The original production of Season 1 was a creature of its time, caught between two eras of television. Exteriors and certain gritty street scenes were shot on Super 16mm film, giving them a beautiful, organic grain reminiscent of a vintage photograph. Interiors, however, were captured on early HD digital cameras (1080i/60i), a format notorious for jagged edges and motion artifacts.
The audio, too, received a boost. The original Dolby Digital 2.0 was upgraded to a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track. The clang of a streetcar bell, the whisper of a corset, the distant lament of a foghorn from the Toronto Harbour—each sound gained a startling clarity that made the city a character in itself. murdoch mysteries season 01 1080p bluray
Consider a key scene from Episode 6, "Elementary, My Dear Murdoch," where Murdoch uses a phonograph to analyze a dying woman’s last words. In the DVD version, the scene is dim and flat. On the Blu-ray, the mahogany grain of the phonograph’s horn is distinct. The dust motes dancing in the single shaft of window light are visible. And Yannick Bisson’s eyes—those famously analytical, almost melancholic eyes—hold a flicker of a reflection: the spinning wax cylinder. A clue that was always there, but never seen . The original production of Season 1 was a
It also came with a small but cherished set of extras: a featurette on the forensic science of the 1890s, a tour of the set with composer Robert Carli, and audio commentaries on two episodes with the producers and stars. In one commentary, they revealed that the "morgue" was actually a repurposed storage room so cold that Helene Joy (Julia) kept a space heater hidden behind a cadaver drawer. On the Blu-ray, you could almost see the faint wisp of her breath. The audio, too, received a boost
It began not with a bang, but with a whisper of steam and the crackle of a new kind of light. In the bustling, soot-stained Toronto of 2008, a small period detective drama premiered on Citytv and subsequently on the fledgling streaming service Acorn TV. Few could have predicted that Murdoch Mysteries , based on Maureen Jennings’s novels, would outlive networks, outgrow its modest budget, and become a global phenomenon. But for the purist—the fan who craved the precise weave of Victorian tweed and the glint of gaslight on a beaker of forensic silver nitrate—the journey to true high-definition perfection was a long, winding case in itself.