I asked Vinegar Syndrome months ago.
Their reply was a yes to Radioactive Dreams, but that they don't do TV shows.
Poll Would you purchase a legit remaster of DS9?
- Thread starter SlayerSantiago
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I asked Vinegar Syndrome months ago.
Their reply was a yes to Radioactive Dreams, but that they don't do TV shows.
I think the situation is quite different in many ways.
Niche outfits, taking reasonably niche movies (and if it's anything like Arrow Films charging a premium price) is different to a large studio which ultimately is much more risk averse. The complexity of a TV show vs one film (and films not needing CGI most likely) is a very different proposition.
The rewards may not be high, but the risks are not too high in the case of the movies.
That said... perhaps that is the most viable way forward - a third party that will de-risk the process for Paramount and do it themselves. I don't know if it's done at all for TV series, particularly ones with huge brand value like Trek... but it's an interesting thought.
Under Paramount's old guard that didn't work out.
If a third party steps in, then paramount will start demanding more money.
Paramount didn't give a damn about Jericho, but Netflix wanted to produce a third season.
What then happened, was Paramount flexed until Netflix backed away from the deal.
I think it would be the same thing, unless you're doing a charity job for Paramount, they're not gonna cooperate.
That being said, things seemed to work differently for the documentaries.
Amending my answer: I'm in for a remaster of seasons 3-7. The razor blade was not kind to Mr. Brooks.
This.
Agreed. That, and the tendency to buy into the empty notion that any "older" production must be "fixed".
Again, this.
OP: yes, I would buy a remaster of DS9. I prefer to own physical media, rather than leave my media interests to the whims and agendas of IP holders / corporations. IOW, the day will come when certain movies or TV series may be permanently pulled from distribution, so why would anyone leave that choice up to any other person or company?
I just feel like the whole people who are pro AI here have lost the plot.
Fans who did the AI upscales did them and offer them up on the internet, because there isn't an HD image to begin with.
The studio in either case would upscale the master tapes to start using them as a template to match takes to, that's part of how they remastered season 2 of TNG, generally, the foundation is a bicubic upscale, that iConform matches takes of the image to.
It was deemed unacceptable in 2010 to do that, the sample of that footage is also available on TNG's bluray release.
From what can now be seen with Roseanne, Aliens and True Lies 4k, it's just an automated enhancement algorithm that can sometimes redraw faces (Badly).
Diffusion upscalers are kinda worse, even on HD footage, I tested a clip from Emissary that was remastered for WWLB, and it literally removed Terry Farrel's teeth.
I feel that the upscaling movement in general comes from a place of cynicism (That there possibly won't be an HD master of the series), and the product that results from just upscaling it, is also extremely cynical, and the studio would only be able to output an upscale inferior to something a fan can do with mediocre sources.
At this point, the studio doing it is almost as tone deaf as a laserdisc transfer of Star Wars going to DVD.
Fans wanted the original '77 cut, and for a very long time, there wasn't a legitimate scan of it to look at.
As for a rebuild of the show, part of remastering is rebuilding the master from pristine sources. That's literally what constitutes a good remaster.
On a technical level, you could call an AI upscale a remaster, as it's cleaning up the master, but it's digitally enhanced.
From what I gather, fan upscales are freely available, and would look better than what the studio would offer, as the studio would bake deadlines in.
If the studio were to release something like that and pass it off, it would be very insulting.
I've seen some of what CandyBoys did with Voyager, and the AI can't discern if 7 of 9 is male sometimes, it's jarring.
So the most valuable part is an actor's face.
Personally, from the few HD clips I've seen from WWLB, there's nothing wrong with DS9's production value, it's beautiful, and I think you're robbing fans of Star Trek if you do a simple upscale at the studio level. From the costumes, to the sets, to the color, it's not some sickly green, there's a vibrancy to that. Even the makeup looks HD ready, Quark looked excellent in HD, as did the Cardassians.
The costumes looked amazing, and the props looked very good.
It's nice when a fan can do an upscale, it shows the fan's love and dedication to the show.
If a studio does it, it's a very terrible thing.
