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All Star Trek TV Coming To Netflix
tekgoblin writes "This is great news for all the Star Trek fans out there. Starting in July, every episode from every Star Trek series will be available for Instant Watch over Netflix. Right now Star Trek TOS is available for Instant Watch, and the movies, but that's all. Soon it will all be here for our viewing pleasure."
No ST cartoon.
Wonder what ever happened to him.
Oddly enough, you'll occasionally find Wil Wheaton posting on Slashdot. Or at least he used to (Slashdot username: CleverNickName). I think he still does some acting gigs here and there though I haven't seen him in anything in a while now.
I wonder if we are in store for HD versions of the episodes? I've heard that atleast with TNG the scenes with cgi were rendered in standard def. 35mm for the character scenes which is do-able.
No, AFAIK the special effects on TNG were mastered on video. The majority of the show was shot on film, but transferred to video for editing and the addition of most special effects.
This means that even if the original high-resolution source film remains intact, any "HD" transfer of TNG would still have to redo the effects since even the "originals" only ever existed as SD video- AFAIK there aren't (and never were) any higher quality versions.
Given the craptastic quality of 80s NTSC video, there's no way you could "clean" or upscale them so that they looked like anything approaching HD- they even looked crap at SD (*)- and more importantly so that they didn't stand out like a sore thumb against the higher quality rescanned film footage.
I'd think that most of these scenes the effects could be redone by someone in their basement compared to 1987. It is star trek they should let the fans add the effects back in. They would do it for free to get their name in the credits.
That sounds nice, and I'm sure that there are many skilled fans who'd do it for free. However, I suspect it's not as simple or "free lunch" for the studios as that.
For one, there's coordinating such efforts, ensuring that (e.g.) the style of effects being done by different teams have a consistent (and not jarringly different) style.
And if people are working for free, how far will they accept being told what and how to do things by the studio? What if their personal fanboy view of how things should be done or what should be concentrated on disagrees with that of the studio? (No, what hardcore fanboys want and think should be done with a show isn't always the best from a general audience point of view- indeed, pandering to the self-indulgences of obsessives can sometimes damage the general appeal of a show and destroy what made it great in the first place).
And will such people be working in their spare time? What if the studio needs X done for release in 18 months time, but some guy working in a particular area can't spare the time from work? Of course, they could pay him... which starts to blur the line between employees and free contributions anyway.
So it's not as simple as you might think.
(*) I always used to wonder why the likes of TNG looked so "soft" and generally bad- the same problems that I could see with US-based video shows- when earlier US film-based shows looked okay. Turns out that the older shows were shot and edited on film, but that at some point during the 80s there was a trend towards shooting on film but transferring to video for editing. Apparently, the BBC etc. used their own film-based prints of older shows, which obviously wouldn't have suffered from NTSC video's defects, but they clearly couldn't do this with video-edited shows. And believe me, even watching TNG on a bog-standard moderately-sized colour television set in the UK, the difference in quality was obvious.
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No, it really is unlimited. If your ISP caps you, that isn't Netflix's fault.
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No ST cartoon.
True, but you can already watch that here. Brief ads, but no Netflix subscription needed.