DS9 on blu ray?
- Thread starter borgboy
- Start date
Bumping it back. This needs to happen already 
The kickstarter for the documentary got twice as much as they asked for, 150k. if a kickstarter can get X, the project should get at least 10X. If a documentary on a 20 year old tv series can get X, why wouldn't the series itself in HD get 10 times that? I heard 20 mil for this to happen. Each episode of Discovery has a budget of 6-7 mil. It's the cost of 3 episodes for f***'s sake.
The kickstarter for the documentary got twice as much as they asked for, 150k. if a kickstarter can get X, the project should get at least 10X. If a documentary on a 20 year old tv series can get X, why wouldn't the series itself in HD get 10 times that? I heard 20 mil for this to happen. Each episode of Discovery has a budget of 6-7 mil. It's the cost of 3 episodes for f***'s sake.
More than double. From indiegogo...
$647,891 USD total funds raised
423% funded on March 11, 2017
Clearly, 3 episodes of Discovery is worth more than the entirety of DS9 though. All that money raised for a documentary about the show.... I wonder how much support the series itself would get through crowd funding.
I don't think the issue is fan desire, it's really just money. And while the amount raised for What We Left Behind is truly astounding, it still pales in comparison to what a hi-def DS9 remaster would require (think millions, not hundreds of thousands). One reliable source I've seen estimates it would take 4 years and $20 million to remaster DS9 (double that if you want to do VOY). Could the DS9 community crowdfund $20 million? I'm not so sure our pockets are that deep.
20 million doesn't sound like that much if you figure people will be buying these blue rays. Maybe you could even go and find multiple investors to spread the costs if you wanted to.
Also I wonder if you could save money by simply streaming the new HD versions of "DS9" instead of putting them on disks.
Jason
Also I wonder if you could save money by simply streaming the new HD versions of "DS9" instead of putting them on disks.
Jason
If you look at the fan CGI work being done in these very forums and elsewhere, I think there's a distinct possibility that at some point in the future we'll get fan remasters of DS9 and VOY - and probably even a better remaster of TOS. The technology is getting to where non-professionals are able to do work that surpasses what pros could accomplish a few years ago, and fans have the advantage of slave-like devotion an dedication to detail. Of course, the biggest hurdle will be copyright enforcement by our friends at CBS/Paramount...
And that's another problem and why CBS is so hesitant to fund this project. TNG is probably the most widely popular Trek series, they gave it a gorgeous HD remaster with a beautiful blu-ray collection with all kinds of special features.......and nobody bought it.
Totally agree. And that's what everyone who's been involved in these projects says when people ask about a DS9 blu-ray: Buy the blu-rays of the other Treks. The only way to get CBS to take a DS9/VOY remaster seriously is to show them there's people willing to buy that stuff. Why would they make it if nobody buys it?
That's what I've been saying!
The cost is in performing the work, not in producing the physical media the work will be distributed on. The link I shared above details what exactly they'd have to do and it's super expensive and labor intensive. Basically it comes down to the fact that that DS9 and VOY were produced on tape at NTSC resolution. So it's not like TOS where they able to scan the original 35 mm prints and convert them to HD. They would have to do what they did with TNG: rebuild the entire show, shot for shot, from the original negatives. It doesn't make a difference what media you're remastering it for. The remastering itself is expensive and time consuming.
From the article:
"But TNG, DS9 and Voyager could not be rescanned and released in Full HD, as the original edited programs only existed on tape at NTSC resolution. With worldwide markets rapidly converting to HD, modern Trek, with the exception of Enterprise, would simply no longer be shown anywhere. With TNG still the most successful Trek series by a wide margin, Paramount and CBS desperately wanted to figure out a way to not let their crown jewel get thrown onto the scrapheap of history. Something had to be done.
So a radical notion was proposed…why not go back to the original negative and REBUILD the entire show, from from the ground up, in High Definition? In the history of television, this had never been done before. Essentially, all 178 episodes of TNG (176 if you’re watching the original versions of “Encounter at Farpoint” and “All Good Things”) would have to go through the entire post-production process AGAIN. The original edits would be adhered to exactly, but all the original negative would have to be rescanned, the VFX re-composed, the footage re-color-timed, certain VFX, such as phaser blasts and energy fields, recreated in CG, and the entire soundtrack, originally only finished in 2 channel stereo, would be remastered into thunderous, 7.1 DTS."
I recommend reading the entire article because it's a fascinating exploration of the challenge of remastering tv shows.
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Couldn't you make up those cost though in something like a online option were people might want to pay a little extra to have access to the HD versions of the show?
I know on my Amazon firestick if you want to rent or buy a movie you can either get a HD version or SD version that is a little cheaper. I wonder if one of the reasons why the TNG disks didn't sale better is because people were simply getting the same quality of visuals through streaming. Maybe people were spending money on those updated visuals but not in the traditional way people use to do when they started going for DVD's over VCR tapes.
