The Oldies Have the Goodies for HD

Shot on Film, Older Series Prove Easy to Upconvert as Studios Mine Back Catalogs

By Danny King

Like the Ford Thunderbird convertible driven by its star Efrem Zimbalist Jr., late ’50s/early ’60s television series “77 Sunset Strip” used film stock that was a thing of beauty, not to mention prime for conversion to high definition.

“The original stock feed on those early shows were phenomenal,” said Ned Price, vice president of mastering and technical operations at Warner Bros. “Quite a few of the master cameramen who’d retired from films went into television episodes. As a result, the images are gorgeous.”

Whether it’s Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios basing much of its business on archiving older content for cable networks or Time Warner using its Warner Bros. unit to boost ancillary revenue, studios are beginning to convert older television series to high definition to feed demand from high-definition-oriented networks such as Mark Cuban’s HDNet and Voom HD, as well as from DVD buyers.

High-definition TV show conversion is still a nascent part of the home entertainment industry, although studios are trying to use their back catalog of shows to generate an additional income stream while helping to resuscitate the home entertainment revenue stream that stalled last year. As a bonus, television film reels that may have become dirty, scratched, marked with fingerprints or faded over time get restored.

While much of the conversion involves current or recently ended series, older, scene-driven shows such as “Flipper,” which was converted to HD in 2003 for Cablevision’s Voom HD network, and “Sea Hunt” have been converted to HD by closely held MGM.

“We’ve been doing HD transfers on new content since 1997, and started doing library transfers in 2002,” said Gray Ainsworth, senior vice president of operations for Deluxe Digital Media, which has transferred about 1,000 film titles and a few hundred hours of television to HD from standard definition for MGM. Other converted MGM titles include episodes of “Stargate Atlantis” for General Electric’s Universal HD network and “Barbershop” for Showtime and older United Artists titles such as the “Pink Panther” cartoons, “Green Acres” and “Cagney & Lacey.”

“Sometimes it’s attached to restoration, but the sales drive it,” said Ainsworth.

The conversion to HD usually involves cleaning, color correction and timing and can take about four months for a series whose masters are in decent shape. With costs running $10,000 to $15,000 per hour of content, one 22-episode season of an hourlong show can cost well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to Ainsworth.

Such costs have dropped by about 50% in the past few years as technological improvements cut down the time needed for the process, allowing Warner Bros. to convert shows ranging from “Kung Fu” to “Murphy Brown,” Price said.

By making such investments, studios are banking on demand from networks for what are essentially reruns in high definition. They’re also counting on the continued growth of TV-based DVD sales, which primarily involve current or recent series such as “Grey’s Anatomy” and “The Sopranos,” but likely will extend further to series such as “Seinfeld,” which Sony Pictures may convert to HD for Blu-ray sales.

Last year, about 15% of the $16 billion in U.S. DVD sales were for television season packages and episode compilations, according to research service Nielsen VideoScan and trade group Digital Entertainment Group. That makes TV-based DVDs a $2.4 billion industry that has more than doubled from less than $1 billion in 2003.

With analysts and some studios predicting high-definition U.S. DVD sales and rentals will triple to $1 billion this year thanks to Sony’s Blu-ray victory over Toshiba’s HD DVD in the next-generation format war, studios may sell another $150 million worth of repackaged TV episodes in HD this year, not including shows converted to be aired on television networks.

Still, demand for certain shows may outstrip the results of the HD conversion from an aesthetic point of view. While shows from the 1960s such as “Flipper” benefit from being shot by movie-trained cameramen using sturdy 35mm film stock, allowing for conversion to true high definition, demand from the generation of TV viewers who remember them may be sparse.

Meanwhile, iconic 1970s and ’80s shows like “All in the Family,” “Maude,” “Dallas” and “Barney Miller,” which may generate demand from those who’ve watched reruns for decades, may suffer in quality because their producers cut costs by shooting them on soundstages in videotape.

With typical videotape containing about 500 vertical lines of data per screen, or half the high-definition standard of 1,080, studios have to use software to replicate existing images to “upconvert” such shows. While such software has improved, a discerning viewer will be able to differentiate videotaped shows in HD from their filmed counterparts, according to Pete Putman, president of Roam Consulting and author of the HDTVExpert.com Web site.

“It doesn’t mean they can’t use algorithms and video processors to kick the resolution up,” Mr. Putman said. “But that’s kind of like a hole right now.”

Additionally, while the width-to-height filming dimensions, or aspect ratio, for the older 35mm filmed shows are similar to how high definition is presented—the shows’ aspect ratios were typically 1.85-to-one versus HD’s 1.77-to-one ratio—videotaped shows often were shot in dimensions that are more square, leaving technicians converting them possibly stuck with screen shots with items unintended for filming once the width is expanded for HD, said Mr. Price. His work includes assessing old Lorimar shows such as “Dallas” that Warner Bros. acquired when it bought Lorimar-Telepictures in 1989.

“You’re basically going to crop the image substantially, or get black borders on the side,” said Mr. Price.

With “Murphy Brown” leading the first crop of shows to return to using film, however, most shows that debuted in the 1990s or later won’t have such problems in the conversion process.

“By the end of the ’90s almost everyone was shooting back on film, except for news programs,” Mr. Putman said. “They were starting to pay attention to the fact that HDTV might be coming down the pike.”