The AI upscales can do some good work, but they clearly aren't a patch on an actual remaster. You only have to compare the upscales to the footage in What We Left Behind to see that. Especially as many of the upscale projects aren't even working with the DVDs, their base files are rips. If you're going to upscale, why not start with the best quality currently available? (One project didn't even deinterlace the files properly so they ended up with audio lag. Who wants to give up audio sync just to have better quality video?) Heck, I'd even take a straight rip of the original tapes onto Blu-ray over the current DVDs.
CBS’s master is NTSC D2 Composite Digital. It’s got a higher bitrate than DVD, but still you’re not going to get much out of it in terms of upscaling. Take a look at TNG’s “Power Play” and the scene’s that had to be upconverted for the HD remaster. TNG Seasons 4-7 were mastered on D2 Composite Digital back in the 90’s. Also the current DS9 DVD’s and streaming files were mastered nearly 20 years ago now using 3-D Comb filters from the very early 2000’s to seperate the composite video into seperate chroma and luma channels. Technology has improved: CBS needs to rescan the tapes with current 3-D comb filters to get cleaner images. Your modern LED or OLED TV could probably give you a better quality picture by just hooking a DVD player up by the yellow composite (or better yet, track down a Laserdisc and player and go that way). But videotape has a finite resolution and all that’s happening by upscaling is doubling the pixels that are already there.
There's also the ancient MPEG2 compression used for DVDs, which introduces horrible artefacts especially in darker scenes. All these fan attempts are still fighting with the poor source material. A modern transfer of the tapes plus a sympathetic upscale and a proper encode would go a long way towards improving the look of the show. It still wouldn't be anywhere close to TNG-R, but would be better than nothing.
I think it's inevitable that fans will someday upgrade DS9. So much technology is becoming affordable and easier to use.
That’s why Laserdisc would be better. Sure it’s analog composite, but Laserdisc offered broadcast quality video that wouldn’t deteriorate (unless you had disc rot) and no compression!
I guess, potentially. I'm not sure there would be significant gain, and only the earlier seasons were available on LD.
The major problem with DVD and even VHS is that the split the composite signal to component (DVD) or Y/C composite (VHS), so going to composite the DVD or VHS player is recombining the signal, whereas Laserdisc was a true composite signal and it’s signal would be the same as the D2 composite signal, with no splitting, just in the analog domain.
Notice that apart from a few shots to blend in better with a documentary, you never see an actual director or producer apply this fucking trash to their work.
I'd love to see whoever did this have a crack at creating new footage to replace that bloody clip show footage mid-battle in WYLB. I know the budget was stretched. Personally, I'd have been quite happy to have had less CGI shenanigans in the fire caves.
A true remaster would require scanning the film negatives, rendering new CGI and re-cutting the completed episodes together. Because TNG was first mastered in film, then stepped down for broadcast or something, it was a lot easier to get a higher native resolution for the remasters than possible with DS9. But with a good upscale, a native betamax transfer can do wonders with DS9. Eventually you"ll hit a wall, but with the resources of a full studio, a solid release can be done for relatively cheap.
Your wrong on that. TNG was shot on film and then transferred to analog 1-inch Type C Composite (Seasons 1-3) and D2 Composite Digital Videotape (Seasons 4-7) for editing (although the model shots were transferred to D1 Digital Component Videotape for high quality multi-generational editing and then the final model composites were dubbed to D2 Composite for inclusion in the final master with the othe live-action that didn’t require SFX compositing). TNG was never edited on film in the 80’s & 90’s, except the theatrical movies. The same goes for Deep Space 9 & Voyager: they were shot on film, but then transferred to videotape (D2 for live-action with no SFX, and D1 for SFX editing, as component offered higher quality, cleaner multi-generational passes than composite, and the the final composites were dubbed to D2) for editing. TOS &TAS were shot and edited on film, which was why we got the 2006 TOS Remaster the way we did. (Although, while the love-action was shot on 35mm, to save money the models were shot on 16mm and then converted to 35mm, so the original SFX looks washed out a lot from that and the number of passes through an optical printer.) They were ready for HD. And Enterprise, Seasons 1-3 were shot on film and then transferred to HD Videotape for editing, while Season 4 was shot and edited on HD videotape (so don’t expect a 4K Remaster of Enterprise’s Season 4 since its impossible).
Forget CBS, let's remaster DS9 ourselves! https://www.extremetech.com/extreme...remaster-its-content-fans-will-do-it-for-them
That article is so out there, the person clearly doesn’t understand video. Also I’d question what source he’s using (especially when you read his article on VFR, and he doesn’t understand why 3:2 pull down is applied to a lot of 90’s shows shot on film and then edited on NTSC videotape), since if he’s using PAL DVD’s as his source for DS9, that’s a major issue right off the bat. (DS9 & Voyager PAL Masters are conversions of the NTSC masters.). Also, as we learned with TNG-R, for the model work, the two different model teams were shooting the ship models on film in both 24 & 30 FPS. So there is never going to be a true 24p cut of DS9 or Voyager.
As I said in the corresponding Voyager thread, the real potential for this technology is on material that can't be remastered properly because there was never a high definition source in the first place, such as pre-2009 Doctor Who.
It definitely looks better than what we have now, but, it just doesn't compare to a legit HD or 4K transfer.
Some major caveats - the opening model sequence looks great, but it was a very rare example of classic Who using 35mm film. The film survives and this episode has been released on Blu-ray at 1080p. The rest looks rather poor to my eyes. The VT was already upscaled for the Blu-ray, but it's still rather low resolution 1" tape. The "4K" upscaling has introduced a lot of smearing and edge enhancement which makes it pretty painful to watch.
And what people don’t get is that interlace (whether 480i, 576i or 1080i) video has blur added to it so that you don’t get the “stair-step effect” on round objects and other angled shapes. So upscaling from 480i or 576i to 1080p or 4K will always look softer than an upscale from 480p, 576p or 720p.
That blurring on interlace video has been around since the 1940’s when the first TV broadcasts were being performed.