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What No Man Has Seen Before: Remastering Deep Space Nine To Maximum Quality (extremetech.com) 118

Posted by BeauHD from the now-that's-dedication dept.
Dputiger writes: After nine months of work, I've published workflows, example videos, and screenshots showing how to restore Star Trek: Deep Space Nine from the rather potato quality of its DVDs to something you could plausibly call HD equivalent. These are the results. "With careful processing and good upscaling, it's possible to give Deep Space Nine a clarity that I think approaches that of what's typically referred to as 'HD' content, though it's still limited to the NTSC color gamut as opposed to later standards like Rec. 709," writes Joel Hruska via ExtremeTech. "At its worst -- allowing for some deviations from perfection -- it'll still look like the best damn DVD you've ever seen. At its best -- and I consider the shot of Sisko up there to be one of the best -- I'd argue that he, at least, comes across in HD levels of detail."

The article "is not a step-by-step tutorial on how to perform this process," Hruska writes, adding, "that will be its own project." There will, however, be enough information that anyone with a passing knowledge of AviSynth "should be able to recreate both approaches."
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What No Man Has Seen Before: Remastering Deep Space Nine To Maximum Quality More

What No Man Has Seen Before: Remastering Deep Space Nine To Maximum Quality

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  • Garek in HD? (Score:4, Funny)

    by SinGunner ( 911891 ) on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @05:11AM (#60487312)
    His facial expressions single-handedly make this the best Trek.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      There were a lot of great actors on DS9, many of them working under heavy makeup.

    • >"His facial expressions single-handedly make this the best Trek."

      I liked DS9, but I think TNG and Voyager were much better. Plus, Avery Brooks was prone to over-acting (in the Shatner tradition). For me, in order:

      TNG
      Voyager
      DS9
      Enterprise
      TOS

      Anyway, if they wanted to "re-master" it, that requires the original, unprocessed master footage, not upscaling a finished consumer product. Still, I have always wondered if, with nearly endless computational time, if AI-based upscaling could be as good as starting

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Anyway, if they wanted to "re-master" it, that requires the original, unprocessed master footage, not upscaling a finished consumer product.

        Exactly. Video on DVD is low-resolution shit because that was the only thing produced back then. Back in 1993, DS9 looked pretty good on my 27 inch CRT television, but, it isn't 1993 anymore. All of the "AI powered upscaling" in the world can't change that.

        It is unfortunate that shows like DS9 will never be available in a good quality format, but it is understandable. They could never sell enough copies to recover the cost.

        • It was probably filmed in standard def.

          A lot of TV was.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Rhipf ( 525263 )

            Actually a lot of TV was filmed and then converted to SD video. That is to say, if the original film still exists it would theoretically be possible to go back to that source and digitize a better than SD version. Unfortunately, even if the original film exists, there is no financial incentive to do such HD remastering.

            • Most of these were filmed, but the VFX were all done in SD video. The work has already been done for TOS and TNG to recreate the VFX in high definition, but the audience is probably too small for DS9 - unless they think it will sell more subscriptions to CBS All Access.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by jbengt ( 874751 )
                TOS? That was some pretty minimal VFX by today's standards.

                • I dunno. They had sleek ships as this was before the Coming of the Greebling in Star Wars, which even affected Trek movies with them removing the cool pulsing orange endcaps and replacing it with nacelles without it and the baffling baffling. This combined with someone going "chewwwwwww" when it went into warp were seen as improvements >:-(

                  The newest Trek movie did one thing right: restored a similar endcap, glowing swirly blue.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Brama ( 80257 )

                TOS had no CGI, everything was shot on film one way or another. TNG's only CGI were cutscenes, there was no mixing of CGI and actual footage. Hence every scene shot was shot with film which is simple to convert to HD.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by tap ( 18562 )
                In this era, prime time TV was filmed and converted to video. So the film masters would be "high definition" as much as comparing physical film to a digital resolution makes sense. Low budget material, like daytime soaps, commercials or something with a short production time like a news broadcast would have been shot in video.

                The film sources would be 24 fps. It would be converted to NTSC's 60 fields (not frames) per second via a 2:3 pulldown, where the first frame is converted to two fields, the next

            • Oh, you mean like the original Star Trek? On the other hand, if Deep Space 9 was "direct to VHS" there is no amount of turd polish that can re-create detail on a turd.

            • I think that's probably the big problem -- does the film still exist?

              It would not surprise me at all if somebody decided that as long as they had a high quality video master (one of the D-x digital standards, maybe DigiBeta) they could just jettison the film copies.

