Today the Tour begins a bit of a new experiment and a brand new category for the Tour. With the advent of ‘modern’ Doctor Who in 2005 the Tour began including screen captures within Tour boundaries. This was, at the time, a learning experience not only in getting the best source material but in finding and honing techniques for producing caps.
As with all things there was a rapid learning curve, but the recent retailing of a blu-ray box set of the first seven series of modern Doctor Who in conjunction with the 50th Anniversary presents an unusual opportunity for the Tour. Despite the fact that HD production on Doctor Who didn’t begin until Planet of the Dead near the end of the Tennant run, the upscaled versions of everything from Rose all the way through to The Next Doctor are very watchable (even knowing this doesn’t detract from their re-watchability).
As part of the massive press build-up to the first series RTD made sure it was known that his conception of an updated Doctor Who was not to do a re-boot but rather to take all of the best concepts of ‘classic’ Who forward aggressively to the present and stake a big pile of 2005 in terms of pacing and storytelling choices into it. In that sense Rose certainly succeeds. There are of course problems with the story, Mickey and a trash bin immediately come to mind, but no one will confuse Rose with anything from the seventies or early eighties.
The new set of caps for Rose are now presented in glorious 720p, a 4x improvement in resolution over the old SD caps, and in much greater quantity over the initial, rather paltry collection we started with. The caps lack some of the overall sharpness from a true HD source betraying their 2005 roots, but there are (let’s face it) many stories within the Tour whose caps are of less than stellar quality, and we think the final result was well worth the effort.
Classic capitology resumes next time… Something in keeping with the endless winter here at Tour HQ.