The reason the picture looks so 'soft and fuzzy' is that it was transferred to video, thus making it SD. If you saw the film they shot, I'm sure it would be sharp as a knife. There would be no upscaling from those video copies required at all. 35mm film is usually filmed and scanned with a 4k resolution, that's slightly more than 4 times HD quality. So they wouldn't have to do a thing as far as converting the footage to HD, in fact, by making it HD, they are actually degrading the original image While it's totally possible that someone was an idiot and 'lost' thousands of hours worth of film, I highly doubt it. It's not like the show is 100 years old...
You just pretty much repeated what I said. The current episodes are to soft and fuzzy to do an HD upscaling of that material. I wonder if they have the complete film elements to do a remastering. They don't have to lose 'thousands of hours worth of film', just lose a little here... a little there. And it cripples the project.
series Blu-ray JekylHyde this has been covered before in great detail. Read these threads: Star Trek TNG Remastered? with 679 replies TNG remastered in HD? It CAN be done. STNG remastered and in 3D?? CBS weighs in on this! TNG remastered REMASTER THE ENTIRE DEEP SPACE NINE SERIES. DS9 should get Remastered Remaster the entire Voyager Series........... Actually Enterprise (2001-2005) has not been released nor announced for Blu-ray release yet. Although it would not be much work to remaster to Blu-ray. This is the closest discussion to it on TrekBBS: Star Trek: Enterprise seasons Blu-ray spec. features wishlist with 30 replies. The suggestion here.
In the early seasons, yes. But by the end of the series, as it had gotten more and more absurd, SEINFELD included visual effects quite often. In any event, the visual effects are not really the problem. If CBS Paramount could afford to redo the effects for every episode of STAR TREK, then it could certainly afford the same for STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION. DS9 and VOY have more elaborate visual effects, and are less popular, so they remain an open question. For the time being, yes. But I find it highly unlikely that STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION will remain unreleased in HD forever.
i agree. While watching a first season episode of VOY some of the closeups were just out of focus. Not via diffusion but out of focus! You can't restore that. With the hectic pace of TV they just let things go if it's good enough for broadcast (at the time in standard definition).
I do notice while watching TNG or early years of DS9 or Voyager that the picture does look kind of, I don't know. I want to say grainy, but I'm not sure if that's the proper term. But anyhoo, I like it. It adds some distinction and character to the show. Full crystal clear HD picture is not always necessary to enjoy a show.
Agreed. There was some discussion in this thread: HIDEF..too good? about the fidelity and sharpness taking away from the storytelling.
The arguments put forth in that thread are good ones for TV shows, but movie film is basically infinite definition. If a problem can be seen in a HD movie on your HD TV, then it was also visible at the movie theater. So, yes, things that are hidden by the low definition of non HD TV would become visible in HD. The trick would be to use computer to animate the back ground, or remove clumsy sets and replace them. That's a lot of work. So as I said earlier, it would be too expensive to upgrade TNG/DS9/VOY to HD right now, it wont be done until the price comes down.
I think we see a new Star Trek animated series before we see The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine or Voyager in high-definition. At this point, I'm pretty sure we won't see any of those series on the Blu-Ray platform.
It proves exactly that - all you have to do is watch them to see. I mean, the studio's not going to put these things on bluray just so they can sell four or five thousand copies to the hard-core.
I was under the impression we're still seeing the digitally re-mastered episodes, just presented without the updated effects. Which is why seamless braching is included for both the original and new effects. They would still have to go and scan all the original film elements (for TNG, DS9 and VOY) and clean them up to release them as high-definition material (which is still very labor intensive). EDIT: They can't just slap the current home video version of Encounter at Farpoint onto a Blu-Ray and call it 'High-Definition'. I've watched the episode on my 40" 1080p TV with a PS3 as the player and it still looks like shit. And the PS3 is still one of the better 'upscaling' players around.