Season FIVE OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Discussion Thread

No one needs to worry about DS9 or VOY not getting an HD makeover. The studio isn't about to stop making money off these properties. The long-term cost of doing nothing, sacrificing any possible future use of these series, isn't going to be acceptable for them. Don't ever underestimate the studio's desire to continue milking these shows for all they're worth.

 

Agreed, although I think the matter of upgrading the visual effects from SD to HD is an open question. The studio invested the money to do that for TNG, the most popular of the Berman-era shows. Will they invest the same (or more) in DS9, which is less popular? We've already seen Fox decide to simply upscale SD effects for The X-Files in HD, rather than spend the money to re-do them, so it's not as if this is without precedent.

 

Not just X-Files, Fox set their precedent a few years back with Firefly.

 

It's possible we could get upscaled FX for DS9, but I doubt it. CBS already set the bar with TNG; I don't see them stepping it back.

 

That's true. Was that a remaster, though, or was it the same master used for broadcast?

 

Yes it's more like the ENT Blu-ray situation, where it was already that way in the (otherwise) HD master.

What I was thinking of was the "we're not spending money on upgrading the CGI" precedent was already set by Firefly.

 

Yeah. If only CBS had access to some of the original assets that could be re-rendered in HD, they wouldn't have to do everything from scratch. In the immortal last words of Captain Kirk in the last episode of the original series, "if only..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJs0-hhOZFQ

 

My feeling is that CBS-D will tackle DS9 using the same approach as TNG, then place VOY as the third project, simply because they know the Blu-ray upgrades sell, they have learned many lessons from the TNG project (S2 must have been particularly instructive), and the techniques have been honed with regards to managing the workflow etc.

The TNG remaster has been an enormous hit by all public accounts, and I don't see them doing that show a disservice.

Once they start on DS9, I'll start with that show as well, and will add Voyager if that is tackled.

 

They likely do have access to some assets of DS9, and the vast majority of VOY. Rob Bonchune says he has most of the files that Foundation did for the franchise. If he doesn't have 'em it seems like his co-worker at Foundation Adam "Mojo" Lebowitz does.

http://trekcore.com/blog/2013/05/deep-space-nine-in-high-definition-one-step-closer/

Foundation did nearly all of the work for VOY but only did extra work for DS9, Digital Muse (more recently reborn as EdenFX) did most of DS9.

So there may actually be more of VOY assets than DS9's easily available. But if Foundation's work included most of the common ship classes seen on DS9 it could really help CBS-D.

 

If anything, we're sure going to get one heck of a preview of Deep Space Nine in High Definition when Season Six comes out.

 

D1 was digital component. D2 was Digital Composite, and on pg. 242 of the Reeves-Stevens "Making Of Star Trek Deep Space Nine" (December 1994) the authors mention that the film footage for DS9's Seasons 1&2 were transferred to D2 tape and D2 was the editing format.

Now then I was just watching "Suspicions", "Rightfule Heir" (TNG) and "Progress" (DS9), and I have a hard time believing TNG's last 4 seasons were edited on D1, since, when compared to DS9, the video quality is just not there for TNG. Yes, the episodes came from something of higher quality than 1", and while parts for the SFX may've been edited on D1 or D2, the seem to have been dumped to another format and the final masters, that have been used for the upressing and DVD's, appear to have originated in the analog domain.

 

When I search for it, I keep seeing repeatedly that everything after Season 1 (which was done all the way through the post-production process on 1" analog tape) was done on D1 tape. But the finished episodes certainly look like it was finished on composite video.

http://tig.colorist.org/pipermail/tig/2011-August/019404.html

That description makes it sound like the raw footage was transferred to 1" tape, and then edited with the VFX on D1. If true, the live action being on 1" analog composite tape would certainly degrade the live action elements, before being finished on a component source.

Archived content from a The Official Star Trek Fan Club magazine issue:
http://reocities.com/Hollywood/set/1116/sfxartcl.html

Looks like the move D1 wasn't completed until Season 4. The article doesn't talk about how the scanned film was delivered at that time, so perhaps it was still delivered as 1" tape and then fed into the digital recorders they were using for editing.

 

While it's possible the DVDs were encoded from a composite source (hence the dot crawl and rainbow artifacts that were often seen) we know they were transferring from film at CIS to component D1 tape from S4 of TNG and still using the format in S1 of ENT (in ENT's case, VFX plates were downconverted to D1 from the 24p HD master, exclusively for bluescreen compositing and other VFX work which were done in the SD realm).

