It’s official: to promote the theatrical release of the 22nd (by official counting) James Bond film Quantum of Solace, MGM and Fox are bringing the early adventures of the secret agent on Blu-ray worldwide on October 20th.
In this batch, six Bond films are getting the high definition treatment: Dr No (1962), From Russia with Love (1963), Thunderball (1965), Live and Let Die (1973), For Your Eyes Only (1981) and Die Another Day (2002). That’s three from Sean Connery era, two from Roger Moore and one from Pierce Brosnan.
You’ve got to admire their press release, which makes it sound like this high definition re-mastering and restoration process they did was just for this Blu-ray release:
Recently restored and re-mastered for the highest quality picture and sound quality via the state-of-the-art Lowry process digital frame-by-frame restoration and featuring special features galore, Bond is primed for Blu-ray Disc with a selection of 007 adventures spanning the storied career of cinema’s most recognisable spy.
I’m betting though that the restoration they’re referring to is the one they made when they released the Ultimate Edition dvds in 2006. Here’s what Macworld.co.uk wrote about the restoration process back then:
The project team also worked to a higher resolution than DVDs support, offering a route forward to release the digitised classics on other formats in future. The film was scanned at a resolution of 4,000 x 3,000 pixels, in contrast with the 720 x 576 pixel resolution of DVDs. This meant that each frame of each movie weighed in at 45MB.
That would mean that essentially all they’ve done now compared to the Ultimate Edition dvds is that they’ve upped the pixel count on the image from dvd quality (576i) to high definition quality (1080p). That’s certainly something, of course, if you’ve got a Blu-ray player and a large screen, but those who already own the Ultimate Edition dvds and don’t have big television sets are propably not missing anything too essential when the new high definition discs arrive.
Unless they decide to release the discs with new extra features.
