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HD Transfer of Star Trek: TNG To Arrive This Year
psychonaut writes "Digital Bits have confirmed through sources at CBS Paramount that CBS are working on a high-definition transfer of Star Trek: The Next Generation. A four-episode Blu-Ray sampler disc is to be released later this year; the episodes featured will be the two-part pilot 'Encounter at Farpoint,' 'Sins of the Father,' and fan favourite 'The Inner Light.' On 2 September, LeVar Burton tweeted that he had stopped by CBS Paramount Television City to check the progress and was 'mindblown' by the conversion. TrekCore has an article with further details and an analysis of some of the technical hurdles involved in remastering these episodes."
Riker's beard in stunning HD!
As the series was originally in 4:3 ratio when it was shown on TV, are we going to have a pillarbox or cropped wide screen transfer when this is put onto blu-ray?
This probably means that I'm going to rebuy the damn series again. VHS, check. DVDs, check. Blue ray? Someday. GAH. DOES IT EVER END?
I'm holding out for the quantum storage holodeck release
Sheldon Cooper commentary track.
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Was Star Trek The Next Generation shot on film, or on video tape? If the latter, what exactly can be done with the content? Did the studio record to higher than broadcast resolution? I suppose they could sharpen it and upscale content, and redo titles and some of the effects. The higher res and audio / video codecs might yield a superior presentation. But is it really HD? Seems a bit deceptive to claim it is if it isn't.
While sometimes rebuying feels silly, here they are doing some real work. I didn't know the series was shot on film, I would have figured video since it was a TV series. However as they said it was edited on video, meaning that all the post effects are done SD. So they not only have to transfer all the film and clean it up, as always, they have to redo the edits and effects (if they still have the edit decision lists maybe the actual cuts can be directly transferred but that's about all).
That work is worth something, if you enjoy seeing things in HD. Now if you don't, that's fine, but I don't think you can hate on them for wanting money or people for paying.
Something else that'll be interesting to see is how much post work they do on cleaning things up. SD hides a lot of defects pretty well that you can see in HD. I wonder if they'll work on that. Makeup would be one (the horrible colour of NTSC lead to often rather exaggerated makeups being used).
We are only really at the beginning of it. That higher resolution technology is available has nothing to do with anything. These standards change slowly. Consider that NTSC was finalized in 1941. We had that standard with us (with some updates like the 1953 colour update) for that long. ATSC, it's successor and current HD broadcast standard, didn't even get kicked off until the 1990s. It took 50 years before a new standard was even started on, and of course there was no real adoption of it until much more recently. Even just 5 years ago getting HD content was quite hard.
It isn't going anywhere for some time. Eventually I'm sure we'll get a better standard, but it could be another 50 years. It'll probably take a more radically new technology to make it happen.
You have to remember another issue is that more than 1920x1080 isn't so useful in most homes. The human eye has real limits and when you are sitting back from a TV, 4k wouldn't be very useful.
Now they may actually be doing a 4k transfer, film scanners usually handle that no problem. Even if they do though that doesn't mean it'll have that much useful resolution. You find that film isn't as good as you might think. Depending on the kind of film used, the cameras, storage, lighting, and a lot of other shit it doesn't end up getting as good a picture as you might hope and you find you don't get additional detail from ultra high resolution scans.
The native aspect ration of 35mm film is 1.375:1. You will sometimes hear that called academy or full frame. that is the ratio that film actually captures at. To do widescreen, one of two tricks is employed:
1) You matte the image, blocking off the parts you don't want. The can be done on the camera, on the projector, or in editing. Fight Club is such a movie this is done in. It was shot full frame, but matted down to be widescreen.
2) More commonly, you shoot using an anamorphic lens. This is a non-spherical lens that squashes the picture on the film. When you play it back using the same lens, you get a widescreen picture.
So for TV, they'd shoot full frame, because it is close to TV's 1:1.33 aspect ratio.
I've been watching TNG on Netflix and it looks absolutely awful. Certainly no better than a VHS tape.
I watched TNG on TV in the early 90s on the same 22" CRT I watched most programmes on, i.e. by the standards of the time on a moderate-sized set that wasn't going to show up any minor flaws.
And even *then* it was obvious to me that TNG's picture quality was f****** awful. It was almost distractingly soft and poor quality.
I live in the UK, and I noticed that the picture quality of a lot of US TV shows was visibly *worse* in the 90s than it had been in the 80s. I later found out that the reason was that until the late-80s most US shows were shot and *mastered* on film. In some cases at least (e.g. the original Star Trek series) the BBC got a film copy that they transferred live directly to the PAL transmission, with no NTSC intermediate.