              The 1990s are such a shit show for preservation of content unless it was shot on 35mm film stock and someone cared enough to keep at least an original interpositive made from the original negatives, if not the original negatives themselves.

              So man

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Brama ( 80257 )

            The problem was actually very specific to that area. Before the nineties, pretty much everything was shot in film, which can be converted to HD quality (assuming 35mm or better film).

            In the nineties, CGI started to become commonplace. However it was still very computationally expensive, as in minutes per frame rendered. So they rendered everything only SD format. Most action scenes were still shot in film, but when editing they would overlay the CGI and again render the final output to SD only. So during th

          • It was probably filmed in standard def.

            A lot of TV was.

            There is no such thing as "filming in SD." If it's captured on film then resolution can be arbitrarily high (technically limited only by film grain size but in practice limited by the scanning resolution of a film scanner). The whole SD/HD distinction comes when you're capturing something on videotape or other digital device. Fortunately none of Trek was done using videotape (unlike soap operas, for example) and digital cameras either weren't invented yet or in their infancy for most Trek series.

            The live

      • DS9 is one of my favorites, it wasn't though when it was out though.

        Deep Space 9 is enjoyable in the long game. More suitable for today's binge watching streaming experience, vs when it was around where it was a weekly serial.

        DS9 added tremendously to Trek Cannon as its story line created a more consistent (not perfect mind you) view of these future civilizations. Vs a Magic Reset button every episode where everything is all fixed up or at best they start the episode or at best the next episode they have

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          DS9 did more than any other series to show us what the lives and cultures of the alien races were like. Most of them suffered from "planet of hats" syndrome where they all basically have one defining trait and personality type, until DS9 fleshed them out.

          Ducat is one of the best villains in Trek.

          For what it's worth I don't like Lower Decks, I managed to make it through the first episode but the other couple I tried I gave up on after 5 minutes.

          • I liked Ducat until the last two seasons where the writers were grasping at straws to tie up the Dominion War Plot with the Mystery of the Profits Plot.
            He was a complicated Villain, while cruel and with evil intentions, he wasn't irredeemable. Until they decided to write him as the Anti-Sisko who goal was to just get revenge on the universe at all costs.

            I actually like what they did with Quark. The Faringi were suppose to be just the bad guys in Trek (from a planet of hats) however he became the narrator

        • Maybe. My main gripes about Discovery: Burnham's dialogue is written so poorly that it is impossible to save (although she doesn't seem to be that great an actor, either) and the plot arcs are ridiculous, even for Trek. I got fed up with Picard after the titular character offered a groveling apology in five consecutive episodes to start the series. Whoever wrote the character dialogue for that simply ripped out the spine that was present in the original TNG Picard character.

          Lower Decks I find amusing, th

          • The problem with Discovery and Picard especially is they haven't really gotten the tone and pacing quite right.

            They are so storyline plot driven that they rarely take a break with the plot a bottle episode where we get to know the other characters a bit better.
            The short treks seem to fill that job. But there aren't too many of them.

            While Burnham and Picard may be the main Star the supporting cast should really have a time to Shine.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        Avery Brooks was prone to over-acting

        Brooks is a academic as far as acting goes, I trust he knew what he was doing. I don't see it as over acting.

        I see it as very 'authentic' DS9 dealt with a lot of issue much closer to home for most of us and issues people are much more impassioned about. DS9 spent a lot of time dealing with subjects like, faith, zealotry, democracy, freedom, colonialism, race, terrorism, cultism and did so with protagonists who did not for the most part have spot less records of being 'the good guys.' If Brooks engages in

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Junta ( 36770 )

          I've been watching it a bit and whenever Brooks was overacting for me, it was always a scenario in which his *character* was acting. Forced friendliness for diplomatic context, or hamming it up for his crew. Basically a deliberate choice consistent with how Sisko would have been if he were having to 'act' for some reason.

          DS9 was different in that who was 'hero' and 'villain' was more of a sliding scale with people moving between the roles throughout the series, with a generally commendable job of providing

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by DarkOx ( 621550 )

            I think you hit one something kind of important about ST:VOY. They sorta wrote themselves into a corner with episode 1.

            The only real motivating force the crew has is wanting to get home. The conflicts the Star Fleet folks have is hold rigidly to their enlightened principles or embrace a more 'means to an end' approach. It would have made a great plot for a Star Trek film, its hard to stretch that over seven 20 episode seasons. So they simply didn't and did TNG style episodal stuff instead.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Junta ( 36770 )

              I remember reading the writers wanting to go that way, but being pulled back to TNG sensibilities.

