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Remastered Star Trek: the Next Generation Blu-ray a Huge Leap Forward
MojoKid writes "There's been no new Star Trek TV series since Enterprise limped off screens in 2005, but the huge success of the 2009 Star Trek movie and the gradual growth of Blu-ray has caught CBS' attention (CBS acquired ownership of the Star Trek franchise in 2006). The broadcast company is preparing to release Star Trek: The Next Generation on Blu-ray with substantial improvements (article contains comparison image shots). The DVD boxed sets that exist today were created from the taped broadcasts that were shown in the early 90s. Rather than repackaging that material, CBS has gone back to the original film stock and started from scratch. The difference is enormous. CBS has released a preview Blu-ray titled Star Trek: The Next Generation — The Next Level with three updated episodes; the show's pilot (Encounter at Farpoint), Sins of the Father and The Inner Light."
From the article, open them in different tabs and switch between. Wow. I always wondered why the DVD image quality and colors sucked so badly, that explains it nicely.
DVD
BluRay
The bluray shot makes the DVD image look like a photo after it's been ran through the wash.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I was really hoping they would attempt to create a wide-screen version of the series by over-scaning the original film, cropping the top and bottom a tad, and stretching a tad to end up with 16:9.
Of course, I don't know exactly what aspect the original film was, and it is likely there will be things that should not be seen to the right/left in the overscan region. And the special effects might be exactly 4:3, in which case it would be very expensive to "fix".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overscan
They should have done episodes that would really show off the process. I would have picked Best of Both Worlds, Yesterday's Enterprise and either The Pegasus or All Good Things... because they are the best examples of what the series has to offer and would benefit from the effects uplift.
...will this article be enough to make CleverNickName log back on after 2.5 years? :-)
o/~ Join us now and share the software
You're also forgetting the source material doesn't even look that great so no amount of messing with it will ever produce a bluray image even as good as most recent films and I doubt there would be much difference even at 720p..
You're also also forgetting they're releasing them 4 episodes at a time and being greedy, Paramount will probably want well over $120 for a season.
You're also also also forgetting file-sizes mean nothing. They could fill the black bars on the sides (yes, sides) with uncompressed nothing just to fill up the disc.
I watched a good bit of TNG on Netflix recently (I skipped over the worst episodes, 20% or so). I did some research into the rather poor picture quality, and I'm kind of surprised to hear of this BR version. From what I read, the "problem" with TNG was that although everything was originally shot on 35mm film, all of the editing and some of the special effects were done on video tape. Editing on video tape saved a lot of money and time during the production process. Thus the quality of the finished version of the show was merely broadcast / VHS quality of the day, and nothing better. Now maybe people were just making stuff up and that information is incorrect, but I was under the impression the picture quality was fuzzy and poor because, well, that's how it was produced originally.
So the BR version must involve more than just digitizing the original film stock - they must have re-edited all the various camera shots together again, matching the original edits, because it never existed as a complete version in film in the first place.
Here's a source for that info, although this is not where I had heard of the video editing before:
http://geekchocolate.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=174:star-trek-the-next-generation-the-next-level-
It's good to see that CBS put the time and money into doing this properly.
Better known as 318230.
TNG was shot on 35mm film which has higher resolution than a 4k TV 5380 x 3620. If they do the scan with a 4k scanner and use good software then we should have something good. TNG is not as old as star wars and the film should preserved better than the star wars film. I don't why people always decide to scan the originals sometimes the copies are in much better shape. If you ever seen the remastering of the original series then you know what i am talking about.
I don't why people always decide to scan the originals sometimes the copies are in much better shape. If you ever seen the remastering of the original series then you know what i am talking about.
I would have to agree that you need to consider that some copies are likely in better shape than the originals, but in the case of TNG, I don't think that is the case due to the production system that was used when it was produced.
Star Trek: TNG was originally filmed with 35mm film stock and then transferred to a conventional videotape editing system before broadcast. The original negatives were barely touched and mostly left in their original archived state, where Star Trek was already considered a very lucrative franchise and something worth preserving as well (so it wasn't treated like yesterday's trash heap either).
The largest problem I would see is syncing the audio with the video and getting the correct scenes matching with the stuff that was put into the production version of each episode. That shouldn't be too difficult as such information was recorded when the films were originally edited, but it would take some effort to organize everything, and certainly take time to remaster each episode in this manner.