From the late-80s, a lot of US shows switched to shot on film, but edited on video tape, probably to save money. This was probably okay for Americans watching on NTSC, because what got transmitted would have been degraded to crappy NTSC standard anyway. But showing that NTSC-edited programme on a UK TV system, you could see it looked rubbish.
Granted, the problem would probably have been exacerbated by NTSC->PAL conversion, but I've seen enough to confirm that the NTSC master probably wasn't that much better, and that the problems were down to NTSC. What you say just confirms it. ST:TNG's picture quality was garbage in the first place because it was downgraded to the lowest-common denominator NTSC quality at the editing stage.
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Was Star Trek The Next Generation shot on film, or on video tape?
As others replied, shot on film, edited on video.... except the special effects, many of which were mastered direct to video AFAIK.
Did the studio record to higher than broadcast resolution?
The bits that were shot on film probably contain more detail than could be shown on 525-line NTSC video.
I suppose they could sharpen it and upscale content, and redo titles and some of the effects.
The stuff that was shot on film probably doesn't need "upscaling", just rescanning at higher resolution.
The stuff that only ever existed on video... there's no way in hell they'll ever be able to upscale that in a worthwhile manner. The quality of NTSC video just isn't good enough to do that, and it would stick out like sore thumb if they tried to integrate those bits with the rescanned film. They'll have to redo them.
But is it really HD? Seems a bit deceptive to claim it is if it isn't.
I suspect you meant is it HD, or just upscaled SD?
But if we interpret your question another way, it raises an interesting point. The original film footage probably contains *much* more detail than the SD video transfer was capable of retaining.... so yes, it's "HD" in that sense.
However, just because film can resolve that much detail, doesn't mean the show was made with that in mind. In particular, it's likely they shot it for SD transmission and TV sets. Even a well-budgeted TV show like TNG would have had to allocate its budget wisely, and I doubt they would have wasted valuable money on (e.g.) set detailing that their audience would never see. It only had to look good in SD.
Now, if you watch the footage in high definition, chances are we may see that the set looks a little shoddy, with visible joins if you look closely. Picard's set makeup might look a bit "cakey" and obvious. And (as others mentioned) any illegible in-jokes on the button text could suddenly become readable.
Of course, this isn't a criticism of the original show, as it was probably never intended that people would be able to see that level of detail on screen.
Apparently, the BBC are having to invest in a new set for their popular soap opera EastEnders' move to HD, because the limitations of the existing one- which looked fine in SD- started showing up. Which shows that shooting in HD isn't simply a question of being able to resolve more detail- you have to plan for it too.
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Damn it...this means I will have to re-download the series again!
That said, I wouldn't want them to change it. Once you start messing around with that stuff, you're tempted to go down George Lucas's path to the dark side [..] Hiding that--let alone gussying it up--would be a sin.
As far as the 100%-film ST:TOS goes, the problem is that by rescanning and viewing at a greater level of detail than was ever originally expected, one *is* being sort of inauthentic- in the opposite direction- by exposing "flaws" that it's unfair to call flaws, because they wouldn't have been visible under the original planned viewing conditions.
Some may argue that I'm imposing a restriction on it that never existed (since the film-based masters were never tied to the resolution of TV). Still, IMHO, this is applying higher standards to the original material than could ever be considered fair.
As for The Next Generation (even ignoring the above), *any* HD version is going to fail the George Lucas authenticity test regardless.
The SD-video-based special effects would have to be remade to ensure consistency with the effects-free high-definition film scans even if one didn't want to attempt to "improve" them beyond this. The alternative- trying to remain as authentic as possible by including the original effects- wouldn't work either since (as I mentioned) it's going to be impossible to upscale them to anything even approaching true HD. The result would be a piebald mixture of high-resolution film shots and obviously much lower resolution effects shots- the jarring nature of which would in itself be inauthentic (as well as being crap!)
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Meaning
1- If it was filmed at a resolution higher than NTSC so they just don't upscale it
2- If they keep the ratio it was filmed in (4:3)
WB totally messed up B5, and it looks like crap on DVD compared to VHS. I know that part of the problem was the CGI was not done in 16:9 and some moron at WB probably insisted it would sell better in Widescreen, they cropped and stretched the composited shots and it's a big blurry mess...)
http://www.modeemi.fi/~leopold/Babylon5/DVD/DVDTransfer.html
I've got better things to do tonight than die.