Season FOUR OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Discussion Thread

[Maxwell Everett]

Season 4 killed my PS3!

Well, not quite.

But in all seriousness I was watching Night Terrors - I kid you not, specifically the scene with Picard hallucinating and yelling in the turbolift as he thinks it is flying out of control - when my PS3 suddenly froze and died... permanently!

Oh well, thank goodness they still make PS3s...

Believe it or not, that happened to me too... when I was watching a S3 disc, back in April. I have a FAT PS3 and I got the so-called YLOD (yellow light of death). But I successfully repaired it myself. What's happened is that either the cell processor or the GPU (or both) have become partially un-soldered from the motherboard. What you need to do is reflow the chips. All you need is a heat gun (about $20-$30), some silver thermal paste ($10) and a little bit of courage.

Here's a quick overview of the issue:

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMG-6rbanlY[/yt]

And a step-by-step tutorial that will take you through the procedure:

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwB_ccO-uGs
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5pB24fobWM
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBHthPKTw7c
Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKJBDya7rBE
Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfwPlA5b-UQ

 

[LOKAI of CHERON]

Ask and you shall receive! HD screencap of said shot from Blu-ray as requested.

Click the link for full size...

http://www.anony.ws/i/2013/08/12/VOMCo.png

 

[Maxwell Everett]

I watched "Legacy" today (for the first time in about 20 years), and noticed some bad compression artifacts in a scene in Engineering. Has anyone else picked up on that?

I can look if you give me the exact time code.

It's most noticable at 18:23, on the yellow uniforms in this shot:

Ask and you shall receive! HD screencap of said shot from Blu-ray as requested.

Click the link for full size...

http://www.anony.ws/i/2013/08/12/VOMCo.png

Ok, here are my 2 cents, for what it's worth. After watching it in motion on the Blu-ray, I do see exactly what you're talking about, but I'm not sure they are compression artifacts. They don't look like defined blocks of data with straight edges but rather random blobs of color -- in this case red and green which are the two colors that mix to make yellow. I think this might be natural colored film grain that has been slightly over-boosted during the color correction phase resulting in what we might refer to now as chrominance noise in the video signal. Notice how you don't see this effect near the tops of their uniforms but more toward their midsection, where the light begins to fall off?

It's also possible that this particular piece of film just developed that way during processing. The way photographic film works is each microscopic light-sensitive silver halide crystal in each of the three primary color layers of the film emulsion, were exposed to light to either a greater or lesser extent... and during development, through a chemical reaction with certain color couplers in the emulsion, a tiny little colored dye cloud is left behind (like a stain) where each silver salt crystal was washed away during the fixing step. It is these tiny cyan (red), magenta (green) or yellow (blue) dye clouds (what we see as grain) that combine in aggregate, sometimes in bigger clusters, to make up the colored image.

Anyway, hope that helps. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

 

[Nero's Shadow]

Well I'm on the episode The Wounded still a good episode loved how the cardys wore them silly helmets !!! And also loved Data,s Day as well data,s face when he's having his dancing lessons priceless now still .

Well I'm going to skip Devils Due as its still awful now regardless of HD and 7.1 Sound.

 

[Maxwell Everett]

Well I'm on the episode The Wounded still a good episode loved how the cardys wore them silly helmets !!! And also loved Data,s Day as well data,s face when he's having his dancing lessons priceless now still .

Well I'm going to skip Devils Due as its still awful now regardless of HD and 7.1 Sound.

Why? "Devil's Due" is just great fun with another classic Ron Jones score. It fits perfectly with "Who Watches the Watchers" and "Thine Own Self" in what I like to call a "False Beliefs" trilogy. Pure Roddenberry.

 

[jimbotron]

Devil's Due is fun. A goofy 'legal case' episode for once. The Ardra actress carries the episode very well. She's one of the better guest stars.

 

[Ghostface1701]

I can look if you give me the exact time code.

It's most noticable at 18:23, on the yellow uniforms in this shot:

Ask and you shall receive! HD screencap of said shot from Blu-ray as requested.

