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Star Trek: New Voyages, Downloadable Video
tm2b writes "What if you could make new episodes of the original Star Trek, with the same characters, worse acting (believe it or not), better special effects, and lower resolution? It seems that some fans secured the Roddenberry family's support for doing just that. They call it Star Trek: New Voyages and they've completed one full episode and and working on another to be released in August. They plan to pick up with the fourth year of the "five year mission," and the first episode can be downloaded in zipped WMV format. It's worth checking out if you can ignore acting that actually makes you yearn for the quality of the original cast. Personally, I love seeing what they can do rendering the old ST tech with modern CGI."
Another great fan made Star Trek is Hidden Frontier
You get anywhere from 2-5% compression depending on codec used. When something is downloaded a couple thousand or even hundred thousand times that little amounts of savings can add up to a huge overall savings in total bandwidth.
--- I do not moderate.
You know what would be useful?
A system like BitTorrent, but that could also be seeded with a list of URLs where the file is available online.
All copies of the software would work together, which each user automatically and optimally assigned different parts of the files to retrieve from the URLs. Using Content-Range: and those "seed" URLs, each user would download a different part to get things rolling. Then they would all work collectively to send those parts of the files back and forth between each other, until everyone has the whole file.
TNG was great. It concentrated mostly on ethics and morality stuff.
DS9 was much more interesting to me. Because they stay in place, there is a chance for political tensions to develop. Makes things a lot more interesting being able to fully explore relationships between ST cultures. In many ways it was the best trek for my tastes.
Voyager sucked. Cheese factor over the top even for trek.
Enterprise: let me explain this to you since you seem to find it so hard to understand: with time travel involved which is THE BASIS OF THE SERIES, you can't really have a fucked up timeline. There will be changes to it, but in the end I'm sure the timeline will be pretty much as we'd expect at the end of the show. Some things may happen earlier/later, but in general it will all work out. You and the other 5 guys that spout this on Slashdot every day are simply wrong.
I'm tired of you folks saying they should pack it in. You're wrong, there are plenty of us that still enjoy trek. If you can find any way to produce sci fi that doesn't cost money and require marketing, lay it out there for us. With your limited imagination though, I doubt you could come up with much.
Seeing all the things Shatner is in right now I'd bet he'd be willing to do it himself for minimum wage... That still doesn't solve your basic complaint though.
For too long Star Trek, the most important series in Geek history, has had second class status to Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings and even The Matrix. Those series has their own topics. Star Trek deserves better. Join the others who have signed the petition to give Star Trek a topic on Slashdot.
I think the only problem with Shatner's acting was that he couldn't seem to turn down his "stage presence". On TV he always looked like he was doing live theater and exaggerrating every word and movement "so the people in the back of the theater could [see|hear] it". Either he never realized, or the director never told him, that on TV you should tone it down just a little.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
> when they first meet the Borg via Q.
Yeah, that was good. The best episode of the second season, IMHO. Q is always fun, and there's always good chemistry between Patrick Stewart and John de Lancie.
> Then "Measure of a Man" about Data.
I'm sorry. This really could have been a great episode, done right. But the "legal regulations" for Data's arbitration board were so utterly contrived, so completely ludicrous, that they made no sense whatsoever. Legal proceedings are at least putatively designed to dispense justice, not to cause Cdr. William Riker and the rest of the Enterpise crew the maximum amount of angst possible. They totally destroyed my suspension of disbelief (and I can usually take a lot in the direction). It just didn't work.
> Also the one about Prof. Moriarty was pretty good as I'm also a Sherlock Holmes fan.
Meh. I'm a Holmes fan myself, but I didn't care for it much. Possibly because I'm allergic to holodeck episodes.
> But the crowning episodes in my mind was "The Inner Light" and "The Defector".
"The Defector" was pretty good, and "The Inner Light" was one of the finest pieces of SF ever produced for television. But neither is second season, so they can't be used to argue the quality of the second season.
