Compression, Upscaling, Downscaling, Quality, NuWho Series 1-4

[Danfun64]

The first four "Series" of the revived Doctor Who were shot in PAL SD. I am curious as to how the best picture can be achived. Sound is obvious, blu-ray wins. Picture, however, is a different matter. The PAL dvd's are at native resolution, but compressed. The Blu-rays are less compressed, but are upscaled. I heard that the upscaling process the BBC used caused artifacts. What is the recommended method for quality?

1. mkv of PAL dvd video (lets pretend that it is a direct mpeg-2 rip with no additional compression) and Blu-ray DTS-HD MA audio
2. mkv of Blu-ray video and audio (let's pretend that is is generated with makemkv and has no additional compression)
3. mkv of Blu-ray video downscaled to native resolution (might cause more artifacts though) and Blu-ray DTS-HD MA audio
4. The BBC have a process called Reverse Standards Conversion which they used to reverse pal to ntsc conversion without doing another conversion. Is there an equivalent of this process for upscaled blu-ray video. I'm pretty sure the answer is no, but if it does exist, the method would go here.

For some reason I haven't found anybody really talking about this. Maybe it's my technically mindedness, but I would like to know the answer.

[newpball]

Upscaling is at a certain physical size unavoidable because after all pea size pixels are obviously not very pleasant to watch.

Where this happens (encoding, player, screen) really does not make much of a difference assuming engineers know what they are doing.

Recent TV series shot in PAL SD, how do you know?

The IMDB page does not give much clearance on it:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436992/technical?ref_=tt_dt_spec

Given that broadcasters simply love those archaic Betacam SX "things" more than their mother in law I would not be surprised at anything, even when this was shot in 2005 and on.

[Danfun64]

It wasn't that recent. The SD years were 2005 to 2009. After that, the show was shot in HD.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436992/technical
http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Doctor-Who-Series-1-7-Blu-ray/78537/

[newpball]

The SD years were 2005 to 2009.

Ahh yes, what was I thinking, how can I be so dumb to think a company the size of the BBC would shoot productions on HD in 2005 and on.

For crying out loud, consumers had HDV already in 2004.

[Dougster]

The BBC was slow to phase in HDTV and Doctor Who was not high on the priorities of BBC management at first.

@Danfun64, As a fan of NuWho (that lives in the States) I found the NTSC DVD's and BluRay's a little disappointing in quality and
the PAL DVD's and Bluray's are better but sometimes still have issues. Series 3 and 4 on DVD are better than the Series 1 and 2
as far as banding and noise. The Bluray upscales for Series 1 thru 4 are not much of an improvement over the DVD's which
I think are more watchable. On Bluray the Series 4 Specials and Series 5 are encoded using VC-1 interlaced and sometimes have
noise issues common with that codec. Series 6 onward uses H.264 and look good.

[Danfun64]

Series 3 and 4 on DVD are better than the Series 1 and 2 as far as banding and noise.

...Interesting, but it doesn't tell me anything about the Blu-ray upscaling.

[Dougster]

The upscaling did nothing to improve the image and just added noise in either UK or USA versions. The banding issue was not
cleaned up for the Bluray transfer. It looks like it came from a D-1 broadcast master @ 704x576. They even left in the overscan.

[newpball]

They even left in the overscan.

That's a feature, BBC engineers are infallible!

[Cornucopia]

@newpball, come back when you actually know what you're talking about.

Scott