Click the link for full size...

http://www.anony.ws/i/2013/08/12/VOMCo.png

Ok, here are my 2 cents, for what it's worth. After watching it in motion on the Blu-ray, I do see exactly what you're talking about, but I'm not sure they are compression artifacts. They don't look like defined blocks of data with straight edges but rather random blobs of color -- in this case red and green which are the two colors that mix to make yellow. I think this might be natural colored film grain that has been slightly over-boosted during the color correction phase resulting in what we might refer to now as chrominance noise in the video signal. Notice how you don't see this effect near the tops of their uniforms but more toward their midsection, where the light begins to fall off?

It's also possible that this particular piece of film just developed that way during processing. The way photographic film works is each microscopic light-sensitive silver halide crystal in each of the three primary color layers of the film emulsion, were exposed to light to either a greater or lesser extent... and during development, through a chemical reaction with certain color couplers in the emulsion, a tiny little colored dye cloud is left behind (like a stain) where each silver salt crystal was washed away during the fixing step. It is these tiny cyan (red), magenta (green) or yellow (blue) dye clouds (what we see as grain) that combine in aggregate, sometimes in bigger clusters, to make up the colored image.

Anyway, hope that helps. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Thanks for explaining it, Max. A voice in the back of my mind was saying it didn't look like compression artifacts, but I couldn't explain what I was seeing any other way. I'm glad I wasn't going crazy

And thanks for the screenshot LOKAI of CHERON!

 

[Trekker4747]

In the broadcast/DVD versions of the episode I don't recall the "mass-energy field"/mistiverse" that surrounds the ship in "Remember Me" being misty and such just a white-ish dullness. In TNG-R it actually looks like a smoky mist.

 

[tomalak301]

I'm not sure if Remember Me is brilliant or Ridiculous. I mean there are some lines where I just roll the eyes, like Picard's "We've never needed a crew before" line. Still, maybe it was the high concept sci fi because it's a great episode and probably Gates McFadden's best show. I also loved seeing the spacedock in HD again, as I still think the one shown in 11001001 was a beautiful shot. As for the mist, nice job from Modern Video actually making it look like mist. Maybe the Enterprise itself is hard to remaster because of the model limitations, but I'm loving all the exterior shots and the like. I just wish there were more exterior shots, and I'm looking forward to Final Mission because of that.

 

[Scotty]

Well I'm on the episode The Wounded still a good episode loved how the cardys wore them silly helmets !!! And also loved Data,s Day as well data,s face when he's having his dancing lessons priceless now still .

Well I'm going to skip Devils Due as its still awful now regardless of HD and 7.1 Sound.

Why? "Devil's Due" is just great fun with another classic Ron Jones score. It fits perfectly with "Who Watches the Watchers" and "Thine Own Self" in what I like to call a "False Beliefs" trilogy. Pure Roddenberry.

This. I adore Devil's Due, but I admit that I mostly love Ron Jones' fantastic score. But from all the TNG episodes of the Piller-Taylor era, I think this is one of the episodes that most resembles TOS.

 

[Nero's Shadow]

Well I'm on the episode The Wounded still a good episode loved how the cardys wore them silly helmets !!! And also loved Data,s Day as well data,s face when he's having his dancing lessons priceless now still .

Well I'm going to skip Devils Due as its still awful now regardless of HD and 7.1 Sound.

Why? "Devil's Due" is just great fun with another classic Ron Jones score. It fits perfectly with "Who Watches the Watchers" and "Thine Own Self" in what I like to call a "False Beliefs" trilogy. Pure Roddenberry.

This. I adore Devil's Due, but I admit that I mostly love Ron Jones' fantastic score. But from all the TNG episodes of the Piller-Taylor era, I think this is one of the episodes that most resembles TOS.

Well I'll give it another go see what I think ??

 

[Trekker4747]

I'm not sure if Remember Me is brilliant or Ridiculous. I mean there are some lines where I just roll the eyes, like Picard's "We've never needed a crew before" line. Still, maybe it was the high concept sci fi because it's a great episode and probably Gates McFadden's best show. I also loved seeing the spacedock in HD again, as I still think the one shown in 11001001 was a beautiful shot. As for the mist, nice job from Modern Video actually making it look like mist. Maybe the Enterprise itself is hard to remaster because of the model limitations, but I'm loving all the exterior shots and the like. I just wish there were more exterior shots, and I'm looking forward to Final Mission because of that.

