The Problems of Remastering TNG, DS9 & VOY

I recently read somewhere that it's unlikely that TNG, DS9 & VOY will ever be released in remastered formats for Bluray due to cost and technical reasons. One person on a random fourm stated that

Is this true? Does anybody know the exact film and equipment used for the filming and production of TNG, DS9 & VOY? Is there any chance of these shows ever being remastered considering all of the obstacles?

 

That person sounds like a real authority on all matters.

But yes, what they said is exactly true, the TNG era series were edited on video because it saved time and money to editing it on film. It's not impossible to remaster the shows, it would just take a hell of a lot of work and might not make a return on the investment. There's a small chance they'll risk it for TNG since it was the most successful Trek series in terms of mass appeal, but DS9 and Voyager will probably never see the light of day on blu-ray.

 

There's a large chance that they'll eventually release Star Trek: The Next Generation on Blu-Ray with proper HD transfers and either newly created or newly recomposited visual effects. It remains a very popular series and Paramount is well aware of its financial potential. There's a long and heated thread in the TNG forum about the issues surrounding this.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager are less likely candidates for Blu-Ray release in the near future, since they were never as popular as TNG.

Star Trek: The Animated Series, like its live action counterpart, could easily be remastered and released on Blu-Ray, but whether there is demand for this or not I have no idea.

Enterprise was mastered in widescreen HD, although the visual effects were upconverted from 480p as it was too time-consuming and expensive to create them in 1080p resolutions. It is often aired on television in HD and could very easily be released on Blu-Ray in this format. If they wanted to re-do the effects at 1080p (unlikely) it would take more work, although, as the most recent series, this may be the most doable since the CGI models, etc. are more likely to still be around.

 

It is a shame that they edited TNG on video instead of film. Though I understand why they did it. Hopefully they will take the chance to remaster TNG on blu-ray. I would definitely buy it. Eventually.

 

Weren't there rumours of TNG being remastered a few years back similar to TOS?

Mind you, since TNG has nearly 100 more episodes than TOS does, I don't see it happening.

 

From TNG, DS9 and VOY there will probably be Blu-Ray "fan collectives" but I don't see them doing the entire series.

ENT, on the other hand, is releaseable right now on BR. Whether or not the effects were upconverted to HD or created natively in that way, the fact remains that they have aired that way, so a Blu-Ray release would be possible.

 

I don't see them doing a Fan Collective. Re-mastering TNG would be a serious project, and an important part of the revenues from it would be television rebroadcasts. That can't be done with only a handful of episodes. It's probably all or nothing.

 

It would be great if they could remaster Voyager's CGI, the ship looked quite bad in its CGI incarnation.

 

But TNG has seven seasons. That's hundreds of episodes. Way more work, and time, than TOS-R. It may not be worth the effort.

 

This is one area where they really blew it, and I think it somewhat limits the replay value of these series. Babylon 5 premiered the same year as DS9, and yet they managed to film that show in widescreen and the non-CGI scenes look fine on DVD. Admittedly, B5 has its own mastering issues with the special effects, but at least they tried. I don't see why Trek couldn't have done this.

 

My thought is, someday, maybe, they'll devise a technique for up-scaling video to HD. Never know...

Honestly though, I'd be satisfied if they just "remastered" them as best as can be, even if not blu-ray quality, and while they where at it, they simply re-make all the SFX with modern CGI.

Just getting rid of the same, redundant, pass-by shots they recycled for almost every episode would be a vast improvement.

 

Any image can be up-scaled, including video image, if you watch a regular DVD on an HDTV either your DVD player or your TV will up-scale the image, otherwise the image will only take up a small part of the screen. The problem is that an up-scaled image can never reproduce the same level of quality as the film image because it doesn't contain the data and has to make approximations. The best up-scaler in the world will never be able to perfectly recreate the full-HD image.

A good example for this would be the bios for Archer and Hoshi in In a Mirror, Darkly which were readable on HDTVs but were difficult to make out when displayed on an SDTV. No matter how well your up-scale that SD image the words will be blurry and difficult to make out while the proper HD image will be crisp and clear.

 

That's the sad thing. I can imagine (or maybe just want to) TNG doing some decent business on a true remaster, but I just don't see enough of a fan base outside of Trek fans for DS9 or Voyager to do anything significant in terms of sales.

 

It's a pity they didn't try, as a test case, a high-definition remaster of the DS9 episode, Trials and Tribble-ations, that was included with the TOS blu-ray. Perhaps it wasn't financially feasible, but I wonder how much it would have added to the cost of the set to do it.

 

It probably isn't.

Blu Ray is still very much a niche format and the DVDs have hit rock-bottom price now. A remastering project is very unlikely, and as others have pointed out, they would need to know they will get some significant revenue from HD re-runs.

There is a heck of a lot more work involved than with the remastered TOS, both per episode and in the number of episodes, for potentially far less gain (no new movie to make the characters popular again).

 

That is unfortunate if only for the fact that with the proliferation of larger and larger HDTV screens, all older TV shows - not just ST - don't look all that great when played. It is almost to the point now where I only want to watch HD signals or Blu-rays on the large screen. If I want to watch anything else I go to the Sony CRT. When it goes, I'll need to get a 'small' HDTV so the signal still remains relatively decent. There is, of course, upscaling, but frankly the quality of the picture is still noticeable. I would hope than in the future, technology will be in a position to be able to overcome the problems that exist now with transfers. Don't really know enough about these things, though.

 

The original question, regarding going back and 'finding' the film footage, isn't outside the realms of possibility.

The Seinfeld DVDs were, to my knowledge, produced in that fashion. That went back to the masters and re-edited everything anew to the exact frame. Now, Trek also has the effects to worry about, but the fact that the original film is presumably still good to go, we may see them redone "some day".

I'm not holding my breath, but a man can dream.

Remastering aside, I'd kill just for DVDs that didn't look like smeared crap half the time. TNG and (even moreso) DS9 really suffers due to porr compression.

 

That's exactly the problem. Not only would they have to go back to the original film and edit frame by frame they have to re-create or re-composite every single special effect from scratch...from every single starfield seen to every optical effect like transporters, phasers, mattes etc. They would basically have to recreate every single episode from scratch.

 

Perhaps they do a 'Best of' as a test run. They could select 22-26 episodes to remaster and sell those to stations for a weekly syndicated run.

And a Blu-Ray release of course...

 

Please explain. Why did those DVDs require all that work?