FWIW they did outsource it, but to what looked like a husband-and-wife team because there were only two names in the credits associated with it, a man and a woman with the same last name. So they aren’t just paying for licensing, but I can’t believe they’re paying an exorbitant fee either.
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Indeed. Nor, lest it need to be said, do I. I put up the poll because I want to know what people think, not because I want to push an agenda.
I don’t know how much it costs, and I don’t want to tell them how to run the show.
But at the beginning of the stream, Joel said that he wanted to hear from us whether we thought it was worth doing. He wanted our feedback and to guage audience reaction. Matt echoed that at the end, specifically asking us to give feedback here on the forum. They haven’t tried doing this before in the show’s history and they want to know if there’s enough audience interest to make it worthwhile. But we didn’t really have a thread for that.
As you say, Joel was quick to explicitly say that both versions would be available. They’re not replacing the original episode.
So far, people seem to mostly be in favor, and that’s good to know.
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I wasn’t accusing you of having an agenda. I was just talking about myself.
Plain text is hard. Lack of non-verbal cues leaves a lot of room for (mis)interpretation on both sides. I wasn’t sure, so I thought I’d clarify. I appreciate you clarifying in return, and I’m glad to know I didn’t come off wrong. 
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Stretch goals aren’t always expensive things. For instance the stretch goals of doubling the number of classic episodes or shorts we got essentially cost Alternaversal/Shout nothing, other than potential lost sales from people who might have bought those.
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I think it is a necessary step to keep the back catalogue watchable for future generations.
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Maybe it is the fact that my teevee is super old and not HD or anything, but I really didn’t notice any difference in the video quality. Even at the start when Joel was showing “old” and “new” side by side, there really wasn’t anything…
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Nooo. Mike’s face has gone Uncanny Valley. It’s old NTSC, just let it be what it is.
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Controversial opinion warning.
Could they digitally undo the blue or green tinting they did to the bots and the movies in the early seasons when they were experimenting with ways to make the silhouettes sharper against the print, but achieve the sharpened silhouettes digitally?
As Joel said, they’re not George Lucasing things - if you like the Shadowramma versions, they’d still be there - but if they can make the prints work in black and white, that’d be neat.
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You just need a bigger TV.
Personally I notice a big difference between HD and SD. HD vs 4K or 8K would be less noticeable, without Frank’s 2000 inch TV.
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Someone did a Manos HD version. It’s on YT.
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I didn’t watch, but if they were applying the same sharpening in the host segments, I think that’s a mistake. It’s the movie segments that really need it. It should be more subtle in the host segments.
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Part of that was the makeup, he looks a little over made-up on the original too.
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Possibly, maybe… All it takes is money.
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Improving the video is less important to me than clarifying some of the muddier audio tracks. I often avoid watching what are probably fantastic episodes because the original movie is nearly impossible to understand. It’s hard to make a riff land when you can’t hear the source material.
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The dearly departed Cinema Editions gave me the best of both worlds: high-quality prints with the quality riffing, and as an added bonus: the episodes were complete and unedited, letting me see what I missed when they went out for commercial sign. The only thing lost were the silhouettes and the host segments, which could be easily reintegrated in some way if they had officially recognized them.
As for episodes proper…tough to say. Some of the jokes are specifically about terrible prints (think the skipped sprockets in Last Clear Chance), so fixing these ruins the joke. Probably take it on a case by case basis. But I’m not inherently opposed. Really…I want the Cinema Editions to return.
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Yes, such as ‘The Wild Wild World of Batwoman’. I might like it better if I could understand more of the dialogue.
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I was most surprised by the improvement in sound quality. It’s worth it, just for that alone.
I do hope they eventually provide up-scaled versions for every episode. The current copies in the Gizmoplex are not of equal image quality to the DVD releases, as they are several year old digital copies. But, the Pumaman experiment brought the quality up to the same as watching the DVD up-scaled on my TV, better even. So, yes, it’s a win win. This will be a mass improvement that will allow the show to find new audiences, as it will look and sound excellent on modern TVs moving forward. And an added incentive to subscribe to the Gizmoplex, as the up-scaled episodes are only there!
I suspect it’s not very expensive to upscale at all. More of a time consuming thing. Basically, the way I understand it, they take their best copy of an episode, feed it through the HD up-scaling software, and there you go. If you have a powerful enough computer, you can do it at home, so I doubt they’re significantly tapping into the Kickstarter funds for this.
I also don’t think we need to worry about the episodes becoming too clear. Yes, sometimes you’ll get a Wild Rebels situation where you can see the credits now, but that’s about it. If you can’t see it in the DVD, it’s not going to be visible up-scaled; bad print will be cleaner bad print 
.
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To repeat this, for impact’s sake, I think this is far more of a better thing for newer and potentially younger viewers of MST3K who may judge non-sugically enhanced episodes harshly. I think this could only help, and certrainly not hurt, viewership overall.
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I think what happened there is the AI picked up mike’s stage makeup (eyeliner and base, etc…) and so you are actually seeing something that kinda looks like what it would have looked like IRL which was made to look good in SD, but looks weird in HD.
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