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Season TWO OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Discussion Thread

The bad bluescreen compositing is an epidemic across all of S2, so while it may not be distracting in a few places, it's everywhere.
More to the point, it's totally inexcusable in this day-and-age of good digital post-production tools.
 
MakeshiftPython said:
The reason I ask "what else" is because it's being implied that HTV is doing a better job at X-FILES than they did with TNG, and what we're seeing at this moment is just non-f/x shots that look as good as what we saw on TNG's non-f/x shots. Because of that, I'm wondering if all the footage was messed up on TNG aside from the f/x work.
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I think we got the quality of season 2 not because HTV was incompetent (well, maybe a little), but that they did not have enough time to complete it, so they had to cut corners.

This all could have been avoided had CBS not insisted on releasing three seasons in 2013.
 
Hopefully a redo can be done in the future if it's just for stuff like compositing. They won't have to dig up the film elements and such anymore, as all the footage is scanned anyway. Still, it might be too expensive for CBS to think it's even worth it, and that would be a shame.
 
I can't see that ever happening. It's not like remastering a 2-hour movie. This would be redoing months worth of work just to satisfy a small subset of fans.

The only people who would want it are 12 fans who refused to buy it and fans who bought it and demand free replacements, meaning it would never recoup its cost.
 
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jimbotron said:
But when it got, it got really bad, and things together were dealbreakers for some. I guess if I were to nitpick, they used the wrong film element (perhaps they lost the real one) in Where Silence Has Lease, regardless of the correct angle. And they used it over:

http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x02/where_silence_has_lease_hd_214.jpg

And over
http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x02/where_silence_has_lease_hd_218.jpg

And over
http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x02/where_silence_has_lease_hd_233.jpg

And over again
http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x02/where_silence_has_lease_hd_284.jpg
Click to expand...

It definitely wasn't a case of missing or unusable film elements as the correct shot was used in The Last Outpost and it looks great.

http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/1x05/thelastoutpost_hd_043.jpg
 
No one's mentioned how HTV also used the wrong live-action shots in several cases. In "Q Who" in particular.
jimbotron said:
I think we got the quality of season 2 not because HTV was incompetent (well, maybe a little), but that they did not have enough time to complete it, so they had to cut corners.

This all could have been avoided had CBS not insisted on releasing three seasons in 2013.
Click to expand...
Were that the case, wouldn't seasons one and three have been plagued by the same problems.
 
They got to work on season 1 while working on the sampler, right? January was the sampler, and season 1 was out in July, so they had at least six-months to work on it, perhaps more. HTV then worked on season 2 without any input from CBS-D, and had it out in December.

I believe in an interview, someone from CBS-D said they went right to work on season 3. That came out April 2013, so 9 months following season 1's release.

CBS-D was then able to work on most of season 4 and all of season 5 in a tiny window. They apparently had the skills and manpower to make it work, but I don't think HTV did.

Using the wrong elements in Q Who? is no big deal for me. The shots are nearly identical, and I wouldn't have ever noticed had no one brought it up.
 
jimbotron said:
CBS-D was then able to work on most of season 4 and all of season 5 in a tiny window. They apparently had the skills and manpower to make it work, but I don't think HTV did.
Click to expand...

Very valid points. Expanding the timeline like that was very useful. I think it's important to note that S4 was handled mainly by another external company, but CBS-D did have more input than compared with S2. S5 also had its share of issues too, that weren't corrected until late in the season, or VFX errors that didn't get noticed. Overall, even with any mistakes that have crept in, the show looks better than it ever has and while I do enjoy finding and analyzing the minor flaws, overall I can't complain!
 
CBS-D handled the conform of season 4, which is the reconstruction of the live action elements. I believe they had the same people working on the color correction as well. It looks on par with seasons 1,3,5.

Modern Video, for the most part, did the visual effects only.
 
From what I understand, the color correction was done by two parties. One for the pilot and season three onward, then another that worked on the first two seasons.
 
Here's another example of HTV's sub-par work (courtesy of TrekCore).

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_3I0hPn0YY[/yt]

Same shot, vastly different results. HTV really only put forth the bare minimum of effort to get the job done, whereas CBS Digital went the extra mile.
 
