The Tour has had for many years two different categories for stories which have been capped twice over time. Once in their original form and then again when an HD version became available. HD Re-classic-ation covers stories from the ‘classic’ era of the show (a continuing process we hasten to add) while Modern Recap-itulation covered the nu-Who stories up to The Next Doctor which were made in standard definition.
As always the results for upscaling stories to meet modern sensibilities vary all over the map depending on the source–especially for older stories–Season 8 comes to mind here), but in part re-capping these stories is as much a celebration of the effort taken to re-present these stories in as good a quality as can reasonably be achieved or expected.
But the ‘return’ of David Tennant for a series for the 60th Anniversary run of three also represented a break again in overall image presentation, moving from 1080p (or 2K) resolution to 4K esolution. It also proved to be a tough nut to crack for the Tour’s honchos to pull that increased quality into capping. It wasn’t until halfway through Ncuti Gatwa’s run earlier, with Dot and Bubble, that we finally got to something presentable. But it has bugged us that we didn’t get this right earlier, so we are inaugurating the first story in the ‘HD’ era to get an upgrade to ‘4K’ caps.
The Star Beast, which only aired a little more than a year ago, has a new set of caps as part of our festive holiday celebrations. Who knows where we’ll go next?
