South Park making long-awaited Blu-ray debut in March
By Darren Murph 
posted Dec 22nd 2008 9:54AM
posted Dec 22nd 2008 9:54AM
posted Dec 22nd 2008 9:54AM
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That's great and all that... but where the heck is Team America that was shown on all those early Blu-ray ads? And how about Bigger-Longer-and Uncut?
I don't know - maybe it's just me, but doesn't it seem a little silly to put a cartoon rendered from paper cut-outs on Blu Ray? Isn't that kind of like hooking an Atari 2600 to a 110" plasma?
What self-respecting geek would NOT want to hook up an Atari 2600 to a 110" plasma?
Agreed, but more HD content is more HD content. There really should be a vector-based playback format standard for cartoons. The audio would be the only thing that would take up any room, the whole video portion would be like 200MB, and would scale perfectly to the highest resolution whatever it may be now, and in the future. It would just be a bit processor intensive...
You know it's computer animated, right? I mean, doing the renders at 1080p instead of 480i or whatever it is for broadcast on Comedy Central... that would make a *huge* difference.
In other words, what we have now on Comedy Central is the Atari hooked up to the plasma... rendering the shows in HD would be like a XBox360 or PS3.
Same for all animation... I'd like to see the Simpsons in HD too!
South Park hasn't been animated from paper cutouts since the pilots. I assume that to go from SD to HD, requires adjusting the target res and aspect, upping the textures / photos a bit and more or less continuing to do what they do now.
Actually, I remember reading that they have all the master source files that they used to render every episode, so they can just re-render older episodes in HD.
I'm probably saying it wrong, but you get the idea.
South Park already a winner in HD?
Comedy Central is NOT an HD channel, so how could it 'already' be an HD winner? I love south park, but did i miss the boat on some previous HD footage?
If you follow the link, you would see that a South Park episode was rebroadcast in HD on DirecTV.
its been on xbox live for a few months now.... as well as directv as mentioned already. and im sure its been on other things as well.
I have direct TV, full HD package, it's not there... are you referring to Direct TV VOD?
Comcast (in Denver at least) has about 6 episodes On Demand in HD right now. And to answer Bill in the post above, it's not exactly the material I would use to show off my rig to friends, but the show still looks damned good in HD. Also, some of their backgrounds/textures have gotten a lot more complex in recent seasons.
Dominic - It was replayed on the 101. There isn't a dedicated HD channel.
Look for Comedy Central HD to sign on next month. The Channel will be called Comedy Central Hi Def. Comedy Central also said that they want all their programming to be done in HD.
I wonder if the BD episodes will be in widescreen.
People still watch South Park?
I hope they'll bother to include some subtitles this time.
While we all wonder about if a Blu-ray version is even needed because its animation doesn't anyone see the true benefit ? How many discs are full seasons of tv shows on DVD ? 3-6 ?
So imagine a full season (multiple seasons?) on one freakin disc and I'm sold. Now I'm not not that invested in TV shows on DVD but when Simpsons, Family Guy, Arrested Development, Seinfeld, etc. come out on Blu-ray, I'm there !!
Sweet. I saw Imagination Land on Directv and it looked awesome!
Of all the 2D animation that could be released on Blu-Ray - '80s and '90s Disney films with smooth animation, Miyazaki films with highly detailed background illustrations - the one that's released has absolutely no visuals that need or benefit from high-definition.
HUGE 2nd on the Miyazaki stuff.
ARE YOU SHITTING ME!!! BLU RAY CAN FIT AN ENTIRE SEASON ON ONE DISC AND THEY ARE GOING TO MAKE IT 3 DISCS!!!!! THAT IS ONE OF THE MAIN THINGS I LIKE ABOUT BLU RAY OTHER THEN HD THE FACT IT CAN STORE SO MUCH. I WAS WATING FOR ENTIRE SEASONS OF TV SHOWS TO BE ON ONE, TWO, OR THREE DISCS ESPECIALLY STAR TREK. YOUR TELLING ME THEY ARE SPLITTING ONE SOUTH PARK SEASON ONTO 3 BLURAY DISCS AND CHARGE US THREE TIME AS MUCH BECAUSE THERE ARE 3 DISCS.
BULL SHIT!!!!!!
Well, I have a 42" LCD and blu-ray player, and really excited about the blu-ray version. I bought the 8th season on DVD and the lack of quality is very obvious. Yeah it may only be 2D animation, but honestly there is a huge difference in terms of the line clarity and color consistency. I'm a bit surprised that it its not on 2 dual-layer discs (50GB capacity), but it definitely could not fit on one, the amount of space 1080p data requires is quite large. Bottom line, it will be worth it.