DS9 on blu ray?
- Thread starter borgboy
- Start date
Since I was already paying for it and I don't have to pay any more for it now... yes... free.
It's like if I was going to pay 10 bucks for a pizza and the pizza guy says "Hey, you want to double that for no extra charge?"
Yes. Yes I would. That extra pizza would be free even though I was already willing to spend the money on pizza.
I bought the teaser disk for the novelty - and it was beautiful, but I couldn't justify the added expense to see a cleaner copy of a show I've seen dozens of times before, especially if I would eventually get it for essentially free in a few years.
I believe they did tests on TNG (it is discussed either on the teaser or season one set) and weren't happy with the results. Which is why we ended up with the full blown restoration.
The show looks pretty awful on DVD, so any kind of upscale would make for atrocious blu ray quality.
To be fair though, an upscale would be from the master tapes, not from the crummy DVD files. It wouldn't look even 30% as good as TNGR, but it would kick the shit out of the current DVDs. (Some of the season 5 upscaled footage in TNGR, while fuzzy compared to the surrounding footage, wasn't too bad.) Much as I want a proper remaster, I'd even buy a 'budget' remastering.
What makes you think they didn't use the highest available quality for the DVD files?
I thought the upscaled bits in TNG were not just obvious they were jarringly obvious - a whole boxset at that quality would be a bad joke, YMMV of course.
Image recognition is making big leaps every year.
Who knows, in 10 years computers may able to understand images well enough to upscale them from any source.
Are you counting all that revenue only towards the HD remastering?
TNG and DS9 were really difficult for DVDs to handle.
They may look a lot better on Blu-ray, because of better compression and bitrate.
Also there would be no judder and scaling for PAL-DVDs anymore.
I think an SD on Blu-ray version of DS9 would still be a great improvement. Hard to sell though.
They were mastered on videotape, their maximum resolution is 480i. The only way to get better picture quality is to go back to the original film elements and recomposite them from scratch.
Why is there a burned in CC note at the beginning of each episode on the DVDs?
There are international broadcasts, that don't have those.
Why wasn't a source used, that lacks CC-branding, and is likely from an earlier generation?
Sorry, but what you write has nothing to do with what I wrote.
Of course the source material is 480i59. But you can't reduce picture quality to that number. There are a lot of more factors to consider.
First of all the vertical resolution is an issue for PAL-DVD users, because the image is upscaled to 576 lines. On Blu-rays it could stay at 480 lines.
The editors of DS9 did not make sure, that the cuts where made with a 2:3 pulldown rhythm in mind. PAL-DVDs had an inverse telecine, to create a 24fps version, which was then sped up to 25fps.
So the episodes run too fast, making the English soundtrack sound a pitch to high.
On top of that, they judder (is that the right word?). For example the opening of the wormhole has a noticeable jump in most episode openings.
So speed, sound, and fluidity of the picture would all be improved for PAL-DVD users, or at least those who listen to the English or German soundtrack.
The judder of the picture is also an issue for NTSC-DVD users as well. The DVDs have to encode almost 30 frames per second, as opposed to around 24fps for most TV series and movies.
So the bitrate is shared by more frames, reducing the theoretical picture quality. In practice it depends on the scene.
And last but not least, the DVDs are encoded in MPEG2, over 10 years ago. For example dark and foggy scenes were difficult to handle for MPEG2 encoders at typical DVD-bitrates.
That DS9 was mastered on video also means there are noise and video artefacts, which is also difficult for MPEG2 encoders.
Modern encoders, which could also use more modern codecs and higher bitrates on blu-ray will improve the situation.
DS9's picture qulaity could at least be raised from mediocre DVD-quality to good DVD-quality.
I'm guessing they would burn that in at the same time as the credits and so on - is there any information out there as to which master tapes still exist?
Whether they did or not, the compression on the DVDs is okay at times, and appallingly bad at others. A "cheap remaster" done from at least the same source would net better results, they just couldn't start with the DVD VOB files as a source. Even the laserdisc releases would be a better source.
Yeah, they were obvious...but if everything is at the same quality you don't get that jarring shift.
Maybe, but in that case textless material would also have to exist. That would explain how cc-free versions could be made. It would also make the job of translators a lot easier, so they could replace episode titles, or replace credits with translated versions.
So maybe the version with CC is from the earliest generation ...
Which absolutely does. The UK TNG "movies" releases of former two-parters were presented without on-screen credits for the second half, so a no-text version is definitely available.
While I am a realist who understands and appreciates that DS9 ain't gonna come to Blu Ray/High Definition any time soon, and have argued that very position earlier in this discussion, I've also come around to thinking that saying "Never, Ever" is too definitive a statement. After TOS-R there were people saying it would never be possible for TNG to be upgraded, that it would be too big a project, that it would require too much work, etc etc. But a lot of the stuff that TNG-R has done, such as the exaustive search of the archives for the film elements, would arguably make DS9 and VOY easier to get off the ground, because the start of that process has already been established. They know where to look, and they know how to find what they need to find. All they need is the green-light to get on with it.
The lacklustre sales of TNG-R on Blu Ray certainly provides a stumbling block, but now that TNG-R is available on Netflix, we might just see sales pick up to the point where a 'ground up' remastering of DS9 and VOY becomes viable. It might take a while, like it took a while for them to get around to TNG-R. But to say it will "never" happen is probably coming on too strong...
The lacklustre sales of TNG-R on Blu Ray certainly provides a stumbling block, but now that TNG-R is available on Netflix, we might just see sales pick up to the point where a 'ground up' remastering of DS9 and VOY becomes viable. It might take a while, like it took a while for them to get around to TNG-R. But to say it will "never" happen is probably coming on too strong...
Why buy the cow when you can get the HD milk for free?
'Man I'm enjoying this so much, I'm going to go out and buy expensive Blurays rather than just sit here and carry on watching" said nobody, never.
"Man I'm enjoying this so much, I'm going to go out and buy expensive Blurays so that I can watch those episodes again with commentary tracks and view hours of special features on the making of this great show!", said me and other enthusiastic fans of TNG.
I recently had this experience after watching every episode of Game of Thrones on HBO Go. Sure, I could revisit those episodes on that streaming service again until the end of time, but when there's bonus features with behind the scenes featurettes and commentary tracks, I'm very much interested in getting those sets.
I recently had this experience after watching every episode of Game of Thrones on HBO Go. Sure, I could revisit those episodes on that streaming service again until the end of time, but when there's bonus features with behind the scenes featurettes and commentary tracks, I'm very much interested in getting those sets.
These are dying out and there is no evidence at *all* they make a difference to anyone but a small number of hardcore fans.
I'm simply disproving the notion that "nobody, ever" buys blu-ray sets, hence why I tagged "me and other enthusiastic fans of TNG" at the end. 
What is it with Netflix, that it makes people so optimistic, and make a such a big event out of it.
It is only one streaming service, and in the case of TNG, in one country. A country in which TNG-R has been available on at least one other streaming service, namely Amazon.
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