Jason
I think you just identified the problem though. The TNG remaster didn't sell very well or make CBS that much money. And when you're a business considering a similar follow-up project, making back more than your investment is the ultimate deciding factor. I think you're absolutely right that people are just watching the TNG remaster on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime, etc. They're not buying the blu-ray and clearly CBS isn't making back their investment on the remaster from either blu-ray sales or whatever it is they get from streaming services' licensing agreements.
And if you give people the option of watching it in HD or SD, a lot of people are just going to shrug and pay less for SD. That'll cut into the profits on the remaster even more. What people need to do is buy the TNG, TOS, and ENT blu-rays. Not on eBay or from friends or whatever. Buy them from Amazon or directly from CBS or Best Buy, what-have-you. They need to make a profit on this if we're going to have any hope of seeing DS9 and VOY in HD.
Do you think the need to update all older shows will someday be needed if anyone expects to make money off of them? I think you can get by with SD for awhile but if everything new looks amazing and everything in the past looks like a crap I wonder if people will just avoid older stuff because of the look. I could see SD being to future fans what black and white movies can be to fans used to stuff in color. Some will avoid them just because they are in black and white.
Also what do people think about how DS9 looks on Hulu,Amazon Prime etc compared to the dvd's? I think DS9 does look better on Amazon Prime but not close to TNG though I think I might be influenced by the fact that DS9 had better sets and visuals almost from the start and a better look with how darkly lit it could be.
Jason
Or even then.
Streaming/broadcast licensing will catch up in time.
The rest of the market isn't going to go back to 480i SD and if customers are buying 1080P or 2160P (4K), why would they want to steam SD? It's like buying a car that can do 300MPH but you're only puttering around on a road where you can't go more than 45MPH before the cops come in.
True, number of customers is an issue... but in 1989, "Doctor Who" was canceled and the BBC got even richer by licensing novel/book deals since 1990, because those were far cheaper to make than the TV show and it kept people quiet since they didn't want a redo of the outrage that took place in 1985's cancellation (a word later retracted and replaced with "hiatus" due to the outrage and outcry). Novel quality got incredibly bad after four years or so, but that didn't stop people from saying "Book quality sucks but if we keep buying enough that'll show an interest and the BBC will make a new season."
And sure enough, they were right. Only sixteen 16 years later, the BBC had made a new show because lots of other dead properties were being "rebooted" and people tuned in for a while to get happy on the nostalgia bandwagon. And aimed it to every possible audience - except the fans buying the novels since to this day fans are belittled at every turn on Doctor Who forums because casual viewers mean more for ratings and they don't want the show to get axed again... (Just how big a facepalm emoticon exists? Triple its dimensions and then it might then almost fit the big picture...)
(Oh, the less said about the 1996TV movie the better, but as with 1989 the BBC wanted virtually nothing to do with making it because it cost too much and in 1996 the "let's revive dead properties and coast off of empty nostalgia" fad hadn't started yet...)
Yeah I imagine as people get more and more accustomed to HD, anything in SD will look dated and odd. Hopefully someday either there will be enough money and interest for CBS to do the remaster of DS9 and VOY or some technological marvel will simplify the process. Who knows?
DS9 looks best on DVD, in my experience. I bought the recent DVD set and it doesn't look bad at all, and I have a pretty large HD television. It looks pretty good on Netflix and Hulu. Haven't checked it out on Amazon Prime. I will say I've checked it out on CBSAA and it actually looks worse. Ditto for TOS and TNG on CBSAA -- for some reason it looks like they're using the original versions, not the remasters, which is super odd. I guess they don't want people just watching it on streaming so they'll buy the blu-ray but that'll never happen because it's on Netflix. Whatever. They need to get their shit together in that regard -- for god's sake, it's their own property and it looks better on other services.
EDIT: I think why DS9 and VOY look better on DVD than streaming is the apparent problem of "deinterlacing" on streaming. This review of the new VOY DVD set goes into detail about why watching DS9 and VOY on DVD is a better experience than streaming. One of the main reasons I ponied up for the DS9 DVD.
I think TNG-R proved to CBS that there is a finite audience for Star Trek. People who want to watch it will do so, regardless of whether it's only available in SD. TNG-R didn't open up a vast new market of fans, and was released just as Netflix and Amazon Prime were going stratospheric. The idea of spending £50 for a season of an eighties TV show seemed ludicrous, unless you were already a die-hard fan.
I've heard anecdotally that TNG has done well on Netflix, but I don't know if it's done better since it was remastered. I doubt it made any real difference. The money is the issue here, no one can work out how to do it and make a ton of money.
I've heard anecdotally that TNG has done well on Netflix, but I don't know if it's done better since it was remastered. I doubt it made any real difference. The money is the issue here, no one can work out how to do it and make a ton of money.
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