There's a touch of "ridiculousness" there but Picard's actions (and the actions of everyone) inside Beverly's "warp-bubble universe" kind of have to be silly as Beverly's mind/universe tries to justify itself. It's not supposed to be "reality" it's like having a dream where things don't make sense but the dream keeps trying to make it make sense by coming up with silly ways to justify things.

Remember Me has a lot of brilliant moments in it I just love and some great lines ("If there's nothing wrong with me, maybe there's something wrong with the universe?")

I also love when Beverly nearly blue-screens the Enterprise computer by asking it why she's the only person on the ship if she doesn't qualify for the mission alone.

 

[Tosk]

Devil's Due [...] But from all the TNG episodes of the Piller-Taylor era, I think this is one of the episodes that most resembles TOS.

Which is hardly surprising, considering the heritage of the episode.

 

[TheSeeker]

I can't remember the last time I saw Devil's Due but I remember enjoying it quite a bit. I'm looking forward to watching it again.

 

[Hober Mallow]

Well I'm on the episode The Wounded still a good episode loved how the cardys wore them silly helmets !!! And also loved Data,s Day as well data,s face when he's having his dancing lessons priceless now still .

Well I'm going to skip Devils Due as its still awful now regardless of HD and 7.1 Sound.

Why? "Devil's Due" is just great fun with another classic Ron Jones score. It fits perfectly with "Who Watches the Watchers" and "Thine Own Self" in what I like to call a "False Beliefs" trilogy. Pure Roddenberry.

This. I adore Devil's Due, but I admit that I mostly love Ron Jones' fantastic score. But from all the TNG episodes of the Piller-Taylor era, I think this is one of the episodes that most resembles TOS.

It was interesting seeing another Star Trek: Phase Two script brought to the screen, but Ardra has to be the stupidest villain TNG ever gave us. If she had simply focused on taking over the planet through legal means, she might have gotten away with it, but then she starts screwing around with Picard and the Enterprise. Once she made the Enterprise "disappear," she pretty much sealed her own fate.

 

[Robert Comsol]

It was interesting seeing another Star Trek: Phase Two script brought to the screen, but Ardra has to be the stupidest villain TNG ever gave us. If she had simply focused on taking over the planet through legal means, she might have gotten away with it, but then she starts screwing around with Picard and the Enterprise. Once she made the Enterprise "disappear," she pretty much sealed her own fate.

Well, it was a nice example of "Pride Cometh Before the Fall".

Interesting that Picard never suspected she might be a Q. But he probably thought, that if this were the case, "his" Q would have interfered to expose the imposter.

After all, playing the antagonist and "devil" in this part of the galaxy was usually Q's job.

Bob

 

[Hober Mallow]

Interesting that Picard never suspected she might be a Q. But he probably thought, that if this were the case, "his" Q would have interfered to expose the imposter.

After all, playing the antagonist and "devil" in this part of the galaxy was usually Q's job.

Bob

I haven't seen the episode in a long time, but I thought the crew discussed the possibility of her being either a Q or the Q, and then dismissed it early on in the episode.

 

[Scotty]

Devil's Due [...] But from all the TNG episodes of the Piller-Taylor era, I think this is one of the episodes that most resembles TOS.

Which is hardly surprising, considering the heritage of the episode.

I had forgotten the script had been adapted from a phase 2 story. That explains it.

 

[Trekker4747]

Interesting that Picard never suspected she might be a Q. But he probably thought, that if this were the case, "his" Q would have interfered to expose the imposter.

After all, playing the antagonist and "devil" in this part of the galaxy was usually Q's job.

Bob

I haven't seen the episode in a long time, but I thought the crew discussed the possibility of her being either a Q or the Q, and then dismissed it early on in the episode.

You're right at one point Riker suggests another refugee from the Q-Continuum and Troi further suggests it could *be* Q. But it's dismissed since Q wouldn't bother with contracts or resort to sexual play to get his needs met.

 

[Borjis]

I love that part in Devil's Due when she turns into that Devil. AWESOME makeup work.

And when Worf blurt's out: YOU are NOT Fek'lhr!

That actress was hot stuff! (pun intended)