TNG remastered

[LLAP]

It think it would a great idea to to TNG remastered. However, since the technical issues make this pretty unlikely I think the resources should be poured into new Trek.

[Scorned]

They will not bother remastering TNG. It will cost them too much money. No one is goin to rebuy 7 seasons of TNG. TOS was only 3. They are not going to remaster the entire Trek catalog.

[SoM]

trevanian wrote:

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They should have been archived, tossing the live-action makes no sense, but then again this is Paramount, who wouldn't pay to keep the vfx elements from TMP so they all got tossed from EEG and Apogee in the early 80s.

I'd figure the live-action film elements would have been archived along with the miniature film elements, but again ... this is paramount.

AFAIK, they still have the live-action film elements. They rescanned a few shots of Ten Forward for These Are the Voyages... (where they had to redo a replicator effect from scratch because they rescanned, see below), and TrekMovie.com said in July 2007 that they were going to do a TNG-R HD test of a single (unspecified) episode. No word on how that turned out as such, but no news is presumably bad news.

Star Treks wrote:

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I see no compelling reason to do a TNG remastered, at least not the kind of thing where you actually re-do shots or effects. Perhaps at some point a total cleanup and revitalization of the prints or whatever but ... content wise, it stand up perfectly well 98% of the time.

The reason to do it would be the same reason they redid TOS - namely, things are moving to the point where a HD copy of a show will get people to rebuy the series on Blu-Ray (originally, HD DVD), and HD syndication is beginning to become viable. And "upscaled" video tends to show its' roots. THAT'S the "compelling reason" if they can keep the costs down in doing it.

They can't do a "total cleanup and revitalization of the prints or whatever" that exist because they did all the optical effects on 480i NTSC video (which was pretty soft to begin with). The improvement you can get from such is limited, compared with rescanning the 35mm film... but if they rescanned the film, they'd need to recreate the edits, redo all the phaser shots, etc from scratch, and at a bare minimum recomposite all the viewscreen shots, LCARS stuff, shots involving multiple models (which were filmed separately and then optically put together on video), etc. And if they wanted 5.1 sound, that would also need put together again from the original elements.

Fundamentally, they would need to redo all the post-production work from scratch. Probably doable, but expensive. There's no middle-ground - as there was with TOS - of playing with the edited episodes, where film prints existed of the final episodes that could be "cleaned up".

[JJohnson]

I want to see a result from the HD test they did. If it were remastered, I would like to see there be more than the same odd-angle warp shot focusing on the deflector (which always looked like the ship was flying at an angle to me), and redo those planets from seasons 1 and 2, which looked like bad projections on a dome, and I could tell most of the time that's what they were. Throw in some good planets like TOS-R, a few more stock shots of the ship from other angles (left side, top, bottom, bottom-front, et al) at warp for variety, and fix a few FX errors (phaser from the photorp launcher), and the rest is mostly SD->HD cleanup and a shot-by-shot reconstruction. I don't have too much problem with the original composition of most of the shots, but I get tired of the same stock shots, and the Enterprise being a lumbering, almost immobile object in fight scenes. Ent-E moved around more.

In short - I hope they get to TNG HD and get started soon. I can't wait to see it.

James

[trevanian]

SoM wrote:

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Fundamentally, they would need to redo all the post-production work from scratch. Probably doable, but expensive. There's no middle-ground - as there was with TOS - of playing with the edited episodes, where film prints existed of the final episodes that could be "cleaned up".

Blame Berman's right hand, Peter Lauritson. He is the guy who made the call early on to finish on video, knowing full well how it would hamstring things in the future -- and for a property already known for its longevity, that seems so far beyond criminal to be just terminally stupid.

Oh, the other poster ... TNG did NOT do planet projections in the first couple years, those are all photos mapped onto a circle or sphere in the computer. Projections would have looked a ton better than that, those scanned pics at times looked out of focus, and worse than almost any original TOS planet (except of course the Rand McNally looking monstrosities when they orbit earth.)

