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On the restoration processes used in the past can be found on the RT's website, if you dig around a bit: http://restoration-team.co.uk/

Well, Doctor Who has ALWAYS been released like this. And personally I like it this way. The Restoration Team do a great job in making these releases the best they absolutely can, all that effort takes TIME, and every release has plenty of bonus features. No-one cares whether Mrs Slocombe's pussy gets the same love and attention...

To be fair, in the case of Doctor Who, the BBC had a policy of destroying any tapes in their archives past a certain date.

The restoration team has mainly been working from old broadcast tapes, and US broadcast tapes (I shudder to think about the effort required to reassemble NTSC and PAL elements back into something that looks reasonable on DVD). If you're really geeky, check out http://www.restoration-team.co.uk/

But, the point being, if some BBC engineers with free time can produce suitable masters for DVD's of a 40 year old television show from a VIDEOTAPE, it's pretty inexcusable that the best Lucasfilm/ILM could manage was to do a rip off of a Laserdisc.

And with some work, I suspect even that could be cleaned/sharpened and converted to a nice anamorphic.

Just wanted to let the Americans in here know, that the PAL copies of this series (seen in Europe, Australia, etc) look very very good already. They would quite likely benefit even more from an HD 1440x1080p24 transfer. The 576p25 copies we can see in our country now, would have been retransferred from film sometime during the 1990s, and the quality is excellent, closer to the HDTV experience of Enterprise than the fuzzy copies of the "new" Next Generation. By the time of Voyager it was just slightly better, but since it went from film via NTSC, it still doesn't compare with the acuity of Enterprise or Original Series.

The exact same thing has been happening for quite a while with Doctor Who (and it's not at all shunned by the fans, like this may be).
Check out:

http://www.restoration-team.co.uk/ (a group of BBC employees working in their spare time to restore the classics)
http://www.rtforum.co.uk/ (the official forum of the team)

CK.

What a stupid name. DVD's are not "broadcast quality". Tsk!

For video, tape is the only way to store. The BBC copied all of it's 2 inch Quad tapes to a digital format a few years ago. For the most part, these 30 year old tapes were fine and any small faults can be repaired.

Take a look at http://www.restoration-team.co.uk/ to read about some of the work that is done to restore Doctor Who episodes.

Also Dæmons

"I'm big and clever! I know how to type that 'æ' symbol properly. Neh neh neh neh-neh neh!" (^_^)

was part of the Jon Pertwee era which was first shown in color. I can't remember if the color version of this was lost, or if it was re-colored based on the NTSC version.

I remember this, because there was some publicity at the time 'The Daemons' (er... I mean 'The Dæmons' :) ) was shown in the early 1990s.

Basically, they had a decent quality black-and-white film transfer *and* some low-quality colour VHS tapes recorded from an American TV transmission in the late 1970s (IIRC). They used the NTSC colour VHSs to colourise the black-and-white film (the eye's colour resolution being much lower than that for detail).

There were various problems, such as the two pictures not being exactly the same size; they used a video-effects machine to stretch one to the same shape.

You can read more on this at the Restoration Team website.

Actually, the original "Doctor Who" series was a mixture -- recorded to tape in the studio and shot on film on location. See The Doctor Who Restoration Team for details.

The Doctor Who Restoration Team has been actively involved in the recovery and restoration of Doctor Who, Quartermass, and other BBC programmes. Some of their earlier work was been in creating a good colour print by combining black and white film with color NTSC betamax video. Recently they have been restoring the quality to B&W programmes. In addition to the video, they also have worked to restore the shows' sound track. More information is on their website: http://www.restoration-team.co.uk/.

Here

Doesn't mention this recent news, but is rather interesting as it explains what they do with such old recordings.

This claim is not Informative. It is, rather, nonsense. An account which actually contains some truth and factual content is available from the BBC's Restoration Team who do the rework on the older material to make it fit for VHS and DVD release.

26 seasons of, on average, 13 hours each. There's some debate in fandom about the box set approach.

At present, we get single stories (mostly 4-6 half hour episodes per story) per DVD, with heavy restoration / rework by the BBC's Restoration Team (descratching, cleaning up the soundtrack, a wondrous process called VidFire developed by Peter Finklestone to restore the original smooth 50 fps video look to grainy 25 fps film stock, on The Ark In Space and Dalek Invasion Of Earth, alternative CGI'd versions of some of the grottier FX), plus usually a good hour or so of extras, commentaries, old documentary footage, newly filmed documentaries and so forth.

It takes a while to make a package that lavish, and I for one would be very disappointed to see the approach change to 'slap it all onto disc as quick as possible for a quick buck'.

Also bear in mind that only two seasons of Doctor Who were Arc-based (Season 16 'The Key To Time' and Season 23 'Trial Of A Time Lord'). Otherwise it's all standalone stories.

Though the 12-part "Daleks' Masterplan" and the ten-part "War Games" could be considered Arc-y, they're not complete seasons.

Only 108 lost episodes to go. It's 5 years since 'The Lion' was found, so we should have the lot back by 2544, just in time for the Dalek-provoked Galactic War against the Draconian Empire ;)

Thanks for the pointer Mr AC. Here's a link to the semi-official BBC Restoration Team who do all the cleanup work for the Doctor Who DVD and recent VHS releases.

As is clear from this article* on the site, in the 1960s film was used for location and model inserts, but not, generally, for studio recordings, which went straight to 2" VT. The VT was generally 'telerecorded' onto 25fps film for overseas sale by BBC Enterprises, but only after the first sale had been agreed, so for example since noone bought 'The Daleks' Masterplan', no telerecording was made.

Meanwhile, tapes remained the property of the Engineering Department and were routinely wiped a few years after broadcast, until 1978 when the BBC's Film and Videotape Library was founded. By then, Ian Levine's initial audit showed that 47 1960's episodes were still held as telerecordings, but only one complete story, the first, 'An Unearthly Child' (4 eps). And after 1972 BBC Enterprises, once orders for B&W stuff had dried up, had started clearing shelf space, not helped by the fact that Film Recording Clerk Pamela Nash believed that the rights had in any case expired.

Over the same period, a lot of the VT stock was also recycled, and due to the BBC's splendidly bureaucratic records, we know for example that the 2" tape that once held 'Enemy of the World' ep 3 is still in the archive, and exactly where it's shelved. Unfortunately it now contains a 1970's edition of Blue Peter.

So basically, almost the entire output of 1960's Doctor Who existed at the BBC on both tape and film, and by 1978, many episodes had been lost on both tape and film. Most of the 1960's Who that we have now comes from the surviving 25fps film copies from BBCE, and looks jerky. Hence the RT's rather wonderful VidFire process to put back the missing 50% of the timeslices.

I know far far more about Doctor Who than is good for my mental health...

TomV

*the domain's different because it's a deep link into a frameset - can be navigated from the RT homepage via 'Articles and Information', then 'BBC Archive Holdings' in the left frame