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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."
might have to get a blu ray player for this
Riker shot first!
Now we can all enjoy counsellor Deanna Troi's tits in HD!!
Did they cut out the first two seasons? That's that easiest way to make a substantial improvement.
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.
... Yefremov actually did have some talent for writing
I think his work was much better in the original Klingon. :-)
I bought BSG (the recent version) on DVD but later found a BR pack containing everything on sale - so I decided to snag that. While I rarely buy something on BR that I already own, I must say the improvement in certain scenes was quite noticable. The "inside" scenes weren't really improved, but the difference in space was rather surprising. When I first watched them on DVD, I thought they were great, but when I saw them on the BR, I saw just how much difference it made. The stars in the background actually twinkled, and the overall darkness in space was much more apparent.
While I won't be rushing out to get everything on BR just because it looks this good in BSG, it was certainly a nice eye-opener - even with such a new series.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
...will this article be enough to make CleverNickName log back on after 2.5 years? :-)
o/~ Join us now and share the software
Just remember that if you have a Blu-Ray drive, you need to make sure your entire setup is HDCP compliant or it will downsample as a form of punishment. This is especially troublesome for your typical Slashdot reader who has a home-brewed unusual setup.
But the easiest solution I've found is to rip out the copy protection altogether. There's a (commercial) program for Windows called AnyDVD HD that automatically strips out copy protection from DVDs and Blu-Ray discs on the fly, within a few seconds of inserting the disc into your drive. The program isn't cheap, but this way you don't have to worry about copy protection getting in the way of playing the fucking disc you paid for.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
One reason to have hard-earned money is to buy things that entertain you... which also means more entertaining things will appear.
Money is a resource, not a score.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
As I grow older, I find TNG to formulaic and not so watchable. I more likely to watch DS9 or Voyager. They tend to rely less on magic
Voyager is all magic, I have no idea what you're talking about. I can't count the number of episodes that were solved by the damn deflector dish, or some other arbitrary solutions, nor the amount of screen time devoted to technobabbling. The problems encountered were almost all caused by magic, the situations were crazy and nonsensical, the solutions were insane, and it was all riddled with inconsistencies with itself and other treks. When it wasn't magical technology, it was magical humanity (characters who made no sense whatsoever).
Macro viruses! The Omega Directive! Cooperative Borg! Insane Janeway! Tuvix! Uggggh.
I remember watching the first episode of TNG. The studio shooting was as dreadful as TOS, but when the music came up, and the Patrick Stewart voiceover came up, there was a great confort that along with the bad there was going to be a lot of good. Of course, one the quest for rating took hold and the overwhelming militaristic mission took over, it was pretty much over. TNG and the Borg. DSP and the dominion. Enterprise and the confusing and arbitrary Xindi. Peaceful explorations simply does not sell laundry detergent.
The later Borg plot in TNG that it sounds like you're talking about (Picard assimilated, etc.) was two episodes long, and there were only a handful of others. The Mission didn't become militaristic, unlike in Enterprise. TNG was kind of magical and more TOS-like for the first season or two. After that it was quite soapy and character-centric.
Voyager: These are the voyages of the Flying Toilet Seat.
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 recently went back to them on netflix. There's a ton of them when you look at all 7 seasons together, so you have to be selective. Just make sure:
a) Riker has a beard
b) Zipper is in the back
c) Polaski, anyone named Crusher, and maybe Jordy isn't the major focus of the episode. (Its ok if its Crusher & Picard, Jordy & Data, etc).
d) Watch anything with Lor
e) Watch anything with Borgs
f) Watch anything with time travel/time loops/etc
g) Holodeck episodes are trouble. Is it the old west? Skip. 1800s you can probably keep. Riker playing in a jazz club? Fast forward just a bit.
h) Q episodes generally can't miss.
i) Picards are a must, but not if it involves him trying to awkwardly woo someone. Stay away: Kirk for the ladies, Picard for solving issues without a double fisted hammer blow to the back. (Exception: The episode Q takes him to his past, see rule h. There he does wooing and double fisted hammer blows, but you also get to see one of the most ridiculously obvious stunt double scenes ever)
In general season 1-2 25% watchable, 3 50%, 4-7 90%.