The template is simple, scan 35mm, grade, fix, edit (that can be automated) and let the people who love it, enjoy it.
There's a natural HD image there that probably wouldn't look good past 2k, 4k max.
The X files would be pointless in 4k, but it looks fine in 2k.
Bare minimum you need a good 2k source for a good upscale.
But there is another issue, your brain can identify facial expressions and knows what an upscale is supposed to look like for the most part. When an upscaler gets it wrong, your brain just knows, it can see it. The upscaling algorithm is far less sophisticated than a human brain, we've made great strides, but not yet does it look great.
The problem with "cutting edge" tech, is that it's still inferior to a substrate like 35mm film, or 16mm film, and smears detail, it has no sense of depth, and no sense of how grain patterns are different from skin.
In fact, the texture of skin is a big deal for me, little white hairs and other odd things happen, where the skin looks like some rubber reptilian carpet hybrid.
It struggles with teeth, and eyes, the big thing, the window into the soul.
Fans who did the AI upscales did them and offer them up on the internet, because there isn't an HD image to begin with.
The studio in either case would upscale the master tapes to start using them as a template to match takes to, that's part of how they remastered season 2 of TNG, generally, the foundation is a bicubic upscale, that iConform matches takes of the image to.
It was deemed unacceptable in 2010 to do that, the sample of that footage is also available on TNG's bluray release.
From what can now be seen with Roseanne, Aliens and True Lies 4k, it's just an automated enhancement algorithm that can sometimes redraw faces (Badly).
Diffusion upscalers are kinda worse, even on HD footage, I tested a clip from Emissary that was remastered for WWLB, and it literally removed Terry Farrel's teeth.
I feel that the upscaling movement in general comes from a place of cynicism (That there possibly won't be an HD master of the series), and the product that results from just upscaling it, is also extremely cynical, and the studio would only be able to output an upscale inferior to something a fan can do with mediocre sources.
At this point, the studio doing it is almost as tone deaf as a laserdisc transfer of Star Wars going to DVD.
Fans wanted the original '77 cut, and for a very long time, there wasn't a legitimate scan of it to look at.
As for a rebuild of the show, part of remastering is rebuilding the master from pristine sources. That's literally what constitutes a good remaster.
On a technical level, you could call an AI upscale a remaster, as it's cleaning up the master, but it's digitally enhanced.
From what I gather, fan upscales are freely available, and would look better than what the studio would offer, as the studio would bake deadlines in.
If the studio were to release something like that and pass it off, it would be very insulting.
I've seen some of what CandyBoys did with Voyager, and the AI can't discern if 7 of 9 is male sometimes, it's jarring.
So the most valuable part is an actor's face.
Personally, from the few HD clips I've seen from WWLB, there's nothing wrong with DS9's production value, it's beautiful, and I think you're robbing fans of Star Trek if you do a simple upscale at the studio level. From the costumes, to the sets, to the color, it's not some sickly green, there's a vibrancy to that. Even the makeup looks HD ready, Quark looked excellent in HD, as did the Cardassians.
The costumes looked amazing, and the props looked very good.
It's nice when a fan can do an upscale, it shows the fan's love and dedication to the show.
If a studio does it, it's a very terrible thing.
The template is simple, scan 35mm, grade, fix, edit (that can be automated) and let the people who love it, enjoy it.
There's a natural HD image there that probably wouldn't look good past 2k, 4k max.
The X files would be pointless in 4k, but it looks fine in 2k.
Bare minimum you need a good 2k source for a good upscale.
But there is another issue, your brain can identify facial expressions and knows what an upscale is supposed to look like for the most part. When an upscaler gets it wrong, your brain just knows, it can see it. The upscaling algorithm is far less sophisticated than a human brain, we've made great strides, but not yet does it look great.
The problem with "cutting edge" tech, is that it's still inferior to a substrate like 35mm film, or 16mm film, and smears detail, it has no sense of depth, and no sense of how grain patterns are different from skin.
In fact, the texture of skin is a big deal for me, little white hairs and other odd things happen, where the skin looks like some rubber reptilian carpet hybrid.
It struggles with teeth, and eyes, the big thing, the window into the soul.
