Warbird Information Exchange

The History Channel is about to premiere in November, a new 10 part HD mini-series on World War II. A lot of the footage is sourced from color film and comes from 8 mm and 16mm film. This footage is supposed to be outstanding from those who have previewed the HD trailer. What makes this unique is that to make the new HD video, the original source master films were scanned at high definition resolution vs. a typical upscale resolution from standard definition film/video stock. It is narrated by Gary Sinise and has many voice-overs of famous actors. It looks like it will be something to not miss. In the trailer, it shows a lot of color warbird footage. This mini-series reminds me a lot of the "The War" by Ken Burns that was shown on PBS a while back.

Mark your calenders.

Here is a link to some info and a low quality internet stream of the trailer:

http://www.history.com/content/wwii-in-hd

Looks good. Thanks for the heads up.

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Just a reminder, this show debuts tonight on the History Channel. Check for your local listings.

hopefully they are getting back to "HISTORY" is stead of the nonsense [pawn stars, loggers, truckers,,etc] they've been leaning toward. i'll give it a try. thanks for posting this, i haven't checking the HC much any more

Watched the first episode of it, lots of good color movie clips I hadn't seen before. A pretty good narrative going along with it. Just a few clips that seemed out of place, but on the whole it is pretty well done. A bit more "GORE" than the usual WW2 Documentary, so a warning if kids are watching, but war is He!! They sure didn't sugarcoat it.

ps: It aired right after Pawn Stars!!!

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I watched a bit of it, and was very glad to see footage I'd never seen before.

I also liked the fact that they interviewed the man who fled from Austria, it provided a nice first hand perspective.

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I watched it as well last night. On the whole, I thought it was very well done, with the majority of the color footage that I hadn't seen before. My one BIG gripe is the following. Unfortunately, they are using "colorized" film that was originally shot in black and white for some of their clips. Fortunately, it isn't much, probably less than 5 percent of the clips they show. I think I know where they got those from too, unfortunately. There is a company in Italy that has a huge repository of color stock W.W.II footage. This company is being dishonest and trying to pass off colorized black and white footage as color. Most of that footage, I know for a fact, was NOT shot in color. Other than that, I really liked the show on this first episode.

Unfortunately, I don't get the History Channel in HD. To me, the footage did not look any clearer since I was watching it in Standard Definition. Can anybody who watched it in HD tell me if the resolution was that much better and how it compared to normal SD war footage?

I hope thet release it in a set......

It will be. Here it is:

http://shop.history.com/detail.php?p=10 ... wwii-in-hd

It looked good on my HD set, but you have to remember the source material is for the most part is in real bad shape. This was no Disney Blu-Ray frame by frame restoration, not even close.

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I realize that, but that's part of the beauty of film. Could you see the film grain and all of the scratches and imperfections of the film? If you can see that, then you know that you cannot get any better quality out of an unrestored film.

It's like that old saying, "garbage in equals garbage out".

Sweet... Thanks

I did see the standard cockpit shots from the Memphis Belle doc (Colonel Morgan has appeared in more documentaries and films...) but just a little of the exterior/aircraft shots from the rest of it.

Very impressed so far, but I'm doing a major edit at the same time, so I haven't watched as much as I'd like....mostly listening.

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I may wrong but I thouight I saw a shot of SBDs that had the meatball put on them by computer so they would pass as Japanese aircraft. Did anyone else see this?

Jim

I don't remember that scene specifically, but it wouldn't surprise me. It was probably one of those "colorized" clips that I was talking about earlier. I've seen a few inconsistencies, but it is much better and more accurate than your standard war documentary.