The difference isn't the magic, it is the style. TNG like TOS is a Rodenberry creation and is a Utopia. He had a bright vision of the future and Star Trek is that committed to film. Things aren't perfect, but they are better, humans are better, life is better.
DS9 and Voyager are Dystopias. They are future imperfect, things turning bad. War, strife, death, etc. They aren't hardcore dystopias (Blade Runner, The Matrix, and Equilibrium would be some hardcore dystopia explamles) but still.
Now the dystopias are probably a bit more realistic visions of the future. I've always bought in to the Firefly theory of "technology changes, people don't" but that is neither here nor there. That is the big difference, and is probably the reason for you liking the new ones more. When Rodenberry died, the ST universe went in a different direction.
Most of the effects were done in post which means in this case "not on film". They shot and edited it on film, but then effects had to be added in. Since the theater wasn't the target it would be expensive to do them all to a new film transfer, then take that back to Beta. Instead they just did the effects straight to video.
So even if they aren't going to change the effects at all, they still have to get redone or there wouldn't be any.
Also there needs to be some digital effects done anyhow just to deal with problems masked by the original format. Even on DVD, you can tell, for example, that the trubolift doors are painted wood, not metal. Couldn't see it on broadcast because the resolution is so shitty, but it is visible on the original tapes and thus on DVD. On Blu-ray, it'd be downright obvious. So that is the kind of thing to clean up before the release.
Voyager: These are the voyages of the Flying Toilet Seat.
Its swirling mission: to explore strange new soils, to seek out new clogs and new encrustations, to boldly flush what no one has flushed before!
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
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 made the Borg. The movie First Contact and Voyager turned them into pussies. Maurice Hurley originally wrote the Borg to be like a force of nature; like a hurricane that swept through an area leaving nothing but destruction in their wake. Your only option for survival was to get the hell out of the way and hide until the storm passed.
Then the writers decided to bring them back, but they decided to anthropomorphise them. So they took Picard, who at the time wasn't sure if he was going to continue playing the part of Picard, and borgify him, leaving the viewers hanging. Would Picard be saved or would he leave the show and become a recurring bad guy?
Then we got Hugh. That's when the Borg began their downward spiral into pussydome. The moment Hugh said "Geordi is my friend" I knew it was all over.
Then we got Lore with the Borg renegades, who all had cool names similar to Locutus. Apparently a single Borg discovering individuality was enough to completely cripple an entire cube's population. No security on that network I guess.
Then we got First Contact, where they basically rebooted the Borg into a technological space vampire bug species. Pretty much everything we learned about them from the episode Q, Who? was ditched so they could play a bigger role. We got the Queen, which was completely opposite to the idea of a collective consciousness! She is the big bad, the drones are just vampiric zombies to be blasted apart by holographic tommy guns.
From there we went to Voyager, which completely ignored the Borg until their ratings started to sag, then they decided to ditch one cast member and replace her with a borg drone with big tits and a nice ass. From there on out, the Borg became a running joke. Voyager disproved that resistance was futile. They disproved that the Borg were even a serious threat. By the end of Voyager the Borg had been relegated to "major annoyance".
But this wasn't the end. Oh no! They had to bring the Borg back for Enterprise! Cause, you know, Enterprise took place in an alternate universe created when the Borg went back in time in First Contact and changed the past. So they had some Borg survive their sphere exploding in orbit and making it down to the arctic where they would be found by some scientists in the 2150's. Now, this could have been done really well, but they still had all the props and costumes left over from Voyager, as well as the same lame-brained producers and writers, so we just got more of the same, ultimately ending in a signal being broadcast alerting the borg to the existence of Earth, thus allowing them to find their way there in the future, around the 2360's...
