What No Man Has Seen Before: Remastering Deep Space Nine To Maximum Quality (extremetech.com) 118
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."
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."
Garek in HD? (Score:4, Funny)
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There were a lot of great actors on DS9, many of them working under heavy makeup.
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>"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
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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.
Re: Garek in HD? (Score:2)
A lot of TV was.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
Re: Garek in HD? (Score:2)
I think Voyager showed that Quark just used the race card for profit
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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> 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.
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* 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
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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
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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
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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.
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Good point - they turned them into more than one-dimensional characters.
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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
Re: Garek in HD? (Score:2)
His facial expressions...
I wasn't aware that Star Trek fans were able to read those.
/Ducks
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Who's Garek? Or did you mean Garak [wikipedia.org]?
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I'd like to see a scaled up version of Cliff Clavin and Norm Pieterson.
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Let's just pretend... (Score:2)
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I'll just leave this here - Star Trek: Confusion [youtube.com]...
Thank you (Score:3)
CBS appreciates your efforts and requests you relinquishing its copyrighted content when complete.
Terminology (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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
Remaster (Score:2)
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
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I've given up on this. ...there are many, many examples.
"drones" now mean literally anything artificial that flies without a pilot
"AI" means pretty much any software process
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Looks like he simply didn't have the PAL versions. He commented on the pros/cons of using PAL version in this Reddit post [reddit.com] though.
Re: Terminology (Score:2)
What no man has seen before (Score:3)
The Ladies' Restroom on the spaceship?
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>"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.
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An episode of Firefly (or Serenity) did have a scene with the captain taking a piss.
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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.
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Restrooms were also seen on UFO.
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And Babylon 5.
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Don't forget Morn's mud jacuzzi!
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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)
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"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'.
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Precedent (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Precedent (Score:3)
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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.
Don't call it maximum, also NTSC colors, sigh! (Score:2)
What am I missing here? (Score:2)
To me this looks like a blurry, washed out mess.
Are my peepers out of whack or what am I missing?
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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.
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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.
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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
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Re: What am I missing here? (Score:1)
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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
If only you could do the same for the writing (Score:2)
Still no Babylon 5 (Score:2)
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.
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B5 was shot on Super 35 film in widescreen then cropped to 4:3.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Yeah, the issues was with the compositing. The film was shot with widescreen in mind. The CGI... not so much.
Zoom, (Score:2)
enhance that!
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so basically... (Score:2)
now, (Score:2)
do Bab5
Star Trek changed "No Man" to "No One" long ago (Score:2)
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.
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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
Video vs Film (Score:2)
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
Re:Improvement (Score:5, Interesting)
There is only so much you can do with an SD source. What is on the DVD has already been processed heavily during the original production. Some of it is to add special effects, some of it was to hide issues with the sets, some of it just an aesthetic choice that we might not agree with today.
The documentary What We Left Behind took some of the original 35mm film and re-scanned it, and it looks fantastic. Every bit as good as the TNG HD remaster.
Doing a proper HD remaster of DS9 is a bigger project than TNG though for a few reasons. There is a lot of CGI in DS9, all of which needs to be re-built from scratch and I read that a lot of the original assets have been lost or would need serious work for HD. The sets have some issues too, in TNG most of the computer displays were printed on perspex and backlit with compositing used for any that were animated. In DS9 a lot of them are CRT monitors run my Macs, meaning they are all SD and curved instead of flat.
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As sad as I find it, it won't come. Even TNG's HD remastering, despite TNG having been more successful than DS9, only was finished because there were so many people involved who were commited by heart and some worked more than what could have been expected from them, and that was at a time when there still was a market for video on disc. It took several years with a substantially smaller amount of CGI to redo from scratch, and still sales turned out not to have been worth it. DS9 would be an order of magnit
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The tools and processes will continue to get cheaper, easier, and faster to perform. At some point the number of man hours required to pull it off will get low enough for them justify doing it.
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It almost certainly won't happen, however the studio could leverage technology and the 35mm source material to do a bit of manual work to have a better upscaling at a fraction of the effort required for TNG did at the time.
They could manually do remastering and reworking of a rather significant sample of original content, but maybe just a percent or so of the frames required.
They could then use the readily available source content versus the reworked samples to retrain upscaling and perhaps even colorizing
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Yeah, the standard company line "we can't because CGI is only in SD" doesn't really hold up IMHO. All the live shots and good part of model work is on 35mm, this being where most of detail people want to see is... I don't think there is point in only re-scanning some of 35mm frames, might as well do every frame. As far as CG goes, what is the high detail that necessitates rebuild from scratch? Odo doing his morph ball routine? Laser/explosion overlays? CG starship exteriors? All those are relatively formula
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Most likely they don't have the CG elements separated from the final delivered product so they would have to render all them out again. Assuming they have the project files and all misc assets required to render it all out again they still would need to find ways of making the old software run. What are the odds the assets they used were high enough quality to look good even if they were able to render it out again? Also, I bet the software probably doesn't have support for HD/4K footage and may simply not
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The problem being that you have special effects only stored as mixed in with the content. So to scale up only the effects, you'd first have to separate the effects from the live action. Odo's transformations (which frankly didn't age well) would have to separate out the CGI from the frame to independently scale it to re composite back with the rescan. DS9 used a lot more CGI than TNG did and thus this would be a costly thing to try.
This could hypothetically be letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
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People seem to forget the state of the Average Television back in the mid 1990's
The TV size for a large TV was about 32" Most homes had 24" or smaller With Low DPI and low "Resolution". This stuff looks impressive on these screens. However when you upscale to 1080p and 40+ inch screens. You can see every mistake and error. I find it funny to see the stickers that look like buttons on the screens. Or problems with the sets that just look extremely fake. This is most noticeable in the HD versions of TOS.
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I guess the aspies have got all the mod points this morning since clearly they can't spot even a blindingly obvious joke as above. I'll signpost it with smileys next time just for you guys.
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Used to be getting meta-modded poorly would remove the bad apples from the moderation pool. That function of slashcode doesn't seem to be working properly anymore.
Legitimate criticism of TFA isn't flamebait. There'd be no point in having discussions if everyone is expected to agree on everything. DS9 did have some bad acting, and some of the episodes were real snoozers ("Soap opera in spaaaaaaace!"). That's par for the course for Trek, though.
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Save it snowflake, heard it all before, probably before you were born.
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Irony is lost on you isn't it. I think I can hear your mummy calling you for dinner so run along.