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PhatSeeJay

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Classics in HD

I have, since a year back, been conducting a small project where I've revived the television series Thunderbirds with Swedish dub. After the series had its run, it  disappeared and never came back. Probably because it didn't get very high viewer ratings, but it certainly was something that got to me and nostalgics who could see beyond the fact that the acting characters were puppets. The never ending fires and explosions were a thing in its favor as well.

My first idea was to simply capture and upload the entire thing to Youtube. That proved to be somewhat unsuccessful though, given the video quality. So I went on to use the video from the English DVD box I bought some seven years back. This required me to rip the video, capture the audio from vhs tapes and then mix and sync together. Problem there is that the Swedish version had some scenes removed to fit the time slots during the Sundays. Safe to say, a lot of work is going into this project but it's fun!

 
I have recently started to upload episodes chronologically, since I've found other nostalgics with more episodes recorded. This have given me a chance to do some sound editing as well to eliminate static noise. Still pretty novice in this area but quality is improving!

Now to the big thing. HD in 720p and 16:9 widescreen. This adds a lot of detail and you can see a the smaller things the supermarionation team used to build settings, environments and vehicles. The downside with this is that it's published in widescreen, which means the top and bottom of the 4:3 clips are cropped in favor of the widescreen 16:9 format. I posted the first episode in the HD format for reference, though I don't intend to continue working on it since it's a lot tougher to sync the NTSC format with PAL format VHS tapes.

       
The real question that I'm trying to get to is which format one should accept? The HD version looks really sharp and the color spectrum is a lot bigger, though perhaps a bit colder. But then there's the cropping. I, for one, can accept the widescreen cropping since the HD detail adds so much to it, even if the strings become painfully obvious in HD. Though subscribers to me have vented the concern that it just looks too crisp and fancy in HD.

Should some old school movies and tv-shows just be best left alone and not getting a transfer to HD?
Have you seen any older movies benefiting from the HD format?
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