by Brent_Reid » 22 Jan 2019 00:20
Cheers James. I wasn't questioning the legality of the Madacy, just its overall uselessness, and figured the footnote would cover it and its woebegotten ilk.
My MoC BD would take some digging out so I can't check right now, but are you sure about all its extras being in true HD, not just upscaled SD? If so, that would make for five hours of HD content, all possibly with lossless audio. That's one hell of a stretch for a single BD.
Additionally, I'm almost certain David's documentary was actually made and mastered on SD video. I'd expect the 1930 reissue prologues to be HD, as they were scanned recently by the Library of Congress (as per my article), and are also incuded on the BFI and TT BDs.
On top of that, back in 2002, only SD masters were created of the remaining civil war shorts and extras. Even by the time of Kino's 2011 BD, there were no HD masters of these, hence Kino's decision to keep costs down by adding their old DVDs containing them. Divisa's release was the following year, as a BD with the feature and HD prologues, like Kino, and an extras DVD with the still-SD shorts, etc. MoC's BD was released in 2013 and to have those shorts in true HD, they'd have had to go it alone in ponying up for new HD scans and masters of the film materials. If they did so, that would have pushed up the cost of the project inordinately.
All this is from memory, but without retrieving my packed away MoC BD, I'd like to know if it's actually even better than I remember!