I have a love-hate relationship with Star Trek. And it's mostly Berman/Braga's fault. Had they had some producers with a minute amount of balls, the Borg could have been awesome. Instead they turned them into B-grade movie bad guys for the ratings, and it is still going on today. In the MMORPG Star Trek Online, you can take out entire cube ships by yourself without much hassle. They've even gone so far as to link V'Ger with the Borg... cause everything in Star Trek has to be related to everything else.
So much potential, wasted by crappy writers and producers...
First Bluray is NOT 1080p. It's CAPABLE OF 1080p, but it can contain anything from 480i to 1080p. you are a fool if you think all Blurays are 1080p.
Second all movies on BluRay are not "HD" movies from the 80's are a waste of money on bluray as all you get is more film grain! Woo! A lot of movies were shot on crap quality 35mm film to save money and ended up having a metric buttload of film grain. Want a good example of a waste of money on BluRay? Star Wars 4,5,6.
Second dont try and tell me that a DVD will not have "visible artifacts" DVD's have long been so poorly mastered and have had the movies bitrate so reduced to fit worthless "added feature crap" on them they look like crap and are FULL of artifacts. The ONLY way to get a DVD that is fantastic is to buy "superbit" editions that do away with all the worthless extras crap and use the whole dual layer disc for just the movie at the maximum bitrate possible. I have a copy of XXX on superbit that looks IDENTICAL to the BLuRay version. (which means the bluray version is NOT 1080p worth of video)
Lastly, very little is shot in 1080p. that has changed recently, but all United states braodcast cameras are either 1080i (1/2 the resolution of 1080p) or the more common 720p. and THAT is what is on most Bluray disks as the source materiel.
There are exceptions. Pixar for example re-renders the film at 1080p for perfection on a Bluray. and any film transfers from IMAX also will work at 1080p IF they did the transfer with a 1080p camera. Anything shot digitally in the last few years on digital panaflex cameras, or digital Arriflex cameras can also look fantastic and real 1080p IF they re render the film at that resolution for DVD release.
Lastly BLuRay's mostly ARE H264 on the disk if they are not MPEG2. I suggest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc for more reading on the subject.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm sorry, but this is not correct. Absolutely nobody in that period was working on TV CG at greater than 1080p. The exact resolution would depend on what exactly they were using, and AFAIK, I don't know anybody who worked on TNG to ask about workflow details. But, I do work with somebody who worked on early Flame and a lot of people who were Lightwave artists during the B5/SeaQuest days. It was all done in SD at the time.
Remember, TNG started in the 80's and ended in 1994. During the TNG era, PC's ran DOS. Irix based Flame workstations cost most of a million dollars and had less power than an old iPhone. Amigas were the kings of TV effects. Nobody had the memory or storage to keep rendered HD frames around for no reason. There was no way to broadcast that resolution, no medium to sell it on. Nobody had displays that would show 1080p. At that point, Lightwave had a serial port tape deck control feature so that you could render frame-by-frame directly to video tape under the assumption that you didn't even have the storage space for your few seconds of 640x480 SD. Even the film guys, with much bigger budgets than TV, were a long way from having the available storage to do things like a full Digital Intermediate. (It didn't happen until O Brother Where Art Thou.) As late as 2000, a lot of film projects were doing VFX at less than 1080p resolution, even without trying to do a full DI.
Certainly, in additional to all that the geometry was less detailed than it would be today, and shading and compositing was simpler. It was still amazing for the time, and I'd love to see a "cleanup only" version of TNG which didn't try to add new CG effects. At this point, it really just has to be appreciated as a product of the time in which it was made, rather than trying to recapture the sense of awe you remember from watching it all those years ago by (mis)using modern CGI.
Despite what Hollywood and their senators want you to think, ripping off copy protection from something you legally bought is not the same as piracy.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
"Jordy"? "Lor"?
Turn in your Trek card now, good sir. You are no Trekkie.
FC Closer
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.
Anything shot on good old fashioned "analog" film, and remastered can be brought up to HD, even 1080P (assuming the film was high enough quality which isn't a high bar).
