There's an audiobook version of "Borg" that you can still find, which is basically a playthrough of the game with a new actor providing narration and dialogue from the (previously) silent protagonist. I can see arguments for and against using the player character narration/dialogue (especially since a lot of the narration is redundant if you can see what's going on), but it'd be a good guide to which wrong turns are really necessary (both to demonstrate the main character is out of his depth and in danger, as well as the puzzles you can only solve after you learn something while you're dying).
I'm a little busy with other personal things. So progress is slow on this one. Nevertheless I was able to replace some plates in the intro with 'originals' from the TNG remaster: I had to recreate an alpha matte for the ship fly-in as otherwise the background stars wouldn't match with rest. Same also for the Credits Text.
There are 58min 'watchthrough' versions of YouTube Made during Voyager using their sets, props and costumes at Paramount, it feels like 'legit' Star Trek, I'm almost surprised it wasn't an extra on a TNG/VOY box set, though rights issues?
@M2m: You did an amzing job here I also played myself with upscaling and a mod developer could already use it to include the Bridge Commander videos back into the game. Do you also plan to release the videos? I would love to try to include them back into the game.
D I plan to release the finished cut. Are you interested in the upscaled intermediate files to add back to the interactive movie ? Not sure this can work. Most likely it’ll be better to create an interactive Blu-ray. But that’s outside my capabilities.
Either that or they didn't regard it being worth the cost/trouble. And that's assuming that the original footage/film exists after all these days. Star Trek games don't exactly have a great reputation in the mainstream anyway so it probably wouldn't help shift many boxsets in any case. Someone once said a few years back here that Simon & Schuster own the rights to it and they won't be part of ViacomCBS soon since they're being sold to Penguin Random House, certainly won't make things easier.
Yeah, it would be great, if you can upload the files maybe on moddb. That way a modder/developer can perhaps reintegrate them into the game. Of course there is the possibility that it won't work, but still it's worth a shoot. It already worked for so many games. Just look at the Wing Commander IV or Starfleet Academy projects
It's a pity - I'm not a gamer but I've researched Trek videogames. In the 90s there were many. What interests me watching videos is they had actors from the shows so they felt like extra, forgotten movies and episodes. Sure, some aren't really great if you're ... wanting to watch a story! Haha And of course the graphics vary from really poor to pretty good in the later ones (Elite Force 2, Online) Weren't there four with exclusive live action footage: - Borg - Klingon - Starfleet Academy - Klingon Academy Also the TNG interactive Board Game, a Klingon Challenge, shot on the Paramount lot with Robert O'Reilly - there was another one called Borg Q-Uest with Q but that was never released!
The storage requirements are relatively huge - I think 70GB - 100GB. I am using ProRes codec - which is virtually lossless and 1080p files. I opted out of 4k upscales as I didn't see any visual benefit and then also filesizes increase even more. I don't think moddb can handle 100GB of storage capacity.
Yeah, the files size with 4k is really to big and the benefit too small to justify it. ODVS, the guy behind the Starfleet Academy and Wing Commander IV Remastered Project, and I are both also just upscale to 1080p. At first we also use a near lossless format, but for the reintegration and an upload to moddb we render it in mp4 (50mbit). That way all his Wing Commander IV files and all my Klingon Academy files are between 7-12GB. Which is okay for moddb.
These look great! I've never had any of them but have watched the play through of Borg. I never knew there was a DVD version. Your upscale looks fantastic. I'm guessing the original master tapes may still exist at Paramount somewhere, but probably won't ever see the light of day.
Thanks I’m happy people like it. Looking at the footage I think this was filmed using relatively cheap video cameras (I guess beta-cam) and not - like TNG, DS9, VOY on real film. There is a lot of purple color fringe at the corner of hard lights and this is typical for video camera sensors ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_fringing?wprov=sfti1 ). So I think the master tapes may not have such a drastic quality difference and my guess is that the DVD video is mostly nearly as good as the master beta-cam. It really looks like they more or less directly transferred the camera footage to DVD, because the color wasn’t even corrected and the DVD image is looking slightly flat and lacking vibrancy. A “flat image” retains more information in the highlights and shadows - the shadows are lighter and the highlights are darker, giving you an image which lacks contrast, it looks “flat”. But this isn’t a problem but rather a good thing because if you are shooting a video with harsh light and dark shadows in the same frame, a flat picture will help the video retain information on both ends of the spectrum, giving more room to expose both the shadows and highlights correctly and adjust it later in post production. So in fact the ‚flat’ DVD image is showing us, that the camera operator really knew what he/she was doing and that the DVD is image-wise very near to the master tapes. So anyway, while the camera operator knew the job, whoever did the motion graphics (like the game over screen with the Starfleet emblem, or the tricorder UI) clearly didn’t. For example in the Game Over Screen the Starfleet emblem is squished into an oval when displayed on TV or a DVD player (obviously the Starfleet logo is supposed to be a circle) because whoever put the graphics into the DVD didn’t take DVD display aspect ratio into account. The whole ‘magic tricorder’ UI suffers from the same problem. This is most evident in the saucer section of the blueprint UI. Also here the saucer section turns into an oval on screen rather to retain the circular shape. Also don’t get me started about the extensive use of VFR (variable frame rate) encoding. I didn’t think about it - my bad - but I basically have started to redo everything from scratch yesterday as there are extensive segments using heavy VFR encoding which leads to audio sync issues in the editing and cutting process (i.e. when integrating the extra scenes for ‘wrong’ choices). I kind of ran into a roadblock yesterday with audio sync, which are impossible to fix realistically in edit. So I have to convert all videos first from VFR to CFR (constant frame rate), do the deinterlacing, upscaling and then do the edit again.
Started working on the LCARS interface of the PADD you receive from Q. I recreate these from scratch.