It’s the same with Indicator’s ongoing Jean Rollin project, which is essentially being released in the order of “when they’re ready”.
Given the gargantuan cost of the entire project, waiting for all (or even half) of them to be finished before putting them out in a box set would risk bankrupting the label first - and in any case the RRP of such a thing would unavoidably have to be eye-watering, as the per-title cost of production is far in excess of a typical release based on an off-the-shelf master.
The BFI’s costs won’t be quite as hefty, but they won’t be negligible either, so getting some out there and generating income before work has finished on the rest makes a huge amount of sense.
"It's never been a problem with DVD" because DVDs are much cheaper to produce, not least because you can get away with a lot more in terms of the source - for instance, DVDs of telly productions almost invariably tend to be sourced from the existing broadcast master (or worse). But once you factor in 2K/4K scanning and painstaking frame-by-frame restoration, you're essentially manufacturing a wholly different product.
Last edited by Michael Brooke; 29th July 2023 at 08:33 AM.
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