DS9 on blu ray?
- Thread starter borgboy
- Start date
Yes that was kinda my point, DS9 won't look that good ever because there are currently no plans to do that, and THAT takes a little away from watching them on a big TV IMHO.
Lets put it this way, in my opinion anyway, my DVDs went down to the charity shop as soon as I was sure all seven TNG seasons were coming out on blu!
Voyager was done on tape? Surely not.
The whole tape vs film thing is pretty depressing. Film has bags of resolution so will work great in home cinemas (35 mm will likely suffice to create UHD masters, HD for 16 mm). Film costs a lot though so a lot of shows were shot on videotape instead and now it's coming back to bite them. A lot of UK sitcoms, for example, were taped rather than filmed to save money. Classics like Fawlty Towers, for example, will never look any better. The recent remastered DVD set was slightly better than the previous one but you'd have to do a side-by-side comparison to tell. They did rescan all the outdoor scenes though (shot on 16 mm). The only minor upside is that more of them were shot in 16:9 since widescreen was adopted earlier in the UK (it was standard for the BBC in the late 1990s).
Another annoyance is the mastering practices of the early 2000s, when "filmising" became popular (basically reducing 25i to 25p and adjusting colours to make a taped show look like it was shot on film). To this end, some shows were shot at 576i/25 and then converted to 576p/25 but in a terrible way. They ended up with stair-steps all over the place because the filtering/interpolation was so poor; effectively what you're watching isn't much better than 288p/25. I assume it was done this way because cameras able to shoot in 576p/25 weren't readily available but it looks like crap (see: The Office and Coupling, for example). Hopefully these shows will be remastered at some point with modern tools to retain most of the original resolution when decimating down to 25p. Even consumer GPUs can do this very well these days.
VT sitcoms are fine, especially when they date from the seventies. You couldn't really expect the BBC to use 16mm to film everything - it was expensive, and only used for locations or pre-filming in other studios. But even so, back then the lavish drama serials were filmed, because they tended to be given higher budgets and were made with export in mind. There's a certain immediacy that VT gives those sitcoms, which makes sense given they were filmed as live in front of a studio audience.
It's ironic that arguably the worst time to make TV was the eighties and nineties, because it was before anyone even considered the possibility of high definition broadcast, let alone HD home video. Video editing was cheap and effective, so you get all these big shows like Star Trek and the X-Files which were filmed, but then edited in such a way to throw away two thirds of the quality. Thank god the "filmising" fad was relatively short-lived, and then things started to get better with the recognition that HD was about to take off.
The Star Trek shows looked pretty ropey on DVD, with the exception of 35mm TOS, so it's nothing short of a miracle that CBS sanctioned a thorough remaster of TNG, especially considering the poor treatment the Star Trek films received. It'll be a huge shame if DS9 and Voyager end up being the worst-looking Star Trek series.
It's ironic that arguably the worst time to make TV was the eighties and nineties, because it was before anyone even considered the possibility of high definition broadcast, let alone HD home video. Video editing was cheap and effective, so you get all these big shows like Star Trek and the X-Files which were filmed, but then edited in such a way to throw away two thirds of the quality. Thank god the "filmising" fad was relatively short-lived, and then things started to get better with the recognition that HD was about to take off.
The Star Trek shows looked pretty ropey on DVD, with the exception of 35mm TOS, so it's nothing short of a miracle that CBS sanctioned a thorough remaster of TNG, especially considering the poor treatment the Star Trek films received. It'll be a huge shame if DS9 and Voyager end up being the worst-looking Star Trek series.
The difference in experience comes down to the size of the TV and the tolerance of the viewer. IMO DS9 on DVD has an intolerable amount of compression artifacts and upscaling it doesn't help.
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Pretty sure it was just like TNG. Captured on film then compiled with the effects on video tape.
Just getting these shows uncompressed would be a significant step forward. (And please god no edge enhancement halos - surely that wouldn't be on the source tapes?)
Well, someone's gotta be the worst
Yes, but it should be the one shot in an objectively inferior format (that is, Enterprise season four).
I think he means that the TNG shows were SHOT on 35mm film, and therefore could all look good at 2k, 4k, 6k - whatever they choose to scan and master them at. The fact the current masters are SD videotape isn't relevant to that.
However, if memory serves, ENT S4 was shot using 2k digital video cameras, so will never under any circumstances be more than 2k.
Diminishing returns apply, practically speaking very little shot on film will look noticably better in 4k than it does at 1080p, but I guess in theory it is a bit better.
It will become like FLAC vs MP3, very few people can pass ABX tests comparing the two with modern converters, but a lot of people just want the best (before anyone starts, yes I know FLAC is lossless for archiving etc.)
As a note, I actually found with ABX testing I can't tell the difference between Lame V0 MP3 and FLAC or CD, and also that I can't tell with AAC 128kbps either! Unless you have a badly encoded old MP3, or train yourself to look for artefacts caused by encoders (like flanging or popping) it is damn near impossible for an adult to tell the difference.
Ah but you have to remember that a lot of people ripped their CD collections 10-15 years ago using poorly encoded 128k (or worse!) MP3s, and haven't updated since. I've still got loads of legacy digital files I haven't got around to redoing in the intervening years. In all honesty, I doubt I'll ever get round to it now, as I listen to most music via a streaming service (Google Play) which matches virtually everything in my collection with a snazzy 320kbps MP3 version.
I'd agree that it's difficult to tell the difference between a good quality MP3 and a lossless format, but the key is that a lot of people are still listening to stuff they haphazardly ripped with iTunes v.4.1 over a decade ago.
Exactly, the only difference AFAIK is that DS9 and (especially) Voyager utilised CGI. Sometimes it's really obvious and badly done though, so I'd hope they would redo the ones that don't look up to scratch (or for which they've lost the original files anyway).
Well no, 35 mm film doesn't have infinite resolution. It's probably equivalent to somewhere between 1080p (~2K) and 2160p (~4K) depending on various factors.
Digital and film can look different and have different "quirks" (e.g. film has more noise in bright scenes, video has more noise in dark scenes) but they can also both look fantastic. Dollhouse switched to digital for series 2 but it didn't change the look of the show; most people would never tell.
Some/most of the CGI in TOS remastered is really obvious and badly done. The last time I watched DS9 I thought it held up pretty well.
The quality of upscaling depends on the device. My Bluray upscales DVDs only in mediocre quality, because I can see the pixels and MPEG artifacts, while the Plasma TV upscales very nicely since it anti-aliases and dithers the image so the edges look smooth and artifacs are reduced.
Actually a key feature of an HD television should be the quality of the upscaling, since you dont get every picture in HD. A TV set can display a native HD signal perfectly but due to bad upscaling show content in all other resolutions in a mediocre or even bad quality. A TV set with bad upscaling quality should be avoided.
I'd say that's the difference between CGI shots designed by a director and shots left to the tech monkeys. (With no offense meant to the tech monkeys!)
I've seen some claim up to 6k scans are practical for 35mm film, but I'd personally expect to see no noticable difference above 1080p.
Oh totally agreed yes, and in fact the new 4k and 6k digital cameras doing the rounds at the minute produce really stunning quality.
It seems that film proponents claim that film has a slightly higher resolution than the highest current digital format available, no matter what that is.
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