All this is covered in Cinefex -- either issue 37 or 38, I forget which.

[JJohnson]

Sorry about that...all I know is the planets did not look good at all the first two seasons. That got really distracting to me after seeing TOS-R. Just fixing the planets and upscaling would be reason enough to do TNG-R.

[jefferiestubes8]

cybersoldier wrote:

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I would like perhaps a remastered version with Cause and Effect, Best of Both Worlds, Q who? Aquiel- the alien at the end.

Dukhat wrote

only three episodes I'd like to see remastered: BoBW, Unification, and Redemption,

I would like all of the Borg episodes from TNG.
If there were a fan collective of TNG remastered which episodes should go into it?


FYI this was also being discussed on trekbbs in the past month here.

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Obviously TNG will have to be remastered in order to actually *air* in HD, but perhaps it can still be released on Blu-Ray - just in standard definition.

After all, there's no ironclad rule that demands everything - or indeed *anything* - on a Blu-Ray disc actually be in HD, is there? A BR disc could hold a whole lot of SD content. You could probably fit an entire season of TNG on a single disc.

[lennier1]

It´s always entertaining to see people talk about remastering shows even though they don´t seem to understand what the term actually means.

[USS Mariner]

Even if TNG were to be "remastered," 99% of the key production staff will never be invited or asked to work on the restoration/reworking. It'll end up being another TOSR; a glorified video remix, done by different people with no direct involvement or experience with the original's production.

A lot of the TOS crew have passed on, but there are still dozens of people who worked on the show still running around. Almost all of TNG's production staff is still in the business.

[Nerdius Maximus]

darkshadow0001 wrote:

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Exactly. I think films are relying on CGI way to much nowadays. CGI is good for say, Disney films or any other kind of anime films, but I wish they would use more "real" effects like they used to back in the day instead of using CGI. With CGI, a lot of times you can tell the scene or object is fake. With some real effects, at least in modern times, some things look more real in a movie when it is a prop or some other type of special effects.

Yeah, CGI is definitely overused. I hate it when they utilize it when it's not even necessary. For example, that scene in the first spider-man where those guys are robbing an armored truck. The fight sequence takes place entirely on the ground, yet they used a really fake-looking cgi spider-man. He wasn't swinging through the city or anything, just kicking and punching. Wouldn't a stuntman have sufficed and been more convincing?

[Salinga]

Babaganoosh wrote:

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You could probably fit an entire season of TNG on a single disc.

I am actually not fond of this. Why? Because if that disc is broken, the whole season is lost. With the DVDs you will in the worst case only loose four episodes.

[Outpost4]

And when was it that you last broke a DVD?

I've never broken a DVD. I last broke a 5" optical disc in the 1980s when I threw a CD against a wall, demonstrating how impervious it was to damage. Wrong!

Put a disc away in the case after you are done watching it and this should never be an issue.

[ialfan]

I'd like to see them remaster a few episodes at least say these:

1. Conspiracy
2. Q, Who?
3. The Defector
4. Yesterday's Enterprise
5. Tin Man
6. The Best of Both Worlds
7. The Wounded
8. Redemption
9. Darmok
10. Unification
11. Cause and Effect
12. Rascals
13. Chain of Command
14. The Chase
15. Timescape
16. Descent
17. Gambit
18. Parallels
19. Preemptive Strike
20. All Good Things

They all have some decent action sequences and are begging to be shown in 1080p HD.

[kitsune]

DGCatAniSiri wrote:

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I think TNG's effects are perfectly fine as they are. Yes, they're not the CGI 'masterpieces' of today, but they're still high-quality work - I think a lot of what they did with pratical models matches what we do with the CGI ones.

One thing that always bothered me about TNG: all the ship explosions looked extremely fake. There was never any debris field, or even a dust cloud left behind.

(edit: I guess this applies to all the series. For example, when the Odyssey blew up in DS9.)