ENTERPRISE on Blu-Ray OFFICIAL Discussion Thread

[StalwartUK]

Makes sense, they won't have to do a lot to get it out on Blu-ray. The only real work will probably be any new special features they decide to do. Also gives them money/incentives to do the remaining SD Treks.

[toughlittleship]

If it gets me DS9 on Blu-ray, I'll buy it.

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Dream wrote:

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CBS should have all their Enterprise bases covered!

And they ARE belong to us.

[lurok]

Looking forward to seasons 3 & 4 (I can live with 1 & 2 on DVD).

[ChristopherPike]

There's one thing that always bugged me about ENT VFX. While objects like starships, planets and even certain alien races like the Insectoids were outstanding... a few times on the show, less than convincing CG human figures were shown walking outside on pylons, the ship's hull and in one particular instance, Reed and Tucker looking around his Sister's Florida hometown after it's been devastated by the Xindi.

Probably not much that can be done about those now. The effects team clearly learned a few lessons from how they looked, because after the show got canned and they moved onto remastering TOS, real extras were filmed moving against a greenscreen, made tiny and digitally added to Starbases, planet surfaces, mining colony shots etc. Inanimate objects and even alien creatures were fine, but creating realistic human movement in a computer needed a Lord of the Rings budget... Nothing beats real people inserted into the backgrounds to sell the realism.

[Mach5]

TATV should not be in there as a finale, or even as a part of season 4, but rather as a special feature, a non-canon apocrypha.

Rick Berman wrote:

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I would have never done it if I had known how people were going to react.

[lurok]

hell yeah. Unless they're magically able to edit it to remove Troi & Riker, resurrect Trip and still have the narrative make sense

[Skywalker]

I think they should magically not include it at all.

[teacake]

They should include it only in the next revamped TNG release and call it: Riker and Troi Go to White Castle.

[King Daniel]

They should CG in a bit of floating disclaimer text when Riker starts the holoprogram: "Events in this holoprogram are ficticious. Any resemblence to real events are coincidental"

[JJ-R]

Regarding the upscaling of the effects rendered in 720p, I'm very happy with Doug Drexler's explanation about his time on BSG where they discovered that 1080p effects look too sharp, even in comparison to higher-res film footage (quoted at Trekcore here). I expect the balance will be correct on the Blu-rays, especially since the episode masters were posted on 1080p/24 D5 tape (thanks Maxwell Everett in the TNG Season 2 thread).

However, I wonder what the impact will be on composited shots - the Xindi council springs to mind. Does anyone know if the only the effects layer is rendered at 720p and then added to the 35mm or 1080p digital shot (the latter in the case of season 4)? Or would the entire shot be at 720p quality?

It would be a shame if Enterprise suffered a similar fate to the Babylon 5 DVD releases, although obviously at these resolutions and with no cropping issues, this could never look remotely as bad as that.

[tomswift2002]

Actually, it doesn't make sense that the effects would've been rendered at 720p at all, especially since there were stations airing it at 1080i (and, besides, 720p effects would've looked just slightly better than the 480i CGI done on the last couple of seasons of DS9 and Voyager), and 1080i broadcast results in a picture that is about equivalent to a Blu-Ray 720p image: that's why Warner is able to offer the first five seasons of Smallville in HD on broadcast and iTunes, but not Blu-Ray (although Season 5 is HD ready as demonstrated by its HD-DVD release), since the amount of compression (and why a number of stations broadcast in 720p instead of 1080i) results in a dramatically reduced picture in terms of quality. For Enterprise too have been done in HD, they would've needed to have done the effects in 1080p, so that they could ensure future-broadcasts and home video releases in formats that offered better compression. Right now, Blu-Ray contains higher quality playback of HD programming than broadcast or iTunes. Of course I never did think the CGI ships in Enterprise looked better than the actual models used for the earlier shows (or even the TOS-R CGI).

And CBS won't have all the Enterprise's on Blu-Ray by the time of the new movie...the Animated Trek was Remastered in HD for its DVD release, so there is still one Enterprise that won't be on Blu-Ray. Of course, it'll be nice when Voyager's on Blu.

[Tom]

Well I really think the decision to do DS9 and VOY will be based on TNG sales.

[norse_sage]

Very, very happy to hear that ENT is due for BD release.
I just hope that Paramount will continue their policy of releasing releasing six disc season sets which started with from TOS season 3 onwards, instead of going back to the seven discs of TOS seasons 1 or 2. Might seem like a trivial matter, but for my custom cover collection, it is a pretty big deal.

[tomswift2002]

You have to remember that with TOS 1 and 2 both seasons had nearly 30 episodes per season, whereas from Season 3 onwards the the other seasons for all the shows ranged from just six episodes in length (Animated Series Season 2) up to twenty-six episodes (TNG Season 1), so CBS would've needed extra space for TOS 1 & 2, unless you wanted the episodes too look like VHS copies because of the amount of compression that would've been applied.

And it's not Paramount calling the shots on this, it is CBS, so it would be CBS who decides how many discs.