"Fake Nerd" is just the "No Girls Allowed" sign on the treehouses of nerds that I'd rather not hang out with. It's a made-up, arbitrary dismissal of anyone who doesn't meet a person's perceived standards of legitimacy. That is, it's bullshit.
So would I. Access to trial software is available. I assume this uses the same algorithm. http://www.infognition.com/super_resolution/ I might have a go if I feel up to it. ETA: My antivirus quarantined the plugin as unsafe. In any case, I have neither Adobe After Effects nor Premiere Pro. Also any interlaced video needs to be first deinterlaced and the separate fields subsequently recombined.
That would be the same result as just hooking a cheap $25 upconverting DVD player from Walmart up to to your TV by HDMI and having it upscale and deinterlace. But another issue with DS9 and Voyager is that they were finished to D2 composite digital videotape, so right now both shows look bad because they only exist in NTSC composite, rather then a component video format like D1 or Digital Betacam.
If you want to know what a professional upscale would look like, check out the Blu-ray release of the 1996 Doctor Who TV Movie. It was made in exactly the same way as Star Trek of the same time - 35mm, edited and finished on VT. The elements may exist somewhere, but were unobtainable. BBC Worldwide decided to go ahead with a blu-ray release despite only having access to a PAL conversion of the original NSTC master. It looks like crap.
Garbage in, garbage out, and that's just what videotape-edited shows are on HD. You're essentially asking to take a static 80 year old recording of War of the Worlds, cheaply running it through some technobabble, and output 5.1 stereo HD audio. The visual data just isn't there. There will probably be a point in the future where computers can increase resolution and extrapolate the data needed to get true high-resolution, but we just aren't there yet. Photoshop is already to the point where it can reduce motion blur or camera shakes and even increase an image size without losing fidelity, but that would be just one frame and there are 60,480 frames per episode of Trek. That's over 21 million frames of Trek needed to HDify.
Agreed. That would basically be what they did with the Trials And Tribble-ations episode on the TOS Blu-Ray set. Did it look better than the version on the DS9 DVD set? Mmmmmm, yeah, I suppose. Would I pay for the entire series to be done that way? Nah, I'll pass. And that's me, the guy who bought every single DVD of TOS when they were first released in the late 1990s and early 2000s, at $20/disc for two episodes, then re-bought them on Blu-Ray. I bought those enormous silver boxes of TNG on DVD for $100-120/season and then bought the Blu-Rays as they came out at $70/season. I bought the VHS of the movies, then the original terrible non-anamorphic DVDs, then re-bought them in the 'Collectors Editions' and then re-bought them on Blu-Ray, and then re-bought TWOK in its super-edition. I'll buy the media, if you give me a good value. Remaster DS9 the way they did TNG and I'll pay twice what I did for TNG - I love DS9 *that much*.
I researched this recently for a discussion on Reddit, and Blu-Ray outsells DVDs across the board in all genres for new releases. There are a handful of children's titles that have sold better on DVD. Additionally, DVD's numbers are almost certainly artificially boosted at this point by the inclusion of DVDs in Blu-Ray combo packs. Once you leave the realm of new releases and look at all sales, DVD outsells Blu-Ray enormously, mainly because the majority of catalog titles - including hundreds or even thousands of TV series' that have been released on home video - never made it to HD.
Honestly, at this point an HD remaster would be a waste of effort. It isn't future-proof, and unless the studio wants to re-do their work in a decade they really might as well go as far as they can and remaster DS9 for 4K. At the very least, the scan of the film elements should be 4K. That's pushing the max resolution for 35mm film and would be the last native remaster the show could ever get; anything beyond that (if there is a home video format after 4K) would have to be an upscale. The VFX could arguably be done in HD and look just fine even against the 4K live-action footage - The Expanse is filmed in 4K, with the VFX done in 2K, and it looks fine. If the CG renders are saved this time (instead of shuffled off and mostly lost, as DS9's original renders were), they could possibly be used for a full 4K CG re-do down the line.
Most brick-and-mortar stores are just stocking DVD. For TV shows they might get 3 copies on Blu and 6 on DVD, and once those Blu's are gone they don't restock and even at Boxing week events or other blowout events you don't see older TV blu-rays like you saw with DVD 5-10 years ago. But upgrading it to HD will future proof the series. Just from my own research, 4K is almost becoming like 3-D TV: it's out there but it's not having as much of an impact as HD had, and the only reason that it'll eventually take over is because manufacturers will stop HD TV manufacturing sand just go with 4K.
Future proof from what? There's no demand in the US for DS9 and it hasn't been on the air for years. That isn't going to change as we get farther away from the finale. TNG has always been on since it went off the air and BBC-America (the only channel in the US that airs the show) only airs the first two seasons in HD, for some reason. Voyager recently starting getting re-aired on the same network and is "good enough" for most people. If the one channel in the largest media market in the world is fine to half-ass it's way through a show that is several times more popular than DS9...what would be the point? And about 4K...it's not taking off because many people who got their first HDTVs 10 years ago still have them, and they were a big investment at the time, and TV stations are just a couple years out from their HD conversions and there's little to no budget to do another top-to-bottom upgrade to 4K. It's not as gimmiky as 3D, but 4K will probably slowly roll out over the next 10-15 years and become the norm. It's inevitable.
With the audio they could probably get away with the 2003 5.1 mix. Sure they wouldn't be able to create a genuine 5.1 or 7.1 (as the 2003 mix was matrixed from the Dolby Surround mixes), but DS9's 2003 was pretty good.
Up here in Canada SPACE was recently airing 10 hours of DS9 and Voyager, each, per week, along with 10 hours for TOS, TNG and Enterprise, each. There is demand for DS9 and Voyager in HD, plus neither series is even 480 progressive scan. All that CBS has to shop around to CRAVE TV (SPACE and CTV's streaming service) and other streaming download sites are masters that are 320x240p---masters that would've been fine online 20 years ago in the 1990's. With DS9 and Voyager it's like the early years of DVD right now where people would take VHS SLP recordings of Public Domain shows, digitize them, slap a 'Digitally Remastered, Sound Enhanced' banner on the front cover or even claim on a title card before you got to the main menu, that the video had been scanned from film elements that were decades old, when clearly it had not been. Good grief, but I was just watching the Shout Factory DVD's of 'ADAM-12', and while they didn't look as good as the Universal issued Season 1, they looked a good deal better than DS9 and Voyager (sure that show was done on film, and the SF transfers looked to be from Betacam SP that was 30 years old but the show was a lot sharper and brighter, DS9 looks washed out and Extremely soft as if it had come from a VHS SLP recording). And 4K, it's probably going to end up as more of a shooting/editing format than a consumer format.
Doubt it. Most TV manufacturers are phasing out 1080p sets already. Be surprised if any mainstream brand isn't totally 4K by Xmas 2018. Perhaps in sub 40" models 1080p will last a bit longer (extra year or two). The biggest improvement is not 4K but HDR--however, no one is making an HDR set that isn't 4K. 4K is decidedly NOT like 3D in the TV market.
Ugh, now I do feel old because I've reached that point where I'm perfectly happy with blu-ray and don't see the need for the next newfangled thing (4K). I'll probably have to wait several years for 4K tv's and players become more affordable. Although by then they'll be moving on to movies via eyedrops or HDMI cables you stick into your cerebral cortex or some shit.
Broadband speeds will improve, allowing practical 4K streaming in a few years time. Obviously it's mainly down to governments to make sure the necessary infrastructure is in place to deliver it to everyone, especially rural communities.