Baseball: A Film By Ken Burns Fully Restored in High Definition Blu-ray

the product is fantastic
Baseball is seminal to understanding how the game began and its roots down to the current era. Any base ball fan will love learning baseball’s history and the inside story of the game. The commentators are especially pivotal because of their obvious love for the game.

A must-own for any baseball fan
Ken Burns does his usual brilliant job for this documentary. It’s insightful and emotional, as baseball tends to be, and is a must-own for any baseball fan’s library. The interviews and voice-overs are perfection, as is this collection of discs.

WORTH the wait
I had wanted this documentary since it was first released on home video. At first, I couldn’t justify the cost of the collection nor the space for 9 VHS tapes. After happening across a recent PBS rebroadcast, I noticed something a bit different about the documentary. I thought nothing of it. After realizing interviews were captioned off to the side as opposed to the bottom screen captions, it became clear the documentary was “re-mastered” (for lack of a better term) – brought to current wide screen format with enhanced audio. When I saw that the series now available on blu Ray, it became a no-brainer.This documentary had always been a must for any baseball fan. The enhanced audio and HD video makes this a FAR better value than ever before!!

Blu-ray edition mostly an upgrade, but keep your DVDs
To me this is Ken Burns’ best documentary, but my own bias toward the sport is most likely why I feel that way. There are reviews stating that it’s not enjoyable unless you’re a fan of the Yankees or Red Sox, and while on the surface it might seem that way, I’m unsure if the sport would be as popular as it is (or was) without the influence those two teams had on the population; they were the vanguards of player performance, ballpark architecture, and the way the game is played, then and now. I’m not a fan of either team but I’m also keenly aware that one cannot side-step their influence in discussing the history of the sport. Another reviewer stated that the home run is over-glorified in this set, and while I can understand what they mean, I don’t think it detracts from showing the history of the game because that’s the crowning offensive achievement of the sport itself, the thing we all know and understand, and the home run was the measure of a player’s offensive potential by the coaches, managers, owners, reporters, fans, and players alike. True, the art and science of pitching is a bit overlooked in the set, but this is about the history of the sport, and the sport began with leaning heavily toward offensive measurements centered squarely on a batter’s ability to round the bases (in fact, nascent forms of the sport were even called “Rounders,” before it became known as “Baseball”). So I find it quite natural that the home run is featured heavily; it’s part of baseball’s history.That said, the high definition scans look wonderful, especially the portions filmed in the mid-1990s when the film was originally made, such as the interviews and ballpark shots. The archival footage seems to look the same to me, as expected. The audio is also significantly improved, and viewers watching in English now have four audio options to choose from: compressed surround sound and stereo (DTS), and lossless surround sound and stereo (DTS-HD). Spanish is also available on this set. I’ve only listened to the English compressed surround (DTS) and lossless stereo (DTS-HD), and the lossless audio is much better than expected, and a boost from the audio available on the DVDs (which was all compressed codecs).I have two gripes. The first one I have is the “crop and chop” aspect ratio shifting. The original DVDs were presented in a 4×3 aspect ratio, which was meant to be framed against a standard definition television for broadcast in the 1990s. For the Blu-rays, Ken wanted to fill out the screen for viewing on a modern television, which is wider at an aspect ratio of 16×9. To do the conversion without stretching the image, the film makers are forced to crop the top, bottom, or a combination of both top and bottom in some measure, then “zoom in” the image so that it squares up properly, and appears “wider,” avoiding the black columns on either side of the TV, therefore filling up the screen of a modern TV. There’s a video out there of Ken indicating he did his best to ensure that the cropping was minimal, that the video we lost from cropping was insignificant, and for the most part, he’s right. But having watched this documentary several times over since its release, the change in aspect ratio sometimes (not all the time) is a bit unnerving to me, and does lop off the tops of people’s heads, or the bottom of their chins when in interview settings (Billy Crystal and Bob Costas interviews were filmed up close, and those stood out to me; others like Pedro Martinez were shot a bit more at a distance, so the effect of the “chop and crop” isn’t so obvious). With all that said, the high definition portions of the modern shots indeed look crisp and not over saturated (over-saturation of the color wheel is a common problem in HD restoration), which is a good thing. It looks great, if you can look past the cropping.My second gripe is minimal, but none of the original extras (that I could tell) were scanned to HD for the Blu-ray release.In all, if you have the DVDs, keep them so you can see how the documentary was framed originally, and so that you can see more of what was put to film, despite the standard definition resolution. But I still recommend picking up the Blu-rays; they look surprisingly better than expected, despite the cropping. The audio sounds crisper and cleaner than ever, and it does come with a few extras that were not on the original set.

Great documentary

The product is as advertised