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.