              For example, the year in hell was intended to be an entire season and kill off some recurring characters for real. Instead they had to settle for a two parter with a magic reset button at the end to undo any 'serious' deaths.

            • > They sorta wrote themselves into a corner with episode 1.

              Gilligan's Island in Space was a crappy foundation.

              * Every season the ship should have looked more and more beaten up, with spare patched parts. Not pristine.
              * Janeway basically violating the Prime Directive when it was TOO inconvenient basically watered the show down.
              * Pulling photon torpedoes and shuttles out of their ass when the plot needed it also didn't help.

              • * Every season the ship should have looked more and more beaten up, with spare patched parts. Not pristine.

                While this sounds realistic to us, the existence of things like parts replicators means there's no good reason the ship can't remain pristine so long as sufficient energy (i.e. antimatter) is available for replication. I know this was touched on with the whole "replicator rations and Neelix has to cook" thing but I found that far less believable. If the ship has power for warp drive, replicators are practically insignificant by comparison.

                * Janeway basically violating the Prime Directive when it was TOO inconvenient basically watered the show down.

                Can't argue with this point.

                * Pulling photon torpedoes and shuttles out of their ass when the plot needed it also didn't help.

                Again, the presence of replicators mean

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by DarkOx ( 621550 )

                  If the ship has power for warp drive, replicators are practically insignificant by comparison.

                  Is that true? I don't recall if this is well covered in "The Physics of Star Trek" or not; but e=mc^2 seems like you need a whole lot of e to get much in the way of m. Independent of if you are asking for a slab of proteins and lipids for dinner or lump metal for hull plating.

                  I realize that c is going to be a component of warp speed travel too, but it does not seem obvious to me replicators would be insignificant in terms of energy use next to warp travel itself. We are asked to except that its possible to

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Ecks ( 52930 )
          Watching these shows now, Voyager's biggest mistake was making the marriage of the Maquis and Star Fleet crews far too easy to believe. After that gaff, for me Voyager's choice to be episodic rather than arc driven, is the second biggest problem. At the end of the day, there are high drama episodes of Voyager that are fun to watch but of the entire Voyager crew, the only member that I'm interested in seeing is Seven of Nine. I can't imaging a current Star Trek writer putting a cameo for Garrett Wang's Ensig

      • Opinions run strong regarding DS9... Trek fans seem to either love it or hate it. Fans who dislike long story arcs certainly hate it, as they do Enterprise (I actually like long story arcs).

        Personally, I think DS9 is great. One thing I think that show did better than the others is develop the characters’ interpersonal relationships. I really liked Cisco’s relationship with Jake. I also felt that Miles and Julian’s friendship was very well written. Writing of the Odo-Nerys romance tended to

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Mitreya ( 579078 )

          One thing I think that show did better than the others is develop the charactersâ(TM) interpersonal relationships.

          Also, aren't they the ones who made Ferengi into an actual race rather than weird cartoon characters?
          Not to mention the Odo-Quark relationship! Way stronger and more original than Odo-Nerys one.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 )

        Gilligan's Island in Space aka Voyager was boring-as-fuck about half of the time. While there are some gems sprinkled here and there, and Robert Picardo's performance of The Doctor was the backbone of the show -- much like John Billingsley's performance of Phlox in Enterprise -- Voyager didn't get good until S3 when The Doctor took a prominent role and when Seven of Nine showed up in S4. The chemistry between Seven of Nine and The Doctor could be amazing. [youtu.be] (Voyager S5E22, Someone to Watch Over Me).

        While DS

    • His facial expressions...

      I wasn't aware that Star Trek fans were able to read those.

      /Ducks

    • Who's Garek? Or did you mean Garak [wikipedia.org]?

    • I'd like to see a scaled up version of Cliff Clavin and Norm Pieterson.

    • When it comes to getting results, it requires motivation and capacity. Motivation makes things happen. Where there's no will, there's no way. Among the greatest ways to enhance your personal effectiveness would be to master your motivation and discover your drive. Boss Quotes [goodmorninglovequote.com] If you can master motivation, then you can cope with life's frustrations, as well as inspire yourself to constantly find a way ahead, and make new adventures for yourself, and follow your growth. In this post, I'll demystify motivation
  • As long as we're going there, I think it would also be fun to pretend that all hands aboard DS9 were actually Cylon sleeper agents. Yes, including the frakking emissary.

  • Thank you (Score:3)

    by MrKaos ( 858439 ) on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @05:46AM (#60487378) Journal

    CBS appreciates your efforts and requests you relinquishing its copyrighted content when complete.