Like these STTNG remasters.
The problem in this case is not getting high enough resolution, but in finding a way to fix all the problems they relied on not being visible in TV broadcasts.
Cheap sets (woodgrain in the "metals" will be visible in 1080P, cardboard props that are supposed to be advanced handheld computers, etc.), makeup jobs (caking on the makeup to make aging stars look as sexy as possible), inside jokes (Mike Okuda probably get's at least 10 drunken death threats a week from the crew working on these remasters)
Except that it has Wil Wheaton in it.
By every account I have ever heard, Wil Wheaton is a good guy who deserves your respect. Wesley Crusher, on the other hand, was a Marty Stu character[1] who alienated many fans, and if you want to hate Wesley, go right ahead.
Just keep the two separate. Wil Wheaton didn't write the stories, didn't write his dialog, and in general should be held blameless. I know if I had the chance to be part of a Star Trek series, working with Gene Roddenberry, I would do it even if my character wasn't popular.
There were some episodes with Wesley that many fans accept. I never saw "The First Duty" but I heard good things about it, for example.
And finally... Wil Wheaton has been known to post on Slashdot, and might be reading this thread. Did you write those words with the idea that Wil Wheaton might read them? Remember, he's a real person.
[1] A while ago I went to a lecture in Seattle, featuring a writer who had written scripts for Star Trek TNG. They announced that first they would show an episode he had written, and then he would talk about it. My heart sank when I saw that the episode was one I had seen before, and it was a Wesley episode and it was annoying. When the writer began to talk, I began to feel more sympathy toward him. He told us that the basic idea of this episode came direct from Gene Roddenberry, and it was just his job to flesh it out. He also told us that Gene Roddenberry's middle name was "Wesley" and he made it clear that Roddenberry was the one pushing for Wesley to be this super guy who is constantly saving the ship. So I'm not just claiming this "Marty Stu" thing, I have evidence.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
My strict adherence to canon only allows me to write character names as I hear them.
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.
"Second all movies on BluRay are not "HD" movies from the 80's are a waste of money on bluray as all you get is more film grain! Woo! A lot of movies were shot on crap quality 35mm film to save money..."
Oh boy...Another example of someone who doesn't understand film quality. When you say movies are not HD and are crappy quality, that is false, at least by implying that film is less quality than video. On the contrary, the picture on film is created by a photochemical process, so you can't really compare it to the pixels or so forth of video. But in terms of equivalency, film quality FAR outweighs even 1080p HD. It has been roughly compared to 4K resolution for 35mm, 8K resolution for 70mm films. Now, when films are shot with a lot of grain in them, the cinematographer chose a very "fast" film stock (i.e., very sensitive to light so you don't need as much light to expose it). One of the artifacts of that is heavy film grain. Plus it's a combination of that and how much or how little light the cinematographer used to shoot the scene that determines graininess. It's either sloppy cinematography, or an intended "gritty" look. But it does NOT mean the resolution of film itself, as a medium, is inferior. Quite the opposite. There has never yet been (although we're getting closer and closer) a visual medium that captures the contrast range, the color gamut, or detail quite like motion picture film. The way the film was shot, the way the lab processed it, how well it's preserved, and how well it's transferred to the master tape for DVD/Blu-Ray distribution all go into play as to how pristine the film will look or not - not the innate quality of film. Just wanted to clarify that.
And to clarify also, everything but the lowest-budget independent films are shot on FILM, not video. Even the newer movies that may be shot in digital, are not typically shot in 1080p, but rather in 4K (e.g., with the RED camera, etc.), which is more appropriate for theatrical distribution. If the movie is made-for-video, it might be shot in 1080p, but again, we're talking about really low budget then.
Really, anyone on slashdot disrespecting Wil Wheaton hasn't got a fucking clue. In the past Wil had a presence (still has a presence?) on Slashdot. Read and learn.
No Deep Space Nine on Blu Ray. Last thing they need Ipis for the resolution to be good enough to tell that ...
IT'S A FAAAAAAKE
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.