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Power Of The Daleks R1 DVD Disc 2: somewhat cheap?

posted 8 years ago by Dr Wily
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Now that I've gotten my order of the Power Of The Daleks R1 DVD, I compared it to the R2 DVD release. I noticed something interesting about Disc 2 of the R1 set.

The R2 DVD set is composed of 2 double layer DVD's. Disc 1 is all 6 episodes of the story. Disc 2 is all the extra features. Both of these discs are combined into one double layer DVD on the R1 release. This means they effectively doubled the compression on the video of the R2 contents to fit on R1's single 2nd disc. This means all the contents won't look as good as they do on the R2 release.

This just seems really cheap to me. As I said in earlier posts, the R1 DVD should have been 3 discs. The 2 discs from the R2 release, comprising the black and white episodes and the bonus contents, and a third disc for the color version.

The only really positive selling point of the R1 release is the color version included on disc 1.

[–] Chris12955 8 years ago

I don't see the problem with the Black and White being on the same disc as the Color. A color image(even on a disc) is composed of a black and white signal AND a color signal. So they would just drop the color part when you play it in Black and White. The Extras should have been on another disc though. I haven't played my copy yet, so I don't know how long the extras are, and if they would fit comfortably.

Either way, Warner Brothers does skimp on the DVD releases for Doctor Who, so this shouldn't be surprising.

It has been fun fellow message board users. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15YgdrhrCM8

[–] Dr Wily 8 years ago

Since the black and white version and the telesnap reconstruction are on Disc 2, that's over 4 hours of content alone. A dual layer DVD holds about 4 hours of content at "normal" compression.

What they could have done to save some space is the mono, 5.1, and commentary tracks are present in both the color and black and white versions, they could have just kept the mono track in the black and white version. They're in black and white which would "match" the mono nature of the original soundtrack. They could have saved some space on the 2nd disc by not doubling up those tracks on both discs.

Yeah, if they were going to include the color version, they should have made the release 3 discs. That way, there would have been no need to construct an entirely new disc for Disc 2 of the R1 release. All that would need to be done to the original R2 discs would be to adjust for conversion from PAL to NTSC.

The R1 release does add a LITTLE extra space versus the R2 DVD because the booklet of production notes that was included with the R2 release is a PDF on the R1.

[–] Dr Wily 8 years ago

The R1 DVD Disc 2 also dropped an audio track option from the R2 Disc 1. There are 4 audio track options on the R2 disc. The 2.0 Audio track is dropped from the R1 Disc 2.

What Warner Brothers ended up doing was compressing about 15 GB of 2 DVD's data to 1 approximately 8 GB DVD.

The telesnaps reconstruction also appears to be have been made from MP3 tracks from the original CD release. There are periodic pops/pauses in the audio at points where it seems like there were original track branches. So, it sounds like the CD's were taken, their tracks ripped to MP3's, and then the MP3's merged together. It would have been better to rip all tracks from the CD's as one giant MP3 at one time instead of doing it separately and merging all the tracks later. This is what introduces the pops/pauses.

[–] Dr Wily 8 years ago

To be fair, the audio quality of the telesnaps reconstruction wouldn't be Warner Brothers' fault. That would just be video they'd be shipped. It's BBC Home Video that would make the master video. And, given how BBC North America dropped the ball on the NTSC conversion of The Moonbase, I doubt that they did the conversion for Power Of The Daleks. So, the video would have been made first by BBC Home Video.