The OFFICIAL STNG-R general discussion thread!

I was mentioning 4k for shooting the next series as some TV shows shooting on the Red One camera are already shooting 4K for the past 2 years. Sony's F-65 comes out this year and shoots 4k (downsampled from 6k before recording). CSI Blu-ray discs are in 7.1 surround sound for the 2 seasons released.
Since we are talking about the next Trek TV series in more than 3 years out 4K is a no brainer for acquisition at probably 48fps (like The Hobbit) for a 4k master to last for 4k distribution (it is a TV show) and will have long life as part of the franchise. UHDTV (8k @ 120fps) is only experimental now (@60 fps) but 2025 is when that will be big. 4k will be a good compromise. 7.1 surround is pretty standard for cinema and blu-ray releases now. UHDTV has specs for 22.2 channels of surround. 7.1 is a good bet for the audio on TV show within the next 5 years.
The streaming datarates are only going up for subscription streaming TV and on-demand shows. It's like dial-up modem 56k now (1995) and in 10 years we will have 4K availability to stream like most people have "broadband" access.

 

They are spending $360,000 per episode, just under a third of what they originally cost! Its a huge investment! I can understand why they are charging more than other series, besides STNG usually does better than most older series in terms of demand over time.

RAMA

 

They're charging more per season because they know they can get it. The home video market will not be the primary market of revenue for this project, however. That will still be syndication.

I'll wait for the holidays to pick these up. I'd like to have them, but I can watch the episodes on Netflix for now, and pick them up on sale (or get them as gifts) later.

 

I imagine the prices will go down over time I doubt many retailers will be charging the msrp (there is a reason places like Suncoast went out of business).

 

As someone who remembers back when Paramount charged $100 for STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER and $15 per episode of TOS on VHS, with no extra features but an annoying trailer you had to fast forward through, $80 for a season of TV with lots of extras seems more than reasonable. It's still more than I'm willing to spend; as excited as I am for this project, I could put $80 to better uses. But it's still reasonable.

Totally agree except for one bit -- TOS remastered to HD entailed merely making a new transfer and cleaning things up. The extra cost of adding new FX had nothing to do with the remaster nor was it a required part of the remaster project the way it is for TNG.

The remaster had nothing to do with the new FX. The new FX for TOS was simply an added bonus which one can either view or not view on the bluray.

Seeing the detail on the old TNG model FX, I think it's a real shame the seperate FX elements of the original TOS FX no longer exist.

 

Agreed. It would have been awesome to see some of those classic planet orbiting shots without all the horrible scratches and blurriness.

Was it ever explained how those elements were lost by the way? Did they get destroyed from reuse, or was it just the fact it was the 60s and studios didn't really bother to keep track of that stuff?

 

Sorry, but all this talk about how much it cost to remaster the series is largely irrelevant to the question of pricing.

Paramount (or CBS or whatever conglomeration owns the rights) has made the investment to remaster the first season. Whether that cost ten thousand dollars or ten million dollars, they did it, and it is a cost that they have already paid, and it is unchangeable. It was an investment they made to strengthen the value of their catalog. The HD episodes of the first season are now an asset that they own and want to make a profit from selling copies of, and the economics are no different from any similar product.

If they charge a high price they will make a lot of profit per unit, but sell to fewer customers. If they charge a low price, they will make less per unit, but sell to more customers. They are going to find the combination of those variables that maximizes profits, and sell at that price. The ideal combination will change over time, as they can charge more to the early adopters who are willing to pay a premium, and charge less in the future to sell to people with more casual interest.

Of course, it's possible that if sales are dismal, they might scrap the rest of the restoration project, and it's certain that if sales aren't good, the chances for a similar restoration project of other series are greatly reduced. From our point of view as fans, this is good motivation for us to buy the season (and buy it early) to show our support, and they are going to heavily advertise their investment to certain circles (i.e. us) because it increases the perceived prestige and perceived value of the product. But that kind of thinking is only going to affect a very tiny minority of potential customers, and Paramount/CBS/whoever can't inflate the price of this product simply because they invested a lot in creating it. What good would it do them to do that if that inflated price is not the ideal profitability point in the number of sales/profit per unit equation? Paramount is offering a product on the marketplace, not turning in an expense report. Does a ticket to Men in Black 3 cost $40 and a ticket to Moonrise Kingdom cost $3 because of the difference in cost to make these products?