  • Terminology (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tx ( 96709 ) on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @05:50AM (#60487392) Journal

    I wish people would stop using the term "remastering" when they mean something else. If you're not working from the original master recordings, you're not "remastering", the clue is in the name. Upscaling from a retail DVD source is not remastering.

    • I presume by "people" you mean "BeauHD" since the original article talks about restoration, not remastering. It's right there in TFS.

      BeauHD is apparently a very small shell script.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      I'm not sure that's correct. AFAIK "remastering" means to make a *new* master copy. I don't think you necessarily have to work from the original master.

      For example old Technicolor films were shot on cameras that produced three separate black and white negatives -- cyan, magenta, and yellow. It would actually be preferable to digitize these original negatives rather than the master copy, then recut to produce a new master that was frame by frame identical to the original.

      Whatever your source is, if you p

      • People use the term freely to mean different things. Originally, in the audio world, it means you took the original studio tapes, produced by the studio engineer, and created a new master copy for duplication. In the olden days "mastering" meant altering the sound so it would work properly on a record, or cassette tape. You had to mess with the EQ, add RIAA equalization, etc...

        Remastering a film would be getting a new copy from the original negatives. Using new technology, that would mean digitally scanning

    • I've given up on this.
      "drones" now mean literally anything artificial that flies without a pilot
      "AI" means pretty much any software process ...there are many, many examples.

  • What no man has seen before (Score:3)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @06:13AM (#60487420)

    The Ladies' Restroom on the spaceship?

    • >"The Ladies' Restroom on the spaceship?"

      Actually, now that I think about it, I am not sure they have ever shown any public restroom or even entrance to one. Just the occasional shot of a private lavatory in a quarters- which never included a toilet, only a sink.

      • An episode of Firefly (or Serenity) did have a scene with the captain taking a piss.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by fazig ( 2909523 )
          Dr. Zefram Cochrane: I've gotta take a leak.
          Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge: Leak? I'm not detecting any leak.
          Dr. Zefram Cochrane: Don't you people from the 24th century ever pee?
          From the 1996 TNG movie First Contact.
        • Admiral Adama: "I'm gonna go to the head, do something constructive. A little project I've been working on." -BSG, Season 4

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sconeu ( 64226 )

          Restrooms were also seen on UFO.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Alcari ( 1017246 )
        Enterprise has at least 1 shower scene, featuring Archer losing gravity in the middle of his (Very non-sonic) shower. But it doesn't feature any toilet breaks, afaik. Most shows and movies don't.
      • I thought that’s what the transporters were for.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by v1 ( 525388 )

        In TNG, there was the episode where Q was reduced to human, which featured Q and Picard stepping out into a hallway from a pubic restroom. (it only showed the short hall that immediately turned right around the corner, typical of the entrance of a public restroom with no door) Q's comment, "That was disgusting!" Picard' reply, "Welcome to being human." (or something to that effect)

      • "Actually, now that I think about it, I am not sure they have ever shown any public restroom or even entrance to one. "

        At least Asimov talked about them all the time and also about the talking vs no talking differences between the Men's and the Ladies'.

    • In the future they don't use restrooms, they simply have it beamed out of you wherever you stand, there's an icon in your LCARS just for that. Transporter malfunctions are a huge problem on a large station or ship.

  • Precedent (Score:4, Informative)

    by kqc7011 ( 525426 ) on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @06:14AM (#60487426)
    The original 100 year old film that Peter Jackson used in the making of "They Shall Not Grow Old" was able to turned into as near as possible to HD, maybe Blu-ray quality, about any modern film / video that is modernized will have to be compared to his teams work. They set a very high standard. Oh, and watching They Shall Not Grow Old is well worth your time.
    • Chemical emulsion film is pretty high res by nature, though. Restoring from a raster scan or low resolution pixels is more challenging. Thanks for the title, I thought of this film when reading another comment, but couldn't recall its name. I'll have to see it some day.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

        Thanks for the title, I thought of this film when reading another comment, but couldn't recall its name. I'll have to see it some day.

        It's a good film, pretty eerie. There are some points where there's some smearing where the computer couldn't quite get it right, but if you're used to the super sped up looking WWI films (if you've seen them, you know what I'm talking about), Jackson really made it come to life.

  • Man this NTSC contrast ratio is killing it. Also: don't call it "maximum" quality, if they did not use the RAW SD input before MPEG compression, beside's next years AI upscaling algorithm will likely be more "maximum" anyway ;-)

  • To me this looks like a blurry, washed out mess.
    Are my peepers out of whack or what am I missing?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

      To me this looks like a blurry, washed out mess.
      Are my peepers out of whack or what am I missing?

