Season TWO OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Discussion Thread

[Mott the barber]

Doug Otte wrote:

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Right, those differences are very jarring in the Season 2 set.

But what I'm referring to is: the shot actually looks SD - the detail is lower, yet there's more digital noise (not smooth DNR) and w/ NTSC-like colors. I wish I could provide a screencap, but Trekcore hasn't posted that episode yet.

I know what you're saying. It's different than the examples posted because you're referring to when the camera is actually panning. The entire shot looks lower-res (a la "The Last Outpost" pan and the "Samaritan Snare" pan with the Pakleds on the viewscreen).

[jimbotron]

There's no SD footage in season 2, aside from minor stuff like the screen in The Schizoid Man.

Another example of an anamorphic shot being used and artificially panned is this shot in The Child:

http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x...ild_hd_434.jpg
http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x...ild_hd_436.jpg
http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x...ild_hd_437.jpg

It ends up looking pretty soft and barely HD, but that's an inherent flaw of the production and not HTV. Thankfully they chose NOT to artificially sharpen that shot.

I don't think they used this technique after season 2 with the new DP.

[Mott the barber]

jimbotron wrote:

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There's no SD footage in season 2, aside from minor stuff like the screen in The Schizoid Man.

Another example of an anamorphic shot being used and artificially panned is this shot in The Child:

http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x...ild_hd_434.jpg
http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x...ild_hd_436.jpg
http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x...ild_hd_437.jpg

It ends up looking pretty soft and barely HD, but that's an inherent flaw of the production and not HTV. Thankfully they chose NOT to artificially sharpen that shot.

Yep, another good example there.

There's another example from S1 or 2 where they actually move the camera I want to say in 10-Forward when the ship is at warp. The rarely did panning shots with the warp stars really until ENT, at which time the technology progressed much more to properly track the stars.

[Maxwell Everett]

Yeah, I think both CBS Digital and HTV's separate working practices may have combined to make that shot of Troi entering the bridge in "Samaritan Snare" and the one in "The Child" look overly soft. What they really should have done is scan all those anamorphic shots at 4K. That would have given them more than enough resolution to play with to do the digital pan.

Unfortunately though, CBS Digital doesn't own a 4K scanner. CBS Digital owns a pair of (obsolete but still good) Spirit 2K DataCine film scanners -- so right off the bat all the film elements are being scanned at a resolution of 2048 x 1556 -- usually this is more than good enough for Blu-ray. (HTV can do 4K scanning according to their website... but I don't think CBS was interested in paying for that.)




The area they scan is called the Full Camera Aperture and it represents the maximum image area available on the 4-perf 35mm color negative film. Normally for the show, they use what's known as the TV Transmitted Area, which in 2K would be an area about 1600 x 1200 within that 2048 x 1556. This is then essentially downconverted to 1440 x 1080 (1.33:1, 4:3) -- or in the case of HTV's work in S2, 1458 x 1080 (1.35:1). For "Sins of the Father" CBS Digital apparently cropped most shots directly to 1440 x 1080 (no downconverstion).

And actually it's a bit more complicated than that as they are actually editing the show with as much available image area possible left and right of that TV area within a 1920 x 1080 (1.78:1, 16:9) frame (see here). They then hard matte the video with black pillar bars on the sides for Blu-ray. HTV obviously gave us slightly more than they were supposed to, resulting in VFX elements that disappear before they reach the edge of the visible frame.

As Mott says, for this particular shot in "Samaritan Snare" they used 2x anamorphic Panavision lenses (aka CinemaScope). The anamorphic aperture is actually a slightly smaller subset of the full camera aperture (just like TV Trans.) and its corresponding resolution in 2K is 1828 x 1556 (1.17:1) -- so it has the same image height but is a bit narrower horizontally.

Now here's what I *think* happened next: In order to correct the 2x anamorphic squeeze, they changed the scanned footage pixel proportions to 1828 x 778 (2.35:1) instead of scanning it at or scaling it up to 3656 x 1556. Notice that at 778 lines it now has less vertical resolution than the typical footage scanned and used for the show at 1080p? In fact, it only has about 72% of the vertical pixels of 1080p!

HTV then took that footage and DNR'd it to wipe away all that pesky grain and did the intended viewscreen composite and digital pan across the frame from left to right (the available TV area at this point would be 1035 x 778). This pan also has added motion blur to simulate a real-world panned shot at 24 frames per second with a shutter speed of 1/48th of a second. That, of course, softens it even more.

Then, the finished shot would have been upconverted back up to 1458 x 1080. But again, disclaimer here: I'm not saying that I know this is what happened, it's just my pet hypothesis.

