Star Trek TNG Remastered?

[jefferiestubes8]

doubleohfive wrote:

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The $150.00 per season is reference to the initial prices the TNG DVD season sets first hit the market under in 2002. Obviously, DVD season sets are cheaper now ... but the Star Trek DVDs have never really been the first to drop in price.

I don't doubt for one second Paramount would charge as much money as they think they can wring out of the all-too-eager Trekkie nerds' wallets as they can.

see this posting for the prices on the TOS episodes & then full seasons with various home video media releases.


As doubleohfive mentioned:
Star Trek TNG DVDs as sold by Paramount/CBS Entertainment's website startrek.com are still overpriced:
Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season One Box Set
$74.99 today though not quite the same price as the original $120. retail that some people actually paid when the list price was $139. in March 2002 according to DVDTalk.com.

for comparison:
Star Trek The Next Generation - The Complete First Season DVD still retails at Amazon.com for $51.99


now when you are talking about HD remastering to HD let's look at the pricing of TOS season 1 on Blu-ray. 18 month's after it's release:
as sold by Paramount/CBS Entertainment's website startrek.com are still ridiculously overpriced:
Star Trek: The Original Series - Season 1 (Blu-Ray)
$129.99

for comparison Amazon.com has
Star Trek: The Original Series - Season 1 [Blu-ray] - for $62.49

We will see the ENT series on Blu-ray before any TNG episodes and most likely each season will be priced similarly to TOS seasons around $65. at Best Buy & Amazon.com when released.

[swaaye]

It's a good thing there's Netflix. Not that I wouldn't prefer to own the sets but yeah it is a huge expense.

[jefferiestubes8]

A comparison and a "preview" of TNG Remastered

The widening of the TNG footage in ENT: "These Are The Voyages" amounts to nearly 6%. Although it went unnoticed until now, this is a sizable distortion that should be avoided when remastering complete TNG episodes.

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/in...ent_vs_tng.htm


Also regarding CGI of the ENT-D in TNG:

David Stipes and, at a later time to a lesser degree, Mitch Suskin, Dan Curry and Ronald B. Moore were the foremost advocates of applying CGI, Stipes already overseeing some of its earliest applications, during the sixth season of TNG. Stipes already lobbied in vain for a CGI version of the USS Enterprise-D during that season, "On 'The Chase' we were all over the galaxy -warp here and warp there- and I have basically the one or two jumps to warp that we had in stock. When TNG was started, the first bits of material were shot at ILM and they shot the original jump to warp with slit scan and streak photography. That served us very well for seven years, but it was very difficult to do and expensive. I had been pushing to build a CGI Enterprise, but no one wanted to incur the expense at that point so I lived with the stock shots." (Cinefantastique, Vol. 27, No. 4/5, page 79

#620 The Chase is obviously an episode that would benefit from a CGI ENT-D.

Now this is rather important to know:
Durability of CGI Models

Advances in software and ineptitude at the studios in handling their property (amongst others in the situation described above in Foundation's case), have to this day caused CGI models to be of a far more fleeting nature than physical models. Lebowitz explains:

"When a CGI company is hired to do FX for a production, in theory all the assets they create are property of the studio. A smart studio should probably ask for regular backups of data for a variety of reasons, most important of which would be safety backups and potentially the need to re-create the work elsewhere. However, this rarely happens, most probably because it's just not anyone's assigned job. Who asks for the data? Who checks it? Where do they store it? Who keeps the records? All this would need to be answered and a process implemented and in most cases, either no one has thought it through or wanted to spearhead a new headache. Even if the data was backed up, if someone wanted to load up a spaceship model ten years later, success would be hard to come by. Do they have the right software? Since no two companies ever name their hard drives with the same letters or use the same directory structure, will the new user know where to find the files when their computer tells them, 'can't find G:/spaceship/wingtip/test/nogood/deleteme/finalimages/nosecone.png?' Even if all the ducks are in a row, often times the CG company, knowing full well the data they provide might be used to cut them out of the picture, will purposely not make it easy for the studio. Sure, they'll provide the models as asked, but not the setup/assembly files (hey, setup files are technically NOT the model). All this means is that the more time passes, the less likely it will be to re-create CG scenes. If all the data and the directory structure on a company's hard drive remains untouched, it's fine, but the moment you start to back stuff up and clear it off the server, your chances of success begin to dwindle.

ILM turned over their ship models, made for "Star Trek: First Contact" for use in DS9. For some companies it is then more expedient to newly construct a CGI model from the ground up. "ILM actually released their Enterprise database to us, which was very nice of them. It was very helpful in the beginning, because we had all these animatics to create. However, their Enterprise was a fairly low-resolution model, and while we originally thought, 'Maybe we can just add to this database', that process became more trouble than it was worth, so we had Viewpoint Datalabs come down and actually redigitize the Enterprise using the original miniature.", Santa Barbara Studio's effects supervisor John Grower said in preparation of "Star Trek: Insurrection". (American Cinematographer, January 1999, page 41)

The ENT-D was also rebuilt

However, as supervisor Bruce Branit of Digital Muse explained, referring to DS9: "Sacrifice of Angels"

We brought the digital models in and converted them to LightWave, which is our rendering package of choice. The Enterprise-D had been done before, but in something else, so we were able to bring the geometry in, and bring some of the maps in, but we had to rebuild it. We had all the ingredients, so we could put it together much more quickly than building it from scratch.

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/database/cgi.htm

Surely any work in ENT by Eden FX showing the Ent-D would be the newest models to use.

[doubleohfive]

Funny, I don't recall there being any Ferengi Alliance officers on board during the Pegasus mission.

[BillJ]

swaaye wrote:

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It's a good thing there's Netflix. Not that I wouldn't prefer to own the sets but yeah it is a huge expense.

Worth every penny!