We already have the low-res warts edition of the effects.
If they were to ever conform the show to HD, the effects should at least be upscaled.
The problem with upscaling them comes to the bad mastering decisions.
1. DS9 recycles a fuckton of FX shots anyway.
2. Rainbows, combing, dot crawl and interlacing artifacts plague those old masters to an extreme degree.
I've seen diffusion upscalers do some good things for some of those FX shots, however, in some cases, say the Danube in the intro, run that through Starlight Mini, and it looks like a bug...not like a runabout, like something from LEXX.
The actual masters aren't in as bad a shape as the current commercially available ones though. If they were to use the actual master tapes as the basis for any careful upscaling the results would be far, far better than the highly flawed DVD transfers.
The LaserDisc project where they are using multiple copies stacked to create a higher quality image is doing some remarkable work.
As does all 60s-00s Trek.
Much of which is not actually on the masters, but were introduced by poor decision making when making the now-ancient digital transfers. Even just the raw stacked LaserDiscs with no upscaling at all produce a better image than the DVDs.
Dude, A lot of those mastering problems are just as bad on the Laserdisc as they are on the DVD.
Sometimes the DVD doesn't have them, and the Laserdisc does.
Even then, I think the studio masters are probably in pretty terrible shape.
But...The reason I mentioned the recycling of FX shots, is because that's your silver lining.
You can track down that same FX shot later, and it won't be in as bad a shape.
Hence why I mentioned it.
For FX, where you don't want to recomp multiple passes of the station, (No live actors) Using a Diffusion Upscaler like Starlight Mini has sometimes surprised me, I woudn't mind that.
But you'd still have to dig through masters and see which VFX shots on which tapes looked the best.
My caveat is like this.
Prioritize actors and rebuild that from 35mm film.
Select VFX shots of the station should be remastered from 35mm film, Intro maybe?
Finale should definitely be a new CGI comp of the station.
But for the most part, upscale FX shots of ships, I think Starlight mini isn't a bad option for that.
Season 1-5 is models.
If you let the old guard come back, and they want to rerender and recomp the last season and a half of CGI VFX and you want to pay for that great. (Mostly where the extensive VFX comes in, most people who estimated it said from season 1-5 it's literally as straight forward as TNG was.)
Prioritize actors and rebuild that from 35mm film.
Select VFX shots of the station should be remastered from 35mm film, Intro maybe?
Finale should definitely be a new CGI comp of the station.
But for the most part, upscale FX shots of ships, I think Starlight mini isn't a bad option for that.
Season 1-5 is models.
If you let the old guard come back, and they want to rerender and recomp the last season and a half of CGI VFX and you want to pay for that great. (Mostly where the extensive VFX comes in, most people who estimated it said from season 1-5 it's literally as straight forward as TNG was.)
There is CG stuff all over seasons 1-5 for things other than ships though.
And even when it comes to ships, they started using CG as early as season three. (For a shot of the Defiant jumping to warp.)
But still better than what we have available to us now.
Not to mention all of those LCARS/alien GUIs shots.
Not really, Digibetacam was used from season 4,5,6 and 7, so for most of the show on DVD, sans the color, you're getting something close to a studio master.
Seasons 1-3 are on tape masters, where it's better than the DVD but still garbage for a bluray. On top of that many ancient Dr. Who and Blake's 7 episodes get enhanced FX.
So I don't really care. Emissary is in the worst shape of all, and needs a legit rebuild. These are 90s FX, not new FX. Everyone acts like it's AVATAR grade FX.
While these were groundbreaking in the 1990s, they're basic bitch FX today, that were common on sci fi channel movies by the mid 2000s.
Emissary has a handful of shots of Odo. Even then how do you approach it? Get the plate, track it, use a rigged human model and a glass BSDF, and match the lighting.
Odo was what? T2/Abyss grade. I can't accept it would be that difficult to replicate in a rebuild.
No one said it needed to look as meaty and new as the Changelings in Picard season 3.
Cs5sycXuhoFXe0Bluescreen FX are common and lead to some awful tape artifacts like ghosting.Upscaling isn't gonna cut it for Emissary.