[davejames]

RAMA wrote:

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Not sure if anyone posted this. An hour audio podcast interview with Robertt Meyer Burnett on Screen time from December.

http://5by5.tv/screentime/16

Cool interview. Unfortunately he sounds pretty doubtful about a DS9 blu-ray release, what with the incredible amount of time and money it would take just to recreate the Dominion War (let alone all the other CG effects throughout the series).

And I can see his point. I just rewatched the DS9 pilot, and even the effects in that early episode seem lightyears more complex and sophisticated than anything they did on TNG.

[Maxwell Everett]

davejames wrote:

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Cool interview. Unfortunately he sounds pretty doubtful about a DS9 blu-ray release, what with the incredible amount of time and money it would take just to recreate the Dominion War (let alone all the other CG effects throughout the series).

And I can see his point. I just rewatched the DS9 pilot, and even the effects in that early episode seem lightyears more complex and sophisticated than anything they did on TNG.

Doing the DS9 pilot shouldn't be any more complicated than say the restoration of BOBW. It's all practical miniatures (save for some isolated CG VFX like the wormhole and Odo's morphing).

[Dream]

Maxwell Everett wrote:

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Doing the DS9 pilot shouldn't be any more complicated than say the restoration of BOBW. It's all practical miniatures (save for some isolated CG VFX like the wormhole and Odo's morphing).

Outside of the wormhole and Odo shape shifting, only the last two seasons of DS9 were very CGI heavy with all those space battles.

VOY would actually cost more to redo the effects, since they changed exclusively to CGI ships much sooner in the series.

[Lance]

I've got high hopes that if they can't do the whole of DS9, they might at least be able to do a few 'select releases', a bit like how they're doing the BOBW special release. The pilot episode, maybe "Way Of The Warrior", possibly a few others.

So even if doing the entire series proves impossible, maybe we could still see DS9 on Blu Ray? Sort of.

[FrontierTrek]

We're trying to spread out the screencaps a bit because of the big gap between Seasons 2 and 3, but as it's a topic of conversation here are the advanced caps from the shot you mentioned in SAMARITAN SNARE:

http://i.imgur.com/A7ZmMKN.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/90Pr3lW.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/N4ml8GB.jpg

[Doug Otte]

Thanks for the screencaps. On closer inspection, it's obviously higher resolution than SD. Thanks also to Max's detailed hypothesis. With my very limited knowledge, his ideas seem reasonable and would explain the lower quality of this sequence (and others).

[Maxwell Everett]

FrontierTrek wrote:

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We're trying to spread out the screencaps a bit because of the big gap between Seasons 2 and 3, but as it's a topic of conversation here are the advanced caps from the shot you mentioned in SAMARITAN SNARE:

http://i.imgur.com/A7ZmMKN.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/90Pr3lW.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/N4ml8GB.jpg

Hmm. I think my memory was misleading me. These frames look quite a bit more detailed and full of grain than even the same type of shot in "The Child":

http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x...ild_hd_160.jpg
http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x...ild_hd_161.jpg

This is definitely the best treatment we've seen of these anamorphically lensed shots. Maybe they finally decided by the time they got to "Samaritan Snare" to scale up the shot to 3656 x 1556 before they did the digital pan?

[RAMA]

FrontierTrek wrote:

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We're trying to spread out the screencaps a bit because of the big gap between Seasons 2 and 3, but as it's a topic of conversation here are the advanced caps from the shot you mentioned in SAMARITAN SNARE:

http://i.imgur.com/A7ZmMKN.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/90Pr3lW.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/N4ml8GB.jpg

There are some better than average improvements in the Dauphin, especially with the planetscapes and asteroid field. Also I think I actually like The Dauphin better than I used to...hmm..

RAMA

[Mott the barber]

Anyone remember the episode with the 10-Forward "at-warp" pan? Almost positive it's S2 since that's what I've been watching lately.

[Doug Otte]

RAMA wrote:

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There are some better than average improvements in the Dauphin, especially with the planetscapes and asteroid field. Also I think I actually like The Dauphin better than I used to...hmm..

RAMA

Agreed. Some of the planets, like in The Dauphin, look much better than other 2nd season episodes. I remember the holodeck scene looking a bit dodgy, w/ the sloppy compositing outlines noted in other episodes.

Although I hadn't seen it since the DVD first came out, I too found myself enjoying the episode more than I remembered. One of its strong points is Madchen Amick, but also it's a poignant episode showing a young woman who must cast aside any selfish joy a young person might look forward to, in order to dedicate herself to the betterment of her society.

[Doug Otte]

Mott the barber wrote:

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Anyone remember the episode with the 10-Forward "at-warp" pan? Almost positive it's S2 since that's what I've been watching lately.

Is it from The Child?