DS9 on blu ray?

[Squiggy]

The point is that sooner or later CBS will have to upgrade the master to maintain the viability of the property for distribution.

The market is taking care of that.

 

[The Transformed Man]

Why? not enough people want it. Trek fans just aren't enough reason to spend that many millions of dollars.

All they need is the master tape and they can update it to whatever format they need and keep reproducing it on demand.

Yup. Any future upgrade of DS9 would probably be a restoration of non effects sequences with film negatives, and a simple upconvert and clean up of the image of effects scenes... it will look like hell, but it can be done for a fraction of the cost.

 

[Jedman67]

Why? not enough people want it. Trek fans just aren't enough reason to spend that many millions of dollars.

All they need is the master tape and they can update it to whatever format they need and keep reproducing it on demand.

Yup. Any future upgrade of DS9 would probably be a restoration of non effects sequences with film negatives, and a simple upconvert and clean up of the image of effects scenes... it will look like hell, but it can be done for a fraction of the cost.

I don't think there would be a market for poorly converted blurays. once you're going to take from the original negatives; it just makes sense to go the whole nine yards and align the quality for everything. otherwise if they do anything at all it"ll be an upscale of the 480i videotape.

 

[BeatleJWOL]

Why? not enough people want it. Trek fans just aren't enough reason to spend that many millions of dollars.

All they need is the master tape and they can update it to whatever format they need and keep reproducing it on demand.

Yup. Any future upgrade of DS9 would probably be a restoration of non effects sequences with film negatives, and a simple upconvert and clean up of the image of effects scenes... it will look like hell, but it can be done for a fraction of the cost.

I don't think there would be a market for poorly converted blurays.

Enterprise was released with the original HD scans combined with upscaled effects footage. There's already a precedent there.

 

[danielcw]

Why should I continue to pay Amazon for streaming an episode at a time when I know I'm going to be watching DS9 over and over for years?

We are not talking about buying an episode one at a time (which Amazon also offers), but monthly subscribtion services.

At some point though they will have to restore DS9 not because of the possibility of film stock deteriorating (that comes much later), but because the master tapes will at some point become unusable.

The master tapes, are probably already on a digital video format, and should always stay in good condition, if good care is taken. Besides various copies of the broadcast versions exist at various broadcasters and video services.

In a counter example, I recall one FX artist talking about the files he knows are on a certain HD that he has that are 100% worthless to anyone because they were made for a proprietary software format a particular studio once used that is now gone.

Digital is even more vulnerable than film media to obsolescence.

You are using digital as an umbrella for 2 very different things.
Video (and audio) files storing the images on the one hand, and scene files, that describe a 3D scene or model on the other hand.

Digital video formats are standardized and well documented. As long as the files are taken care of with backups, etc. , they are in no danger of becoming unavailable or unusable.

The same can be said for modern 3D models. Most stuff is well documented, and standardized.

But back in the time of DS9, CGI was like a wild west, without many standards, and without caring, that the work can be preserved and recreated.
So yeah, that work was in danger.

But in no way that means, that digital is in greater risk than film stock. That would be wrong on various levels.

 

[The Transformed Man]

Why? not enough people want it. Trek fans just aren't enough reason to spend that many millions of dollars.

All they need is the master tape and they can update it to whatever format they need and keep reproducing it on demand.

Yup. Any future upgrade of DS9 would probably be a restoration of non effects sequences with film negatives, and a simple upconvert and clean up of the image of effects scenes... it will look like hell, but it can be done for a fraction of the cost.

I don't think there would be a market for poorly converted blurays. once you're going to take from the original negatives; it just makes sense to go the whole nine yards and align the quality for everything. otherwise if they do anything at all it"ll be an upscale of the 480i videotape.

As we've already seen there's little market for blu-ray season sets for Trek to begin with. I'm talking strictly from an upscaling for streaming and future broadcast on TV standpoint. I doubt we will ever see DS9 or Voyager on blu as the format will be dead before CBS makes the decision to remaster.

 

[kkt]

Sooner or later, CBS will be forced into doing a fresh master for no other reason than if they do not, then the show will be lost to them, because the original source masters will degrade past recovery. It almost happened to Star Wars, for example. It happens to 100s of films every year because there is so little concern put into recovering them.

I find it hard to believe that CBS would just let an entire Trek series essentially "rot away".