 

How likely is this to happen would they really not bother remastering the whole series for HD based just on sales for the fist season BD?

 

They will make their profit R.O.I. on just the broadcast syndication rights it will take time. The Blu-rays are really the quarterly $ sales for the stockholders. That's why 2 releases per year of TNG Blu-rays.

 

Well, the official press release states that they are doing all 178 episodes. And they've already paid the cost to ship the 25,000 plus reels of negative to L.A. and have them scanned (and the process to convert them into digital intermediates is still ongoing). It would be very odd for them to just simply stop mid-stream. They know how many units of TOS they sold on Blu-ray and they surely will sell more of TNG. So, while anything's possible... I think the odds of them not releasing the whole series is vanishingly small and probably not worth worrying about.

 

It was probably reuse. IIRC they did the photon torpedo effects by scratching the film or something, so that sort of thing probably messed up the film.

 

I don't think so. While I don't know exactly how the photon torpedo effect was originally done, they never would have scratched the negative to create an effect. What likely happened, was that after optically printing the finished FX shots to inter-negative film, they would have been cut into the episodes and the original negative VFX elements would have been vaulted alongside the episodes (to sometimes create new composites, which would have caused wear and tear, yes -- but often they just created dupes of the inter-negative and re-used the shot unchanged). But sometime between 1969 and 1979 when Star Trek was considered dead, the original VFX elements were probably trashed by Paramount.

 

Yeah, they sure didn't take very good care of the actual Enterprise model, so it's no surprise they wouldn't put much effort into preserving the film elements either.

 

This was exactly my point in my original post! The investment has been made, and it would be practically unthinkable for the level of sales to stop the process. Therefore we can't act like the blu rays somehow 'deserve' to cost more because they were the subject of an expensive restoration. The restoration was an investment by Paramount. Paramount is attempting to make a profit by selling blu ray sets of the restored episodes, and the price they sell it at will be determined by regular market forces and perceived value and willingness to pay. The fact that it was expensive to restore the episodes cannot be the main factor in the marketing team's decisions in how to price it to maximize sales profits.

 

I don't think anyone here truly cares deep down what a studio spent on producing a Blu-ray/DVD. It's an interesting topic to discuss while we wait for the release date to come, but when you've got the product in your hands in the aisle and you're contemplating spending your hard-earned money on it, the primary consideration isn't going to be, "Gee, CBS sure spent a whole lot of money on this release and I owe it to them to pay more!"

Speaking for myself as a Blu-ray collector and TNG fan, I'm less concerned with how much it cost CBS to restore these episodes than with how well the restoration was done and how good the finished product looks. I'm willing to pay a smidge more than TOS-R for better presentation (better color, density and grain retention) and high-quality re-composited, original VFX.

So, perhaps -- in my mind, anyway -- they "deserve" to cost more because they were the subject of a great restoration. Right now, Season One of TNG looks like it's on track to be about $10 more expensive than Season One of TOS when it debuted in April of '09.

But, hey... the price could still drop further.

 

Any thoughts for people who don't want the blu-rays but want them as a digital copy? I'd rather get them all on a harddrive (it's so much more convenient for me) since I don't have a blu-ray player and don't have itunes, I'm not sure how easy this will be to do legally (hey, this is Star Trek, I have no problems giving them my money!)

Any suggestions?

 

Highly unlikely, since, as you yourself point out, CBS has made this investment to strengthen an important catalog title. Principally, this means sales in syndication (foreign and domestic), not home video, which continues to decline in overall sales.

 

The online glimpses of HD TNG look fantastic. Unfortunately I'm just not interested in buying. These days I barely seem to have time to sleep -- much less rewatch TNG.

 

If these things come with digital download codes, someone who doesn't want them could send them to you.

 

This must be Stardate Revisited: The Origin of Star Trek: The Next Generation which has three parts apparently: "Inception," "Launch," and "The Continuing Mission." So each part must be about 30 minutes. Energized! Taking The Next Generation to the Next Level, the other featurette (about the restoration) I'm guessing is about 15-20 minutes. Pretty substantial, if you ask me.

As a comparison, Star Trek: The Original Series Season 1 only had 33 minutes of new HD features, namely Spacelift: Transporting 'Trek' Into the 21st Century which was only 20 minutes. The other 13 minutes were Billy Blackburn's 8mm home movies.