EastEnders

The timing of this was interesting - the new Queen Vic was unveiled on screen in the same week that BBC One HD launched, yet the programme remained upscaled SD as you say. They then launched BBC One HD on the Wednesday night with (I think) a lineup of full HD programming. Given the publicity that they were rebuilding the Vic for HD, it suggested the original intention was go HD that week, but for whatever reason that wasn't possible, and they went for Christmas Day instead.

The original plans were for a temporary Albert Square on the car park, whilst they demolished the original Albert Square and then rebuilt the current 'back lot'. However, as already been said, the temporary move plans were abandoned and a permanent set is now being built on the car park instead.

Once this is completed, as far as I can interpret, the original set will then be demolished to make way for further building work to create more outdoor sets for EastEnders. Reading the BBC News article, this part will be completed in 2023:

"At EastEnders, the so-called "front lot", which is the replacement for the existing set, will now be finished by 2021 - but work on the "back lot", which will include new Walford outdoor locations, will go on until May 2023."

So there's no plan that has been mentioned that the old 'back lot' will be sold or redeveloped into something else. The outdoor space will eventually be almost twice the size of now, just built over two different parts of the Elstree site. But has already been said, you won't really notice they aren't joined on screen. The old back lot will probably have some of the elements that have been lost due to the smaller plot of land for the new main square - I think quite a bit behind the railway bridge can't be squashed onto the new space. I know there were also discussions to make sets to reflect a more modern representation of London e.g. a mosque, coffee shop, apartment block, offices etc. I wouldn't be surprised if they create frontages for a hospital, school or supermarket as well when the new back lot is constructed.

The plans I saw, included an Overground Station, so I would imagine the area past the railway bridge will be "redeveloped" and it may play into a story about the closure of the Tube Station. I guess the other road closures and re-arranging of the area will be part of the show

It's been made to look like it's been there a while, but in one of the early episodes several of the cast went around there and it was just wasteland.

Speaking of Doctor Legge, I recall a famous line he once delivered many years ago, after having too many sherries in the Vic:

"Legge is legless. But he's also quite 'armless".

I had no idea he was back in the Square. Will be nice to see Mary back again. And Sharon and Michelle.

Oh, hang on.......

One thing I've noticed on a few recent Drama episodes of EastEnders is at the very top of the frame in some scenes, you can see a couple of lines of the picture from one of the other cameras, obviously some sort of artifact of the vision mixing. Wouldn't have been seen by viewers at the time of course, thanks to overscan, it's only watching via digital with overscan turned off that I can see it now.

That’s interesting! It’s something you see today, particularly when a DVE effect is about to happen, and the ‘background’ scene can be seen as a one pixel border. I’ll tune in and take a look at the archive EEs

You see it quite a bit on the BBC4 TOTPs as well, usually at the end of the titles, around the chart countdown or when they show a video (obviously they used a lot of those DVE effects as well).

With the relatively early DVEs in use on TOTP repeats, you used to often be able to tell if a DVE was in circuit by the poorer quality of the picture... (The early Quantel DVEs were far from transparent)

In some ways it's like watching those old American filmed shows from the 50s-80s when you could tell when a transition was coming because the picture quality would drop a second or so ahead, I presume because the film dropped another generation.

Actually less noticable when watching those shows now than it used to be in the 90s, I presume because they're new remasters where they've digitally adjusted the picture so the quality matches.

Also, the filmising has been absent from Drama EastEnders for 2 weeks now, looks like they finally fixed that problem. It only took them 3 months.

I think they often go back to A/B rolls or earlier for remastering, so don't have to cope with the poor quality opticals in the finished master. (They recreate the 'opticals' digitally)

The drop in quality was because the last shot of a previous scene and the next shot of the following scene were passed through an optical print process to do dissolves, wipes, overlays etc., which wasn't needed for a straight cut. The quality drop was pretty noticeable...