Film is a fragile medium, and motion pictures of all types are deteriorating faster than archives can preserve them. Preservation practices slow film's inevitable decay by environmentally controlled storage and by copying endangered works onto more durable film stock. Today's film preservation crisis is not merely the result of substantially decreased public funding but also arises from a growth in the types of films now valued and requiring preservation. Newsreels, documentaries, avant-garde works, anthropological and regional films, advertising shorts, and even some home movies (especially of ethnic groups invisible in the mainstream media) are now seen as important records of America's social memory.

Fueling the crisis is the deterioration of films from the last 40 years, films previously thought not-at-risk. Preservation efforts were once directed solely at copying nitrate- base film, an older, unstable film stock. "safety film" replaced nitrate in the early 1950s, and now preservationists must deal with recently discovered problems of this less flammable substitute--the fading of color film and "vinegar syndrome", an irreversible film base decay--in addition to the still-pressing task of nitrate conversion. Research is increasingly demonstrating the critical role of low humidity and low temperature storage in extending film life. As technical expertise grows, better copies are being made from older film materials. Film preservation is increasingly perceived as an ongoing activity, not a one-time copying "fix". These factors point to the need to re-think the current approach.

Film preservation in practice. While many types of organizations have motion pictures of cultural interest, preservation efforts vary greatly with funding and commercial rights.Studios with large film libraries, once little interested in "last-year's pictures," now earn less revenue from a film's theatrical release than from later ancillary distribution by cable, network, and home video. Although industry practices vary, most studios are now investing in sophisticated storage facilities and restoring older features for which they own commercial rights. Independent producers and distributors, owners of films financed outside the large studios, generally lack the resources and organizational continuity to mount such expensive "asset protection" programs. The works of avant- garde and documentary filmmakers are among those most at risk.

http://www.loc.gov/programs/nationa...nt-state-of-american-film-preservation-study/

And before someone brings up existing digital media, consider that even they have "shelf lives", either in the storage media or in the encoding.

We know that photographic negatives, transparencies and prints last a long time. They are reliable forms of storing data. Recently the Royal Geographic Society reprinted Frank Hurley's pictures from the 1913 Antarctic Exhibition - from his original glass negatives, nearly 100 years old. An example of how robust the storage medium was - remember these negatives had been in sub-zero conditions and transported across an ocean in a tiny lifeboat!

In the headlong rush to put photographic images into digital form, little thought has been given to the problem of the longevity of digital files. There is an assumption that they will be lasting, but that is under question.

"There is growing realisation that this investment and future access to digital resources, are threatened by technology obsolescence and to a lesser degree by the fragility of digital media. The rate of change in computing technologies is such that information can be rendered inaccessible within a decade. Preservation is therefore a more immediate issue for digital than for traditional resources. Digital resources will not survive or remain accessible by accident: pro-active preservation is needed." Joint Information Systems Committee: Why Digital Preservation?

The 1086 Domesday Book, instigated by William the Conqueror, is still intact and available to be read by qualified researchers in the Public Record Office. In 1986 the BBC created a new Domesday Book about the state of the nation, costing £2.5 million. It is now unreadable. It contained 25,000 maps, 50,000 pictures, 60 minutes of footage, and millions of words, but it was made on special disks which could only be read in the BBC micro computer. There are only a few of these left in existence, and most of them don't work. This Domesday Book Mark 2 lasted less than 16 years.
Digital media have to be stored, and the physical medium they are stored on, for instance a computer's hard disk drive or a CD-rom have finite lifespans. But the primary problem is of obsolescence. Computer formats sink into oblivion very rapidly. Howard Besser, of the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies says: "Fifteen years ago Wordstar had (by far) the largest market penetration of any word processing program. But few people today can read any of the many millions of Wordstar files, even when those have been transferred onto contemporary computer hard disks. Even today's popular word processing applications (such as Microsoft Word) typically cannot view files created any further back than two previous versions of the same application (and sometimes these still lose important formatting). Image and multimedia formats, lacking an underlying basis of ascii text, pose much greater obsolescence problems, as each format chooses to code image, sound, or control (synching) representation in a different way."

If an image has been generated on negative or transparency, then scanned and transformed into a digital file, then the original is safe. However if it has been digitally originated, such as much of today's news and sport photography, then vital parts of our cultural heritage may be lost forever. This problem will get worse as more photography becomes completely digital.

http://www.dpconline.org/events/previous-events/306-digital-longevity

We do have to keep the readability of digital media in mind, however the new Domesday Book is a particularly bad example. They used a format that was not widely used even at the time. I work in a library, and we have many types of media: CDs, audio cassette, reel-to-reel tape, digital audio tape, 33 and 78 RPM vinyl, DVDs, VHS tape, Umatic tape, 3 1/2 inch and 5 1/4 inch floppy disks. All of these still have working equipment to read them (although it may need to be gotten out of the closet). All of them predate the bizarre format they chose for the Domesday Book project.

