are they remastered enough?

Heh. And I cringe when I see the remastered Doomsday, with that ridiculous strafing run.

 

Which relates to my long-standing contention that the idea of updating the effects shots to make the show more acceptable to modern audiences is like changing the color of the sprinkles on a cupcake: it changes one tiny aspect of something that, overall, is antiquated. If you can get past the 40 year old styles of acting, cinematography, fashion sense, etc., then a few seconds of clumsy VFX shots aren't going to make a difference.

Yes, I know the argument about redoing the VFX for hi-definition, but, what I've never heard discussed is, given the very small number of shots of the Enterprise on the show, if it was ever considered to try to locate the best and cleanest version of every stock shot, clean that up ONCE, and then use that to make replacement composites for every subsequent shot that used that element.

 

^ When it comes to The Doomsday Machine, I take the exact opposite point of view. The best part about the remastering? The new Constellation. The rush job and $4.99 budget in creating the old model showed on screen. It was always a weak point. The worst part? The new planet killer. It looks terrible. And the strafing runs by the Enterprise are soooo hokey.

All in all, I'll take the old version of this one, and I'm favorably disposed to most of the remasters. In fact, I'd prefer to watch the remastered Corbomite Maneuver, and Corbomite Maneuver is one of my top five Star Trek episodes.

 

Boy howdee. Really??! Everyone has their opinion. The scale of the enterprise to the original planet killer just looked so off.

I liked the remastering of Corbomite. It was subtle, but not disappointing.

 

They did clean up and enhance the colors on that first DVD release, but the problem was it was done from D1 Tape masters and not the original negatives.

after getting used to the newly remastered episodes and comparing them with the original dvds, they do look awful (too much grain for sure)

Here's hoping the blu releases come out soon.

 

If they did clean them they did a pretty mediocre job - you can see dirt, hairs and damaged frames on every episode!

Compared with the Remasters or say something like, Doctor Who classic episodes where every single frame is cleaned up using software, it's a pretty crappy job IMO.

 

they did and they were much less colorful before.

they did not have the same dust busting/ restoration tech that is available now but 10 years ago the before/after comparisons were pretty impressive. This was all covered when sci-fi channel began airing the restored episodes
before the DVD's came out.

incidentally, it was the DS9 "trials & tribbleations" that began the quest for the first restoration job.

 

Well the Who dvd's started coming out slightly before the TOS DVD release and they were, and are, spotless. I remember complaining about that at the time - so perhaps the technology was available, at least in Britain ?

 

Who was originally done on videotape. It never had dust or scratches.

 

Uhh, not as far as both Tomb of the Cybermen (where only a film print survived the great purge - they would routinely copy the vid-tape to film for worldwide distribution and broadcast) and Spearhead from Space (shot entirely on film) were concerned - and these both look fantastic on DVD. They were also amongst the first of the DVD range to be released.

http://www.purpleville.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/rtwebsite/tomb.htm
http://www.purpleville.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/rtwebsite/spearheaddvd.htm


Sorry - try again.

And yes even the videotape stories have quite a bit of distortion and degradation that had to be finely cleaned up frame by frame. In addition, 16mm masters of exterior/location-shoot scenes (only the interior in-studio sequences were shot on video in most cases) exist for almost all stories and these were similarly cleaned up by the restoration team for the DVD releases.

http://www.restoration-team.co.uk/

 

Ah! I'd forgotten about the early kinescoped ones. Never mind.

 

I will only watch the remastered version of TOS now. Considering the technical improvements, they can only make a good story better. Balance of Terror was one of the biggest disappointments of the remastering process. Sometimes they really didn't go far enough.

RAMA

 

I'll be saving my 'remastered TOS' money for when remastering provides: Asimo-style robots to the backgrounds of many Enterprise corridor and engineering scenes, and Forbidden Planet C-57-D style saucers to backgrounds of appropiate space & planet-surface scenes - to finally make a hard link to Trek's real source. And a couple smaller planet-landing saucers (George Adamski/The Invaders style) in background of the hanger-deck scenes.

 

I'll be saving mine for when Stovo-Kor freezes over.

 

I'm an agnostic on this issue - I can legitimately agree with points on both sides. And I can see why some would love to see a full-bore, wildly expensive CGI remaster/update.

But I do take issue with the notion that the original bridge set was "cheap and fake." By today's standards, perhaps. By 1960s television standards, it most certainly was not.

 

I like the remastered effects well enough, but a part of me wishes they had waited until they could have spent more money or effects were cheaper. I love the enchantments that don't relate to space shots--fixed phaser effects, the clock in Naked Time, enhanced (or replaced) matte paintings with computer generated backdrops. Ship shots are a mixed bag, and they don't look as great as they should (and the way the CGI model changes part way through is very disappointing).

I don't want to see Star Wars (or worse) "remastering" done to the episodes, though. If you want to see something like that, it makes more sense to just remake the thing entirely.