It's a shame because I really like Where Silence Has Lease and the FX re-work makes it at times less attractive than the DVD. Same goes for the opening shots of The Child.

Peak Performance while decent, suffers as well. I can only imagine how much more appreciated S2 would be if the restoration was on par with the rest of TNG thus far. :(
 
There's an odd effect in season 2 also. It's in The Schizoid Man.

The shot that appears in every episode - the effects shot of the Enterprise passing by under camera, and then warping away. It's also used occasionally in episodes. It's the 6-footer, then there's a flash, hiding the transition to the 2-footer.

This is how it appears normally:
http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x21/peakperformance_hd_472.jpg

This is how it appears in The Schizoid Man:
http://tng.trekcore.com/hd/albums/2x06/theschizoidman_hd_059.jpg

For whatever reason, they wasted their time recreating a special effect that appears in every episode anyway. It doesn't look very convincing either. It's a still frame of the model that's then been stretched in After Effects, or something.
 
jimbotron said:
I think we got the quality of season 2 not because HTV was incompetent (well, maybe a little), but that they did not have enough time to complete it, so they had to cut corners.

...

January was the sampler, and season 1 was out in July, so they had at least six-months to work on it, perhaps more. HTV then worked on season 2 without any input from CBS-D, and had it out in December.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure exactly how long HTV had to work on it, but based on Dan Curry's comment in Larry Nemecek's video interview with him that was posted on July 23rd, 2012, a day before Season 1 came out, Curry clearly states that Season 2 was also complete. If true, that means that the Season 2 episodes sat essentially untouched for a little over four months while VAM, authoring, disc replication and packaging were underway.
 
Maxwell Everett said:
If true, that means that the Season 2 episodes sat essentially untouched for a little over four months while VAM, authoring, disc replication and packaging were underway.
Click to expand...

Actually, that seems like a reasonable time frame. It has to be finalized at a certain point to make the schedule to be handed over the home video people for final BD authoring, replication, and then packaging, which easily takes 90-days from what I've heard.
 
SpHeRe31459 said:
Maxwell Everett said:
If true, that means that the Season 2 episodes sat essentially untouched for a little over four months while VAM, authoring, disc replication and packaging were underway.
Click to expand...

Actually, that seems like a reasonable time frame. It has to be finalized at a certain point to make the schedule to be handed over the home video people for final BD authoring, replication, and then packaging, which easily takes 90-days from what I've heard.
Click to expand...

Right... and again, I don't know exactly when they were handed the project by CBS. It could be before the sampler disc came out in Jan. 2012 or just after. Also, I don't know what deadline CBS set for them in their contract. It could be they delivered everything exactly when they were asked... or they could have delivered it ahead of schedule, perhaps even as much as a month ahead. I seriously don't know.

Their work certainly doesn't look as polished or as carefully integrated as CBS Digital's. It's acceptable, but just barely. It could honestly just come down to CBS Digital having better artists and compositors. There's also the surprising fact that HTV received no assistance or oversight from CBS Digital. That policy was fortunately reversed with Modern VideoFilm and the results speak for themselves.
 
Given that the Okudas and Dan Curry were involved in the remastering of S2, I'm surprised they were content with what HTV was churning out. How involved were they though? You'd think with them looking over the project, especially Dan Curry, that the effects would at least be more than "acceptable".
 
Beta-Z said:
Obviously HTV has done quite a good (better) job on the x-files than on TNG.

Some of the remastered HD episodes had been shown on german pay-tv already yesterday, some examples of the pilot:

http://abload.de/img/vlcsnap-2014-01-20-210bkfk.png

http://abload.de/img/vlcsnap-2014-01-20-21fyjl2.png

http://abload.de/img/vlcsnap-2014-01-20-21nhj1d.png

http://abload.de/img/vlcsnap-2014-01-20-21e4jb9.png

http://i1.someimage.com/qTWfstz.png

http://i1.someimage.com/ZBTgP1c.png


Good job so far, seems they've learned.
Please keep in mind that's cable-TV with quite extensive compression level!
Click to expand...
HTV's mistakes were all VFX-related. The pure live-action footage in TNG Season 2 looks excellent.

I'm not overly familiar with the X-Files, but are there any comparable FX shots that demonstrate what they've learned since then?
 
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