With Star Trek remastered coming soon to blu-ray next year and the new Trek film and TNG going back to syndication. When do you think TNG will start getting the remastered treatment?
TNG remastered
- Thread starter cybersoldier
- Start date
I think TNG's effects are perfectly fine as they are. Yes, they're not the CGI 'masterpieces' of today, but they're still high-quality work - I think a lot of what they did with pratical models matches what we do with the CGI ones.
And the fact they've said it would be more difficult than TOS since effects were done on video, rather than film.
darkwing_duck1
Vice Admiral
Worse...the OUTPUT was to video, meaning the film masters of the LA footage are also gone.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
They should have been archived, tossing the live-action makes no sense, but then again this is Paramount, who wouldn't pay to keep the vfx elements from TMP so they all got tossed from EEG and Apogee in the early 80s.
I'd figure the live-action film elements would have been archived along with the miniature film elements, but again ... this is paramount.
At least they aren't like what BBC did to their film archives in the 60s and 70s.
It is extremely unlikely that TNG is going to be remastered. They've already stated that the costs to have it done would far outweigh the returns, so it's not viable for them to do it. And quite frankly, there's only a few TNG episodes that it would benefit from anyway, so there's no point in doing it to begin with.
Exactly. I think films are relying on CGI way to much nowadays. CGI is good for say, Disney films or any other kind of anime films, but I wish they would use more "real" effects like they used to back in the day instead of using CGI. With CGI, a lot of times you can tell the scene or object is fake. With some real effects, at least in modern times, some things look more real in a movie when it is a prop or some other type of special effects.
I see no compelling reason to do a TNG remastered, at least not the kind of thing where you actually re-do shots or effects. Perhaps at some point a total cleanup and revitalization of the prints or whatever but ... content wise, it stand up perfectly well 98% of the time.
Agree, I would like perhaps a remastered version with Cause and Effect, Best of Both Worlds, Q who? Aquiel- the alien at the end. If I say the only if I had to choose to redo would just be the ship shots at least the ones with ship to ship battles. I love TNG, I would just hate to see this series no to get the same or similar treatment like TOS
I agree completely. I think half the reason I couldn't get into Babylon 5 is the cheezie CG. When the ships blew up there were smooth shapes slowly moving around in an unnatural way. When you use a real model with real explosives It brings it to life. Like when the Ent. D was stuck in time reliving Dr Frasier Cranes
miranda class hitting the nessel then blowing up. Man ya cant CG that any better. It was perfect. 
There are only three episodes I'd like to see remastered: BoBW, Unification, and Redemption, because those were the episodes that had the most amount of ships in a scene. I could care less about anything else.
Insurrection's sfx have a better shot of being redone, Star Trek V, shatner wanted to do a lot and with the reboot, I doubt it would happen with either, but it might be interesting to see to see how it would look if shatner got to the money to do what he wanted. The question would be if he doesn't go over budget again.
It would require a much bigger budget than TMP did...simply because -- IMHO -- EVERY shot would have to be replaced and the rockman sequence would have to be created...
AFAIK, they still have the live-action film elements. They rescanned a few shots of Ten Forward for These Are the Voyages... (where they had to redo a replicator effect from scratch because they rescanned, see below), and TrekMovie.com said in July 2007 that they were going to do a TNG-R HD test of a single (unspecified) episode. No word on how that turned out as such, but no news is presumably bad news.
The reason to do it would be the same reason they redid TOS - namely, things are moving to the point where a HD copy of a show will get people to rebuy the series on Blu-Ray (originally, HD DVD), and HD syndication is beginning to become viable. And "upscaled" video tends to show its' roots. THAT'S the "compelling reason" if they can keep the costs down in doing it.
They can't do a "total cleanup and revitalization of the prints or whatever" that exist because they did all the optical effects on 480i NTSC video (which was pretty soft to begin with). The improvement you can get from such is limited, compared with rescanning the 35mm film... but if they rescanned the film, they'd need to recreate the edits, redo all the phaser shots, etc from scratch, and at a bare minimum recomposite all the viewscreen shots, LCARS stuff, shots involving multiple models (which were filmed separately and then optically put together on video), etc. And if they wanted 5.1 sound, that would also need put together again from the original elements.
Fundamentally, they would need to redo all the post-production work from scratch. Probably doable, but expensive. There's no middle-ground - as there was with TOS - of playing with the edited episodes, where film prints existed of the final episodes that could be "cleaned up".
I want to see a result from the HD test they did. If it were remastered, I would like to see there be more than the same odd-angle warp shot focusing on the deflector (which always looked like the ship was flying at an angle to me), and redo those planets from seasons 1 and 2, which looked like bad projections on a dome, and I could tell most of the time that's what they were. Throw in some good planets like TOS-R, a few more stock shots of the ship from other angles (left side, top, bottom, bottom-front, et al) at warp for variety, and fix a few FX errors (phaser from the photorp launcher), and the rest is mostly SD->HD cleanup and a shot-by-shot reconstruction. I don't have too much problem with the original composition of most of the shots, but I get tired of the same stock shots, and the Enterprise being a lumbering, almost immobile object in fight scenes. Ent-E moved around more.
In short - I hope they get to TNG HD and get started soon. I can't wait to see it.
James
In short - I hope they get to TNG HD and get started soon. I can't wait to see it.
James
trevanian
Rear Admiral
Blame Berman's right hand, Peter Lauritson. He is the guy who made the call early on to finish on video, knowing full well how it would hamstring things in the future -- and for a property already known for its longevity, that seems so far beyond criminal to be just terminally stupid.
Oh, the other poster ... TNG did NOT do planet projections in the first couple years, those are all photos mapped onto a circle or sphere in the computer. Projections would have looked a ton better than that, those scanned pics at times looked out of focus, and worse than almost any original TOS planet (except of course the Rand McNally looking monstrosities when they orbit earth.)
All this is covered in Cinefex -- either issue 37 or 38, I forget which.
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