I just pulled out my TNG DVDs and watched a couple of fifth season episodes, The First Duty and Ensign Ro. The transfers to DVD are TERRIBLE! They are so faded and the colors are pixilated and distorted that I can't believe it was allowed to be released this way. I watched some season six DS9 DVDs recently and none of the episodes looked as bad. Why were the TNG transfers so bad? There should really be a restoration of the show and a re-release of the series on DVD.
Early DS9 DVDs are awful too, so it's not TNG in particular. I remember watching Emissary and the rest of s. 1 and maybe 2 and remarking how awful it looked even though my DVDs were brand new and DVDs don't degrade like VHS anyway. I had thought about even exchanging it, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't my particular set that was the problem.
Really? In that case I'll hold off on getting Season 5 of TNG (I wanted to buy S5 of TNG and Seasons 1-7 of DS9). J.
It could be that they weren't filmed on high def. They probably didn't make TNG and early DS9 with DVD releases in mind (of course, since they predated the DVD era). It's a shame. They should rerelease the DVDs.
My understanding of TNG and DS9 was that the only studio owned masters were on SD video. I'm not sure if the series were originally filmed on film and transferred to video for storage, or if they were filmed straight on to video. Anyway, I thought that Paramount only had video copies to transfer to DVD, which has been the main obstacle to any remastering of effect shots for TOS-esque cleaning up and visual effects improvement. As video degrades over time, and let's face it, 1987 video quality wasn't great especially compared to modern standards, it's quite understandable why the first two seasons of TNG look poor on DVD. When released on DVD back in about 2002, the original video masters were 15 years old. I will agree with anyone who says the early seasons of DS9 should look better on DVD than they do, but they're decent enough for what were around 11 year old masters at the time of the DVD release.
You think the TNG transfers are awful? You should check out the first few seasons of Married... with Children, also done on SD Video. Makes the TNG transfers look absolutely hi-def.
I'm pretty sure there was an article/interview on TrekToday not so long ago, something about remastering TOS, saying TNG was on video and the time it would take too much time to restore to make it worthwhile. It might have been another site, but I honestly can't think of any other Trek site I've visited over the past year.
All live action for TNG was shot on 35mm film and transferred to video for editing. So the original 35mm masters should be available for HD rendering. However, the visual effects were all done straight to video, and that's been the sticking point on any sort of HD release for some time. There's simply no raw film that they could go back and work with. The best they have is original video from 1987-1994. So if they did an HD transfer, they'd either have to accept the visual effects elements looking ridiculously worse than the live action elements, or they'd have to re-do the visual effects from scratch. No small undertaking.
I'm just thankful to own every single episode on DVD. I was so happy to get rid of my VHS tapped off of TV collection!! That was a LOT of tapes, and you wanna talk poor quality?? Nope, doesn't bother me how the TNG DVDs look compared to others. They were worth every penny (And I bought them at full price when they came out!! No regrets)
I waited a year and got the slimiline ones, sure the quality is not the greatest, its still watchable to me (and i occasionally do). The only thing that looks out of place to me is the occasionaly bluish tint to the sides of the screen particulary during the opening sequence.
Yeah, that's another obvious problem that's quite noticeable. I'm glad to have them, but there are a lot of shows of a lot less quality that have had much better treatment on DVD. They did do well with the packaging and the onscreen menus and extras, but the actual show, itself, deserves better treatment. Surely, they will find a way to correct this. Plus, they never turn down an opportunity to make more money on a Trek product, right?
Compared to the TOS remasters, the TNG DVD's do look awful on my HDTV..but I'm not sure that a re-do of TNGs effects would be all that problematic..after all the 35MM transfers do exist, so a "remaster" of TNGs effects IS doable...and probable after TOS's remasters...later seasons of DS9 and all of Voy were done with the possibility of transfer to HD DVD in mind...so there is little doubt that those programs will look better on Blu-Ray disk..but TNG REQUIRES a remaster to be a viable Blu-Ray release..