Season FOUR OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Discussion Thread

Regarding the missing original film elements from The Best of Both World part 2, having watched the episode in HD on SyFy tonight, would not it not be possible to solve the problem by either

a) reusing almost identical HD footage of Riker on the Battle Bridge, and either digitally compositing his SD lip movements when saying "we need to time prepare our people for assimilation" on to his HD face, and relaying the audio,

or

b) using digital manipulation to move HD Riker's mouth to match the script

While not a perfect solution, it appears the original film element is no more, and I would like one of the above as an alternative option on some sort of Blu-ray disc branching. To be honest, I'd not read the reviews of the S4 set, and I didn't know CBS hadn't found all the BOBW footage. I'd been looking forward to it in HD for some weeks, but I almost cried when I saw part 2 this evening. The 3 seconds of upscaled video look awful.

 

The second technique you mention would probably not look very good. The first one is certainly possible (and I even suggested it back when the missing shot was disclosed), but in all honesty, it would be very hard to integrate the SD element precisely over his face in a different take with different head positions and have it look convincing. In the end, it's probably better that they were upfront with us and just upconverted the entire shot. It's very quick, and is no more jarring than the few upconverted seconds in "We'll Always Have Paris." The best situation is what happened in "The Drumhead" where a quick SD cutaway of the damaged warp core through a window in Engineering was substituted for missing footage. That one is very difficult to spot.

I think CBS has been very lucky so far in regard to missing footage. It's kind of amazing that we're only talking about a few seconds of footage out of several days of edited content.

 

I think anyone with moderate video editing skills could do my first option on their home PC to most people's satisfaction. Riker doesn't move position between the two shots, so with his head staying still, compositing his SD mouth movements on to his HD face would pose no issues. We've all seen far more advanced stuff on youtube that some very skilled "amateurs" have done at home.

It's a shame that doing it didn't occur to anyone at CBS. It occurred to me straight away. It would only have taken a fully trained CBS in house monkey an hour or two to knock something up.

 

I dunno, we humans are pretty good at noticing even very subtle nuances and deviations in regard to human facial movements. In fact, we have entire parts of our brain (the fusiform gyrus, the amygdala) that are devoted to face perception and interpreting emotions. I think you would need someone with more than just moderate video editing skills.

Also, just because CBS Digital didn't end up doing it doesn't mean it didn't occur to them. It may have, we don't know. And I'd just caution against stating how easy you think a visual effect may be without actually attempting it yourself. I was probably guilty of this when I first made the suggestion you are now. You can't really know until you try it. Sometimes things may seem straightforward and simple, yet when you're actually doing it you run into unforeseen issues. There's a difference between coming up with an idea and successfully executing it at a professional level.

I think CBS Digital's trained monkeys would agree with that.

 

3 whole seconds. How terrible for you.

 

Yes, that one is really difficult to spot because of all the smoke in the shot and thus works really well. This is no substitution of different missing footage, though, but again, just upconversion of exactly the same SD footage.

Jörg

 

When making the final cut of Blade Runner, they did something like that to fix a line. The line was one thing, but Harrison's lips said something different.

They fixed it by recording the line with his son, and pasting the result over Harrison's mouth and jaw. His son's facial structure was nearly a perfect match. I'm glad they did that instead of CGI, because no one has been able to a human face look realistic yet. It's always a little off.

Frakes is older and rounder now, so it wouldn't have worked. Upscaled SD beats bad CGI in this case.

 

Re: Dull & Boring

I get the impression the producers by Season 4-5 wanted to stay within a certain comfort zone that allowed them to get things done on time and in budget without any fuss. This meant boring music and floodlit overbright sets everywhere. I assume this lighting made things quicker and easier to set up and shoot.

They wanted to save the pennys and run a well oiled machine. TNG Season 4.5 to DS9 Season 3 is the result. Bermans bland machine.

People like Ron Jones who liked to rock the boat by trying new things and spending extra money doing it (and sometimes not going to plan!) is what got him fired. After that they wanted sonic wallpaper only. No fancy stuff.

IMHO.

 

If did occur to me that Paramount could get Frakes in for a few hours, dye his beard black, take a few years off his face with make up, put him in front of a blue screen, and get him to re-record the line while capturing his mouth movements in HD. His lip movements could then be digitally pasted on to his HD face on the Battle Bridge shot, with any necessary cleaning up around his face being a fairly simple job.

If they went down the CGI lips route, there's already the SD template of Frakes saying the line. Only his lip movement would have to be recreated in HD and applied to his HD face. Given that it's shot from relative distance in a dark environment, I think either of the above could be done successfully without it showing.

My earlier idea about just pasting his SD lips over doesn't really work due to framing, colour and lighting differences. The framing differences between the SD video and HD film mean that Frakes is slightly smaller on screen in HD, ie his mouth his bigger is SD and won't fit his HD face properly without being digitally resized.

 

It's THREE. SECONDS.

 

Yeah, it's barely noticable.

 

THERE! ARE! THREE! SECONDS!

 

Count me as not giving a shit over three seconds of SD footage. I find it incredible that so little is missing and tip my hat to CBS-Digital for the work they've done piecing the episodes back together.

 

I'm amazed that it justs a few second here and there that's missing. I'd rather look at this positively.

 

Same here. Sure, we'd all prefer there was no upscaled footage needed, but look at how much HD footage we know have that we never did before. Some people got over how amazing this project is a little too quickly.

 

6 seconds missing out of 26 episodes (one shot in BOBW2, one in Drumhead), each about 40 minutes of live action each (excluding effects and credits).

That means 99.9904% of the footage was found. Not bad.

 

I'm about 25 minutes into the Art Department feature and man this is some boring stuff. They're not even talking about TNG. At least with the writers room you had personalities and the stories they told were interesting and funny. Not only that, but they provided examples. With these guys I'm not sure if I'm really interested in anything they've brought up so far, and it's something that seems to be better fit on the DS9 Blu Rays.

I'll finish it, but man we really needed features that were like Seasons 1 and 2. What was the highlights, media and fanwise of Season 4? Were there news stories or features on ET that focused on the series? Hell, I would have taken off the arts thing and put on Klingon Empire on BOTH discs (Hey they did that with the trailers). I'm not going to see that feature and it's not being posted on Youtube, but for some reason I feel like that feature is a lot better than listening to the Arts Department.

 

The Klingon feature on the "Redemption" disc was rather good - I certainly enjoyed it more than the Art Department reunion. Robert O'Reilly's stories about his audition were hilarious. I certainly recommend you pick the disc up if you see it discounted to a price you're prepared to pay!

 

I fell asleep 3 or 4 times while trying to watch it the first time. I feel asleep again the second time while watching it. It was after my fourth attempt that I finally finished it. It really need an outside moderator to keep it more focused. I wanted to hear more about TNG not DS9.