 

[Phantom]

Digital video formats are standardized and well documented. As long as the files are taken care of with backups, etc. , they are in no danger of becoming unavailable or unusable.

The same can be said for modern 3D models. Most stuff is well documented, and standardized.

But back in the time of DS9, CGI was like a wild west, without many standards, and without caring, that the work can be preserved and recreated.
So yeah, that work was in danger.

But in no way that means, that digital is in greater risk than film stock. That would be wrong on various levels.

From physical deterioration no, but from obsolescence of format yes. Read that 2nd article I linked to.

 

[Maxwell Everett]

It's informed speculation. HULU paid nearly $400,000 per episode for HD CSI and nearly $900,000 an episode for HD Seinfeld earlier this year. The 2011 Netflix deal for Trek in a mix of both HD and SD content (which coincidentally was inked just before the TNG remastering commenced) was up for renewal (these streaming deals only last for a few years) and when that happens, the streaming companies have to pay up again. More for HD content. If anything, $100,000 per episode for TNG is conservative given its relatively high profile.

Even if it's as low as 100,000 per episode, that's roughly 17,800,000 for the whole run. Which is well over what it cost to produce. (Do I remember correctly that it cost 9 million to remaster TNG?)

100k does not sound low or conservative to me. But that would also be specualtion.
Anyway, you can count all of that money towards the remastering project. Only part of it. And we are talking about TNG, thes second "crown-jewel" of Star Trek. DS9, Voyager and Enterprise may be worth a lot less.

Newer series, that currently air, and have an active fanbase, like Arrow or Supernatural, get reportedly around 1,5k per episode.

FYI: I did some more digging in the last few days and discovered that the 2011 CBS/Netflix deal was worth around $200 million for "dozens" of classic shows (probably around 2,700 total episodes like the similar CBS/HULU deal the following year). The deal was for two years and has been updated and renewed twice, in 2013 and 2015.

That would put the average price per episode for the Netflix deal at roughly $75,000 (again, this is a ballpark figure, just a back of the envelope calculation to shed some light on what these things are worth). The CBS/Amazon deal that same year (2011) was valued at around $100 million for 2,000 episodes. The average per episode there would be roughly $50,000 (it's terms were slightly different having to do with the number of Prime subscribers and it was only for 18 months). Either way, it breaks down to about $3,000 per month, per TV episode.

So, extrapolating from that, you'd expect a series like TNG to be worth somewhere in the vicinity of $9 million to $13.5 million every time CBS renews one of these deals. So I was definitely wrong to say they were worth "hundreds of thousands per episode." It's more like tens of thousands. But, all things considered, I wasn't really that far off from $100,000. In all of the press releases I found, the various Star Trek series are always singled out for mention in the deal. That's no surprise as CBS chief Les Moonves has been quoted as saying Star Trek "works exceedingly well" in their streaming deals.

Since 2011, CBS has increased its back catalog of available episodes to around 5,300 which they offer on their own streaming service and have continued to license to Netflix, Amazon, and HULU in two-year increments. The Netflix deal is currently worth "hundreds of millions per year" according to a recent quote by Les Moonves, so it has roughly doubled in value since 2011, along with the amount of content offered.

 

[danielcw]

Digital video formats are standardized and well documented. As long as the files are taken care of with backups, etc. , they are in no danger of becoming unavailable or unusable.

From physical deterioration no, but from obsolescence of format yes. Read that 2nd article I linked to.

I read the part of the article you quoted, and I argue against it in my response you quoted.

The formats are well documented, so they are in danger of being lost. You can go and read up on all of them right now.

Obsolescence is no issue here, because the basic video formats are still the same, and modern software can handle them.

In the case of DS9 the problem is, that nobody took care of documenting and preserving the 3D model data for some of the CGI. But that isn't an issue inherit to digital formats.

FYI: I did some more digging in the last few days and discovered that the 2011 CBS/Netflix deal was worth around $200 million for "dozens" of classic shows (probably around 2,700 total episodes like the similar CBS/HULU deal the following year). The deal was for two years and has been updated and renewed twice, in 2013 and 2015.