Also, how hard is it to animate the Defiant jumping to warp, when fans animate that in a high quality and recreate those shots on a desktop computer?
I didn't deny they weren't using CGI FX with Odo, that was apparent in the pilot. These FX ran concurrent with CGI use in TNG for seasons 6 and 7.
Which means DS9's first 3-5 seasons used CGI about as much as the last two seasons of TNG, and TNG's remaster including recreating those CG shots for the final two seasons.
TNG episodes in question, "Ship in a bottle", "Masks", "Aquiel", "Frame of Mind", "Sub Rosa", "Eye of the Beholder", and "Emergence".
The shots in these were likely as complex as episodes of DS9 that were produced alongside TNG 1-7 and weren't cost prohibitive for a 12 million dollar remaster.
The thing that's listed as cost prohibitive is shots of ships, as though DS9 was using CGI for ships the entire time...it wasn't.
The next thing is that it's supposedly cost prohibitive because VFX assets are lost, which has been contradicted by anyone who worked on those shows since 2013.
"The cost of CGI production dropped dramatically after LightWave 3D became commercially available, off-the-shelf, in 1994. Although both Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager had already implemented CGI in their title sequences (created in 1992 and 1994, respectively), they both started their runs predominantly using traditional visual effects methods but transitioned to regular use of CGI in the late 1990s. The transition to CGI was completed in 1997, during DS9's sixth season and VOY's fourth season; Voyager took the lead, having been unofficially designated as a testbed for the technology, and Deep Space Nine followed suit. DS9 was particularly well served by CGI in its last two seasons, allowing the series to showcase Dominion War battle scenes that would have been impossible using models. Actually, the transition was already accelerated one year previously as staffers of the motion control company Image G began to see the writings on the wall when they observed that their main client, Star Trek, was increasingly experimenting with the new technique. As Visual Effects Supervisor Mitch Suskin noted at the start of Voyager's third season, "Fortunately for me, or I guess coincidentally, we had a problem where the vendor that we were using for motion-control had a mass exodus of their personnel, and we were unable to do motion-control [note: Image G's remaining capacity entirely taken up with Deep Space Nine] at the beginning of the season", but as a former Foundation Imaging employee he has, hardly rueful, added, "It worked fine for me because I prefer to do computer graphics." (Cinefantastique, Vol 29 #6/7, pp. 103–104) This circumstance reciprocally accelerated in fact the introduction of, and full transition to, CGI in Voyager, whereas Deep Space Nine followed likewise one year later." This is from Memory Alpha.
Deep Space Nine in High Definition: One Step Closer?
Two years ago, fans thought it would be impossible that a show like Star Trek: The Next Generation could ever be remastered in high definition. Like spinoffs Deep Space Nine and Voyager…
blog.trekcore.com
Bonchune went on to describe how he has all of the original assets for not only his work with Foundation Imaging on Deep Space Nine, but also the vast majority of Star Trek: Voyager:
"But to redo it is to virtually start over from scratch.",
"We have most of everythign that was used. That would eliminate a ton of the cost of rebuilding.",
"Today, it would be easier! Literally, you could just load the scene files and hit 'render'."
-These are Rob Brochune's words.
...spoiler alert, they don't have to be rebuilt from scratch.
X-Files digitally restored for Netflix
illuminate has completed a digital restoration of the iconic TV series, The X-Files. Retransferred from the camera-original negative, the show’s entire 201 ep
www.advanced-television.com
https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/7468/remastering-the-files-hd-jim-hardy-ceo-illuminate/index.html
This is your next set of articles."Our proprietary iConform process uses image recognition software to search through all the scanned film elements. It conforms perfectly to the original. We don't need any original edit lists or logs. It doesn't require any manual organization, but we do this as a matter of procedure. With just the film negative and a reference tape, we can deliver a conformed master in HD or 4K."
When Paramount sold off it's scanners and didn't help out with "To the Journey", you only need those archives (Which are shooting scripts and a numbering system) if you're looking for a selection of footage.
The 2k scanners were also out of date, and 4k is the new de facto scanning resolution.