According to my October '93 issue of Cinefantastique, it says in an article about the S6 TNG VFX work that Digital Magic (who took over from the Post Group starting in S5) was working with D1 tape. Digital Magic also handled DS9 S1 at the same time. It seems odd that after all that careful work they would finish their on-line edit on D2 tape when DigiBeta was available, but anything's possible I suppose given they were still clinging to D1 for VFX when ENT launched!

But D2 for the initial film transfer? No way. There were too many bluescreen shots on these shows to use a composite tape format. Even in Seasons 1 & 2 of TNG they used a pin-registered Rank telecine that transferred all VFX footage in RGB component direct to an Abekas Digital Disc Recorder for compositing work.

 

Here's the quote from "The Making Of Star Trek Deep Space Nine" by Judith & Garfield reeves-Stevens, published December 1994, pg 242:

Aside from D2 and VHS videotape, no other videotape is mentioned as being used. Also, you have to remember Digital Betacam wasn't on the market til 1993 (D2 was out in 1988), so before 1993 tapes used for final mastering would've been Betacam SP, D1 and D2. Also, you have to remember that the Reeves-Stevens, even though they were not producers at this point, for their book, they still had unlimited access to the sets for the book. And if you watch the opening credits for DS9, when we get the shot of the underside of the station with the core, I did notice rainbowing right along the edges of the lower part of the core.

Also, how do you know that CIS went right to D1. Even the Cinefantastique article, from what I've read of it in regards to D1, seems to be saying that Digital Magic did have D1 decks at the time, but there was no specific mention of TNG actually being edited on them.

 

The archive of the Official Fan Club article I linked to says Post Group started using D1 for post-production in Season 4.

They list the equipment in the next paragraph of the article after the one I quoted. It includes Sony D1 decks.

So I don't know what happened, if anything, when they moved to Digital Magic.

It could also be that for some reason Unitel provided D2's of the film scans, while it was then edited on D1. This would still make some sense, since editing in the higher quality component color realm would at least help to reduce errors with bluescreen compositing, etc. But the initial source data would still have been composite video.

 

This also says the final product was on D2 or 1" analog
http://mixonline.com/mag/audio_tv_dvd/

Although the article is about the sound mixing, there is this comment:

 

It's also funny how, aside from the Sony VTR's, they mention the model numbers for everything else, but for the "D1"'s they just say "two Sony D1 Digital Recorders". And as we've seen earlier in this thread, people can get confused as too whether it is D1 or D2 that is component or composite, and I've got to wonder if, when Desire Gonzalez wrote that article, if the person they were interviewing said D1 by mistake when the really meant D2. The whole point with those two paragraphs is that TNG had moved from doing it's SFX in analog to doing them in digital.

But, also on the sidebar, and in the article, it's just talking about the Special Effects (ship shots, phaser shots, etc.) being done on digital tape. It is not talking about what the final master, containing all the live-action and SFX shots, was. It just says that the Edit master was on D1.

As well, even with the Edit master being on a digital format doesn't mean that the Editor could not have Edited the entire show, live-action and SFX, onto Betacam SP (which is also component, just analog). But from what I've seen of the upressed footage in Season 5, it didn't look like CBS had gone from a digital source. Sure it looked better than the upressed video of Seasons 1 to 3, but it looked too soft to have come from a digital source, unlike DS9's Season 1.

 

Yep I noticed that too. Makes ya wonder.

It's really too bad we don't have a more definitive article somewhere straight from the horses mouth of one of the post guys. Because as it stands now it's just a mess of little tidbits from early-to-mid 90s articles.

Sadly there are some pretty thorough books from later in the franchise (Star Trek: Action! is what I'm thinking of, made much later, circa 1998) but none from the era where things were transitioning from analog to digital.

 

Right now I'm just watching "Second Chances" and I'm at 26:56 into the episode (where the two Riker's have their argument over the engineering "pool table"), and in the shot "yellow" Riker is extremely sharp, while "red" Riker looks like he's been through a couple of analog generations, even though it should've been a simple split screen effect (of course there could also be that the camera op never adjusted his focus for "red" Riker). Even with Betacam SP, it should've only been the third generation (second Betacam generation) from film for those two shots, and Betacam SP is rated for 6-8 generations before you notice any discernible loss. D2 I believe is closer to 40 generations. Even if Paramount used a different master for the DVD (even a DigiBeta or S-VHS copy from the late-90's), I don't think we'd see that much video loss, since it would've been sourced from the final edit master, and it probably would've only been one more generation away.