Twilight Zone in HD
July 4th, a day for barbecues, hanging out by the pool, spending time with friends and family, and watching the 24-hour Twilight Zone-a-thon on the Sci Fi Channel.
Maybe I'm just being nostalgic, but there is something about the old black and white Twilight Zones which is missing from modern science fiction programming. The difference lies in the quality of the stories, something which applies equally to the old Star Trek episodes, and a fact which made up for sometimes cheesy special effects. On that note, maybe the inability to manage great special effects encouraged better plots, because studios in the 50s and 60s couldn't rely on gee-whiz graphics to make up for glaring holes in the plot.
Whatever the case, in a discussion with my father on July 3rd, I learned that it is now possible to buy the entire Twilight Zone series on DVD. It will run you close to $500, but at least when you buy DVDs of TV shows, you aren't at risk of the purchase being superseded at some future point by a new HD version. TV shows can't be converted to HD the way movies can since they were never designed for the big screen...
...or can they? It occurred to me that it MIGHT just be possible to get an HD version of an old Twilight Zone episode. Back in the 50s and 60s, TV shows for syndication were created using film, and film has resolution levels that match HD levels. That is, it's possible to get a high-resolution HD encode from film stock, a process common in the modern film editing process due to the need to digitize film product so as to pass through digital editing studios. Since the old film editing process was manual, that means a final cut of the filmed product had to exist at some point.
If those old film reels still exist, it is theoretically possible to get an HD-quality version of an old Twilight Zone episode. Of course, there are a number of issues to resolve. First, film stock degrades, and there is no guarantee the old reels are in any kind of shape worth using. Second, old Twilight Zone episodes may have been recorded using film, but they were intended for output to TV, a medium that in the 50s and 60s had even less visual clarity than todays standard defintion TV sets. That means they used makeup to help compensate for visual deficiencies on older CRTs. In other words, capturing an HD version might be possible, but the actors might look like clowns. William Shatner wouldn't have to contend simply with gremlins on the wing of his airplane, but the fact that he bears a striking resemblance to Tammy Faye Bakker.
Even so, it may be possible to achieve HD clarity from media that never imagined the possibility, assuming problems can be worked out. It does introduce the odd possibility, however, that TV shows using the old film process yield higher-resolution releases in an HD world than TV shows from the 80s and 90s that used a digital production process that assumed standard definition output.