Well, it's a dramatization. If we're going to nickel and dime it: you told me "The Guardian" was filmed near you -- but the joke about a plaque commemorating "Arturo-jumping" was a remark you posted on the forum followed by the disclaimer, "Not really," and I thought (internally), "YOU MONSTER!"
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I don't know why I made a rip of the Mill Creek DVD for upscaling. I also don't know why I used the fastest possible setting on Handbrake which cost some detail for a faster encode. What strange choices in the middle of the night. I should have ripped the Universal DVD set -- which I had to dig out of The Box of Sci-Fi Channel news clippings that the Sci-Fi Channel inexplicably and nonsensically sent to Matt at his request. (Why did they do this? And at their own expense, too! TF snarked that people should ask Sci-Fi for a stapler and maybe they would have gotten one. After I went through it, EP.COM got 16 new articles for the Article Archive out of it.)
Anyway. Upscaling "As Time Goes By." The Mill Creek set was even more compressed than the Universal DVD set, and the image is fuzzy, which gave the AI video enhancement very little to work with over the course of a 11 hour upscaling process. The result was a 720p high definition file that looked... like a decent standard definition version of the episode.
Onscreen text like credits were now smooth and clean instead of smeared. Signs like "Vancouver Ice Cold Storage" at the start of the episode were now crisply legible. In moderately-lit scenes, faces had more skin texture. In brightly lit scenes, everyone's overexposed faces remained overexposed and without detail and there was a faint waxiness to the image where the blocky, pixelated quality was now smoothed out and certainly an improvement.
It looks presentable on my 55 inch HDTV whereas the original DVD from Mill Creek was a mess of jagged edges and squares that vaguely resembled an episode of SLIDERS. If Mill Creek had fit the 88 episodes on 24 discs instead of 15, it'd probably look a bit like this upscale. The results are definitely better than the Universal DVD version of "As Time Goes By."
The Universal DVD set itself is maybe 20 per cent sharper than the Mill Creek discs -- but is badly marred by interlacing lines, likely because the original master tapes are interleaved video, and when Universal converted them into digital formats for DVD, they neglected to deinterlace and decomb their video before mass producing the discs (except for the Pilot episode, for some reason).
They seem to deinterlaced their digital assets before handing their materials to Mill Creek.
Anyway, I'm running an upscale on the Universal version of "As Time Goes By" which should offer the AI more to latch onto, so we'll see if that's a leap forward or just a lateral move. I'll report back tomorrow night.