DS9 on blu ray?
- Thread starter borgboy
- Start date
And that was just from the pilot, DS9 looked even better later in the series.
Watching DS9 these days depresses me slightly because you just tell those sets should be shown in HD there is so much color and details.
There's a lot of work to do with the CGI of season 6 and 7. So many shots. Seasons 1-5 would be much like the TNG restoration level of work since it was still all practical models with Optical FX.
Would you vote for staging the effects of S6 and S7 identically or ramping them up a bit given the state of the art? If was working on it, I'd love to amp up The Sacrifice Of Angels to the level of Tears of the Prophets, and then go nuts on Tears of the Prophets. But then most of season 7 would have to be amped up that much more. The game changed forever when that Jem'Hadar fighter cut that Klingon cruiser in half.
Would you vote for staging the effects of S6 and S7 identically or ramping them up a bit given the state of the art? If was working on it, I'd love to amp up The Sacrifice Of Angels to the level of Tears of the Prophets, and then go nuts on Tears of the Prophets. But then most of season 7 would have to be amped up that much more. The game changed forever when that Jem'Hadar fighter cut that Klingon cruiser in half.
I'd really love to watch DS9 on blue ray. There are so many episodes that would benefit from it.
Does anyone have SPACE HD (in Canada, or any HD channel in any country) on their cable/satellite package (I don't have it in the package that I have)? Just for comparison how does SPACE's upconversion look compared to TNG-R or even an upconverted DVD?
I'll check it out but if it's like other SD shows it won't be upconverted. They simply send the SD source over the HD channel. Looks no different than switching to the SD feed. DVD is a much better option for PQ. Netflix probably looks better with a good ISP though on well tuned gear, DVD should be best PQ available.
SpaceHD uses the original SD broadcast version of DS9 there is no up converting. The source appears to be the original broadcast tapes because when they go to commercial the DS9 title card will pop up with the old startrek.msn.com web address on it.
If possible, the effects would simply be rerendered, like in that famous youtube video.
If the recreation of these effects is what's stopping the remaster from happening just upscale them, as it was done in the early seasons of Enterprise, Firefly, and a bunch of other science fiction shows released on Bluray.
However, I think the time-consuming and expensive task of going back to the negatives and recuting the show is the real showstopper.
Wish Netflix would cofinance. They can spend millions of dollars on silly Adam Sandler movies, but not this? I know, I know... The economics aren't there...
They would likely want partial ownership of the property, which CBS would never allow.
The problem is those 3d models (meshes) were built using a fixed polygon count, not subdivision surfaces. The former means fixed resolution and the latter can be upscaled to a large degree.
This is similar to the problem with the TMP Director's cut (except the Ent was Subpatch, a lesser proprietary form of Subd) . The app they used back then was Newtek's Lightwave, and at that time Lightwave was kind a proprietary. It didn't play well with other apps like 3d modeling programs do today.
So in non-tech terms, they can't just use what they have and render it in HD. It would look better but not good enough to warrant the investment.
They would have to re-topologize (skin a new mesh over the old), and model additional details on every ship design so that the ships will hold up in hi-res closeups, and build all the scenes again from scratch more or less. This goes double for the station itself. We have a better chance of getting TMP director's cut redone than we getting DS9 redone. I will happen but probably not until the TV Trek archive becomes more profitable again. That might be years or even a decade or more away unfortunately.
Probably not partial ownership (Netflix owns very little of their own content; they're basically a network, not a studio), but they'd definitely want exclusive rights in many territories, which would probably be impossible.
I doubt they would invest in this, honestly. They drive viewers with original, exclusive content, not remastered legacy content.
There was an interview floating around; one of the 3D companies that was doing the vfx for DS9 stated that the models were all built to be HD ready; but were merely rendered in SD. All that would need to be done is to rerender the shots at HD and done.
They just got exclusive trek rights in many territories.
Here is information pertaining to the recovery of *some* of DS9's original CGI vfx.
http://trekcore.com/blog/2013/05/deep-space-nine-in-high-definition-one-step-closer/
There original CGI elements however aren't necessarily HD ready, the were over designed and the person being interviewed in the article stated that they *should* hold up in HD.
Thank you, that's the one!
Doesn't sound possible but maybe I'm wrong. Those models can't be detailed enough. Back then it wasn't a question of foresight, it took took too long to render (or even load) a model anywhere near as detailed as you find today. Also there's the texture maps to consider. They didn't paint huge psd files back then because it slowed things down and the output medium was low res NTSC/Pal. I remember it was a big deal to have larger maps texturing nx-01. All the later digital matte paintings, optical fx, etc. I guess it all comes down to expectations. They could do a decent enough job with the old assets, but I'd rather they wait till they can do a great one.
Are these the original assets in HD?
If you look in the comments the poster mentions that the original versions were done in Lightwave and Aftereffects. It has been leaked that one of the companies,Digital Muse, the artists all kept their own copies of the files (http://trekcore.com/blog/2013/05/deep-space-nine-in-high-definition-one-step-closer/), and that they had purposefully over built them (besides HD, I guess they were also thinking at that time that if a future theatrical film needed one of the ships, by overbuilding, the ships would be ready for theatrical resolution). Plus the CGI model of both DS9 and Voyager are still in use for the Ships Of The Line calendars (actually, it was the CGI artists on Voyager who launched the idea for the calendars, because of all the work and detail that they had put into the Utopia Planetia yards for the opening of the Voyager episode Realativity, and how they hated the fact that people were only going to see blurry, low resolution shots of the orbital facility).
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