Chris Mattern
There is nothing wrong with Nimoy's acting
I saw an interview with him once where he said that whenever the camera stopped rolling, he would spontaneously burst into laughter or start crying. Maintaining Spock's emotionless facade took a lot of effort for him, he couldn't keep it up for long. Hell they had to write a "Data goes crazy" episode every now and again, I reckon that was just to keep Brent Spiner sane.
Make the Star Trek name absolute mud?
"They" are not doing anything. Its a private, not for profit group that is doing this, not the Copyright holders. The copyright holders (Eugene Roddenberry, son of Gene) have come in toward the last, and given alot of leeway because he feels the project is exactly what his father would want. Additionally, many talented people from the movie industry have donated (or near donated) their time for the project. The producers are paying for the entire project out of their own pockets, with no method for recovering their expenses.
It is not being sold, its given away. They plainly state that this is their interpretation of what years 4 and 5 would be. Its looks like a pretty cool project, and once the slashdotting is done on their site, you can download for FREE.
This looks pretty damn cool to me, a fan based trilogy with decent acting, and very good visual effects, putting a new spin on Star Trek, while remaining fairly faithful to the original. They even state in their FAQ (link above) that they will NOT screw up the timeline.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Which is why I always wondered why movie trailers often have saving disabled.
It's a good thing for people to watch them more than once, but why do the sites want to pay extra for it?
I watched it, I thought it was great!
:)
It felt authentic, in a way that everything after ST:TNG does not.
It's true, it's rusty. But they seem really comitted, and I think they're going to master this system that they've created.
I just have one major wish:
I really wish the audio were redubbed. Do the shots just using the microphones on the set, and then perform a seperate dubbing session, so that the sounds are clear.
Regardless of whether the audio is improved or not, I'm a dedicated fan now.
I haven't watched a Sci-Fi TV show in about 7 years. But I'm excited about these shows!
I would go so far as to say that whether or not it was originally meant as a B5 knockoff, DS9 had some of the most intense plotting and intricate character relationships of the entire Trek canon. Far from being Picard the Boy Scout or Kirk the Adventurer, Sisko was a deeply conflicted man who did some very, very bad things at times to try to make things come out right. I think if you want to look at what Star Trek always should have been, you have to look at DS9; it was the only show where some of the supporting characters were as important or more important than some of the main characters.
That said, Voyager had one thing going for it: if I was going to take any ship in the Trek canon, it would be the Voyager. Of all the ships on the show, that one is the closest to indestructible...
Starship Exeter: I like the lighting and design. Some acting is ok other is very bad. Maybe some sponsors relatives had to get a job on the show. Greatest annyoance: It looks like they used VHS or SuperVHS, no DV. And they should have done something in post production to give it more of a film look. As the original was filmed on 16 or 35 mm film.
New Voyages: Brilliant set design, nicely combinated with CGI that tries to recreate the classic look. And they treated their video to more look like film. All in all it best matches the classic series. Feels cheap here and there? Yes, the original did too. Sometimes really felt like watching a never before seen episode of the original show. Which happened for the last time in the seventies when I watched in in my payamas before going to bed.
Final Frontier: Good story, best acting, overall good look, but with all the bluescreen stuff it got the look of movie sequences in a Star Trek game. Anyone remembers Starfleet Academy?
Which gives me an idea which is pretty obvious: How about a fan based effort about Starfleet Academy? You could give it a classic look but also could make your own designs. It would make perfect sense to use young actors. Still you could use the classic characters. IIRC Paramount thought about that concept before.
What I really don't get: Why not use a format that will play on every machine (standalone DVD players included) and LOOK GOOD FFS? Sorenson QuickTime, WMV ... Someone please give them some hours of video encoding 101. (Grumbel ...) No, size shouldn't matter. There are distribution systems that work perfectly fine for big files, like BitTorrent and donkey/overnet.
Would be a nice thing if those projects would join their efforts.
In the end all those shows are good enough to make me want to watch more of them. Which is more than the first season of "Enterprise" achieved for me.