Using iConform, you only need the negative, and a master, then image recognition does the job.
So, most of the VFX assets can be stepped up and enhanced, uprezzing would fill in the gaps some of the time, TNG:R and The Roddenberry Archive probably have extensive assets that they can use to also fill in the gaps, and you'd just assemble a raw master at this company after rescanning.
So, we'll set one other factor.
Season 3 onwards might use more CG, the assets can be enhanced if they weren't overbuilt and you hit render.
If you get a new team, you have to rebuild it from scratch.
If you call Rob Brochune, Mitch Suskind or anyone who worked in TV from the 90s to 2010, you could hit render, and 90 percent of the shot would be ready for presentation.
Craig Weiss (One of TNG:R's supervisors) breaks down some of what they had to do. TNG's bluray has a marvelous documentary on how they did it.
Finally, we have this vid, talks for this started in 2013.
08:15, starts with him explaining they had to upconvert 1 inch dailies to lay the foundation for iConform.
11:36, using Flame and After FX, they recreated phasers, which were handpainted FX.
They also built an archive of Optical FX.
TNG, DS9 and Voyager were using ILM archives of starfields and matte paintings in the 90s, TNG remastered that archive anyway, so that means those assets are digital files.
Lightwave files can be loaded into Blender, and can be upstepped in modern Lightwave software.
So, Lightwave, Blender, After FX and Nuke artists could work on these shows.
lightwave3d.com
en.wikipedia.org
A fan on Youtube recreated a lot of Voyager's FX on his home computer, which means freelance artists with studio assets could do this work
That same fan did this animation.
and... This shot of the Defiant.
It appears that a lot of the VFX artists and fans network, so you could build a team of fans and actually get these FX shots with their help and compensation.
So, I'll argue CG isn't as big a deal as everyone makes it out to be. Sure the modellers need to be contacted, credited and compensated but their models seem to surpass what's in the original FX files and would probably work perfectly as drop in replacements.
But you also have in house models thanks to...
The Roddenberry Archive.
So from surviving assets, and everything else, I doubt a studio upscale would be worth it.
From James Cameron to Roseanne and a different world.
If you simply output an uprezzed movie or show, it's literally saying
"We couldn't be bothered to give a fuck."
Season 3 onwards might use more CG, the assets can be enhanced if they weren't overbuilt and you hit render.
If you get a new team, you have to rebuild it from scratch.
If you call Rob Brochune, Mitch Suskind or anyone who worked in TV from the 90s to 2010, you could hit render, and 90 percent of the shot would be ready for presentation.
Craig Weiss (One of TNG:R's supervisors) breaks down some of what they had to do. TNG's bluray has a marvelous documentary on how they did it.
Finally, we have this vid, talks for this started in 2013.
08:15, starts with him explaining they had to upconvert 1 inch dailies to lay the foundation for iConform.
11:36, using Flame and After FX, they recreated phasers, which were handpainted FX.
They also built an archive of Optical FX.
TNG, DS9 and Voyager were using ILM archives of starfields and matte paintings in the 90s, TNG remastered that archive anyway, so that means those assets are digital files.
Lightwave files can be loaded into Blender, and can be upstepped in modern Lightwave software.
So, Lightwave, Blender, After FX and Nuke artists could work on these shows.
LightWave3D®
lightwave3d.com
LightWave 3D - Wikipedia
A fan on Youtube recreated a lot of Voyager's FX on his home computer, which means freelance artists with studio assets could do this work
That same fan did this animation.
and... This shot of the Defiant.
It appears that a lot of the VFX artists and fans network, so you could build a team of fans and actually get these FX shots with their help and compensation.
So, I'll argue CG isn't as big a deal as everyone makes it out to be. Sure the modellers need to be contacted, credited and compensated but their models seem to surpass what's in the original FX files and would probably work perfectly as drop in replacements.
But you also have in house models thanks to...
So from surviving assets, and everything else, I doubt a studio upscale would be worth it.
From James Cameron to Roseanne and a different world.
If you simply output an uprezzed movie or show, it's literally saying
"We couldn't be bothered to give a fuck."
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