

There have been a few misfires along the way (Dirty Dancing and National Lampoon's Van Wilder look upconverted); but I've been pleased with almost every BD I own from them.

They are all HD, not up converted SD. Even at $9 a disc, they are still making money off of it, plus they can always use the HD transfer for TV/iTunes in the future.

Those titles listed in the OP are not up-converted DVD transfers.

However, there are releases on BD that are merely up-converted SD masters. For instance, Highlander: Season One.