That would put the average price per episode for the Netflix deal at roughly $75,000 (again, this is a ballpark figure, just a back of the envelope calculation to shed some light on what these things are worth). The CBS/Amazon deal that same year (2011) was valued at around $100 million for 2,000 episodes. The average per episode there would be roughly $50,000 (it's terms were slightly different having to do with the number of Prime subscribers and it was only for 18 months). Either way, it breaks down to about $3,000 per month, per TV episode.

Some good finds.

And thanks to you quoting my previous response I glimpsed an error I mad, by omitting the word "not".

I meant to say:
The money TNG got from that deal, can NOT be counted towards TNG-R, only part of it. How much money would TNG have made, if it were only in SD?
And more importantly. How much more would DS9 be worth, if it were in HD?

 

[tomalak301]

I wish we can get a ds9 documentary series for Netflix if we don't get blu rays. I loved the behind the scenes stuff for TNG and we don't have nearly enough for DS9 or Voyager.

 

[Mage]

I was watching an earlier season of Doctor Who (Tennant-season) on Netflix, in what is the HD quality for those earlier seasons.... and if they ever do a simple remaster like they did for those seasons on DS9, count me out. After the quality of the later seasons of Who, I forgot how horrible those earlier HD-seasons looked. Especially CGI shots. And with such a huge amount of CGI in DS9, it will look like shit.

So no, I'll stick to my dvds. Just check your settings on your tv and player if need be. You can turn a lot of the upscaling and enhancing off, and it'll look a lot better.

 

[Tomalak]

Doctor Who was not recorded in HD until the last Tennant specials following series four. Everything before that was good old digibeta.

 

[ATimson]

Enterprise was released with the original HD scans combined with upscaled effects footage. There's already a precedent there.

Enterprise was broadcast like that, whereas Deep Space Nine would be a new product.

 

[Lance]

The problem I've found with upscaling the existing DVDs is that the nature of DS9 and VOY, being shot on film and then transfered to videotape for editing, means there's a generation of quality lost to begin with. There isn't a Blu Ray player in the land that can upscale that and get rid of it's naturally muddy look.

The benefit that a native upscale project would have IMHO is in them being able to digitally regrade the picture. So, while it may not have the added definition of going back to the source like TNG-R did, they *could* fiddle around the edges with the broadcast copies to give them a richer color palette, slightly sharpen the definition, play around with the contrast, put them out there without the compression artifacts they've got on the DVD versions, etc etc.

Even that kind of 'minimal workload' would still present us with a better overall product than is currently available on the DVD sets.

 

[Beta-Z]

Everyone can play with contrast, color, sharpness, brightness by just adjusting it on the TV.
And every good BD player (f.e. Panasonic 500 or 700 or an Oppo player) does upscale DVDs mostly as good as CBS did it with that missing film elements for the TNG Blu ray release.
There's nothing CBS could do, that we can't do by ourselves, apart from getting rid of some artifacts, which one barely notices, given the right amount of distance between you and the screen.
No, that doesn't justify the effort of a DS9 BD release to me, i'm sorry.

 

[Mage]

Doctor Who was not recorded in HD until the last Tennant specials following series four. Everything before that was good old digibeta.

I know, and the transfer to HD is horrible. Dunno how they did it, all I know is it sucks.

 

[USS KG5]

Even that kind of 'minimal workload' would still present us with a better overall product than is currently available on the DVD sets.

But would you pay $400 for it?

Sure as we all know at some point the series would plummet in price, but the studio want people buying it upfront at full whack.

I probably wouldn't bother for, well, not even as much as half a job. I'd probably wait until it came on the streaming services.

Of course, in the UK DS9 isn't streaming anywhere at the minute, or any other Trek, its obviously considered unpopular.

 

[Tomalak]

Doctor Who was not recorded in HD until the last Tennant specials following series four. Everything before that was good old digibeta.

I know, and the transfer to HD is horrible. Dunno how they did it, all I know is it sucks.

Right, you mean the upscales that are floating around. They just got a blu-ray release here, and I was tempted by the series one set. I still have the DVDs in that enormous Tardis cube box from the original release in 2005. If the price is right I might get it just for saving space if nothing else. Though I don't expect an improvement in picture quality.

 

[Relayer1]

I don't think there would be a market for poorly converted blurays.

Thrte is, and I'm proof !

Having purchased none of the Trek shows before on any format, they've now fallen in price enough to attract me. I've recently purchased the complete Voyager DVD box for £45 new. I'd have preferred a Bluray, even if it was an upscale and would have paid a little more - up to about £70ish.

For those of us without the earlier releases, even a marginal (uncompressed) version would be attractive.

It's unlikely to please the suits though, not at those prices.