      I honestly couldn't tell the difference in the side by side ship render comparisons.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nagora ( 177841 )

        To me this looks like a blurry, washed out mess.
        Are my peepers out of whack or what am I missing?

        I honestly couldn't tell the difference in the side by side ship render comparisons.

        The AI versions looked marginally more like plastic models, I thought. But the difference was very slight.

      • Article author here:

        Here's the DVD:

        https://www.extremetech.com/wp... [extremetech.com]

        Here's the upscale:

        https://www.extremetech.com/wp... [extremetech.com]

        Differences (Focus on the model, because the disrupter beam isn't frame-perfect -- there's a one-frame offset by mistake that I need to go back and fix).

        Sharper text across the hull.
        Cleaner hull, period. All of the shapes are sharper. You can make out the fine detail in the greebling at the rear of the model in the upscale, where these blocks tend the blur together in the DVD.

        If you want t

    • Remember that YouTube is defaulting streams to 720p or less at the moment. You'll be watching DVD-equivalent quality unless you specifically choose the 2k or 4k settings.
      • 1280 by 720 is nearly four times more pixels than a widescreen NTSC or PAL image. Of course, it all turns to shit unless you actually view it at that rez; upscale it a hair to 1366 by 768 and watch it turn to shit...

    • Article author here:

      I cannot show you the DVD credits at genuine quality because YouTube's compression algorithm makes such terrible hash of them, they are *vastly* worse than anything you see off the disc. That makes it really frustrating to do comparisons, as you can imagine.

      https://youtu.be/OqG_A72Q5fM?t... [youtu.be]

      The upscaled credits are probably the single-best place to see what the show can look like compared to what you'd see on the DVD. While I realize I'm asking you take my word for it, I didn't pour 20-40

  • And some of the actors too.

  • It's probably consigned to the trash bin forever, as there is no money from Warner Bros. (now AT&T) to re-render the graphics, much of which are likely lost. Note that it was not shot on film for budget reasons, and a previous widescreen release was done by clipping the top and/or bottoms of scenes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by samdu ( 114873 )

      B5 was shot on Super 35 film in widescreen then cropped to 4:3.

      • B5 was shot on Super 35 film in widescreen then cropped to 4:3.

        Live-action elements were widescreen but the CGI was 4:3 ratio SD. 90's-era CGI was both primitive (by today's standards) and expensive. They used every trick in the book to cut down the number of pixels/frames they had to render, including rendering at an aspect ratio different from the live-action material.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by isorox ( 205688 )

        But was it protected? Did they have lights or ladders or people just outside the 4:3 safe part which were cropped out in post? I believe that was a key reason TNG couldn't be done widescreen (sure you can recreate widescreen CGI, but while the actual film may have been available 16:9, it wasn't filmed 16:9 safe.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tap ( 18562 )
          Mostly protected. The pilot was shot 4:3 full frame so the 16:9 is entirely cropped. The rest of the series was super 35 and JMS did consider 16:9.

          I actually recorded B5, on VHS, back when it originally aired and also when it was first rebroadcast in 16:9. I made some comparison shots of the 4:3 and 16:9 versions but they've probably disappeared from the net in decades since.

          There was scene where they did a stunt and you can see some guy sitting around watching in the background.

          The few times they

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by samdu ( 114873 )

            Yeah, the issues was with the compositing. The film was shot with widescreen in mind. The CGI... not so much.

  • enhance that!

  • Computer! Enhance image!

  • do Bab5

  • Star Trek:The Next Generation specifically changed out "man" for "one" in its opening credits because Roddenberry and others recognized that the original slogan was discriminatory. Slashdot's headline takes a step backwards, encouraging the 1950s idea that space exploration was only for half the human race. Please update your headline.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by aaronjp ( 51549 )

      But if "no one" has been there before what do you expect to find? I do realize the Federation is made up of many races so using "man" which if not meant in the sense of race, but in the sense of sex then leaves out "woman", and if meant in the sense or race "man" or even "human" isn't much better because it basically it then leaves out Vulcans, Klingons, and whatever other race from other planets you wish to mention who are part of the UFP.

      To put it another way "no one" is not a change for the better, bec

  • TNG was shot on film and the remaster was done from film, which has all the colour and high resolution and can be up-scaled easily - only the CGI had to be redone as it was only added to to video

    DS9 was shot on SD Video in NTSC - there are no more colours, no more resolution to pull out of the original master

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