Some of the South Park Blu-rays are screwed up

[Katie Boundary]

I just checked out South Park seasons 12-15 on Blu-ray from my city's library system. Seasons 13-15 seem fine, but season 12 has blended frames, and is 29.97 fps where the others are 24. The blended frames alternate with progressive ones in a pattern, almost as if they were rendered at 24, then telecined up to 29.97, and then run through ye olde blur().sharpen() to get rid of the scanlines, as opposed to being directly blend-converted.

Coincidentally, season 12 was the last season that was originally produced in fullscreen and then re-composited and re-rendered for widescreen, and season 13 was the first to be produced in widescreen from the beginning. This suggests that the blending may have happened during the rendering step as a result of Matt and Trey forgetting to update the framerate when they redid everything in widescreen.

[Katie Boundary]

Analysis of the DVDs shows that even as late as season 12, episodes were still incorporating 30hz and 60hz effects and footage. An example is during some of the heavy metal parody scenes in the cat pee episode. When the episodes were converted to HD, these footage and effects weren't replaced. They just blended the scanlines and said "screw it".

Also, when they said they "re-composited" (or whatever) the episodes for widescreen, presumably moving characters etc. around to better fit into the new aspect ratio... that was 100% pure bullshit. They just cropped the top and bottom of the screen. You're not getting any additional width and nothing has been moved.