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DS9 Remaster through AI machine learning

C

Cap.T

Lieutenant Commander
Red Shirt
There is a guy on Reddit who has tried upconverting some episodes from the DVD versions trough AI machine learning. He posted some clips on YouTube. Keep in mind that YouTube compresses these heavily:

Intro:
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Battle form "Sarcifice of Angles":
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He also tried it on Voyager. You can read about it here.
There is also a link to a longer sequence that one can download in uncompressed 3840x2160 resolution and watch on a 4K TV. Eventhough it's obviously not anywhere near the TNG-Remaster, it still looks pretty good.
 
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Nope.

Watching full screen on a 2.5k monitor, the SD source shines right through the technical trickery. The edge enhancement is still unable to add actual detail within elements. At least for Odo, I'd expect it since he's simulating a shape and not quite as perfectly as other Changelings who do it as a favor for the humans... But also forgetting the quilting on the uniforms of Dax and O'Brien that should be consistently visible (and in natively crisper detail) but clearly aren't despite being close enough to the camera, even crows' feet and face wrinkles on Odo's face don't begin to have the definition that a proper remastering -- there's the flicker and jaggies obscuring the actual detail, which would be consistent between frames.

Remember, one can always downscale from larger density materials but once removed, adding detail back isn't going to happen, for motion video though I'd seen a couple static photos that showed some promise, despite being obvious paint-by-numbers affairs. But I digress. Even Photoshop with its tools that can remove background objects still requires a lot of manual work - for even just one frame - to make the finished result look adequate. Never mind 24 frames per second... 60 seconds per minute... 43 minutes per episode...

The ships too have that bizarre fuzziness that just scream "HI THERE, I'M SD! COOIE!" that start to look more detailed once the video playback window is reduced in size. If you enlarge it and it starts to look fuzzy and/or jaggied, it's not true HD because you're still displaying it above its original resolution.

It's still nothing more than edge enhancement trickery largely via contrast and unsharp masking and slightly augmented/shifted color gamut (NTSC is mocked with its other acronym, "never the same color"...).
 
Also, both DS9 and Voyager were edited on D2 NTSC composite videotape. So you’ve got NTSC Composite artifacts as well. Really, the DVD’s are closer in quality to the Laserdisc releases if you sent the Laserdiscs composite video through a 3-D comb filter circa 2003. So that guy is just upconverting NTSC Composite video to 4K Component video. In 2020, the best method for watching DS9 & Voyager in 4K is to pop the DVD’s into a PS4 or Xbox One and let them upscale the DVD to 4K.
 
JamesRye said:
It looks a lot better to me.
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That battle scene from Sacrifice of Angels looks terrible, especially when you've watched it on the What We Left Behind Blu-Ray that got the original 1990's CGI and re-rendered it to at least 1080p (might've been higher, as it was shown on theater screens when the documentary was in theaters).
 
Well... I like it!
Despite the technical blah blah ... it is better to none.

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That looks extremely marginal.

I think we're a good few years off AI being able to do anything approximating the TNG remaster.
 
Honestly, this looks pretty impressive to me. Not as good as an actual high definition remastering, but still it reads as better image quality and more detail to my eyes. Kind of amazing what AIs are able to do nowadays.

Savage Dragon said:
I'd like to see this process used on the same footage that was remastered for the documentary. It would be interesting to compare the two side-by-side.
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Yes, I'd like to see that comparison as well!

By the way, did we ever learn where exactly these HD re-renderings came from and why, how and for what they were produced …

Because, damn, they look so good! :drool:

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Michael said:
Honestly, this looks pretty impressive to me. Not as good as an actual high definition remastering, but still it reads as better image quality and more detail to my eyes. Kind of amazing what AIs are able to do nowadays.


Yes, I'd like to see that comparison as well!

By the way, did we ever learn where exactly these HD re-renderings came from and why, how and for what they were produced …

Because, damn, they look so good! :drool:

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Quite frankly, I don’t see how you can think it’s better. Upscaling and doing anything with 480i or 576i content is like taking a postage stamp and blowing it up to rofftop billboard size. You can use all the filters you want, but your not going to get Any better quality since it simply doesn’t exist.

as to those CGI shots, they were rendered by someone who had worked on DS9 in the 90’s and still had his copies of the files. And the CGI has been engineered to stand upto theatrical exhibition should a Trek movie call for a detailed model.
 
Hi All
With the technology available now I think the results will be marginal at best due to the quality of
 
Hi All
Apologies I posted above accidentally before completing my thought. With the technology available now I think the results will be marginal at best due to the quality of source content
 
No one should waste time thinking about the wrong way to remaster DS9 when the right way is available. Certainly, uprezzing tech is used all the time for lost or damaged elements, but the way to go for the most part is film scanning and CGI recreation/re-rendering regardless of when it could be done and at what cost. I’m sure it will happen eventually when the process becomes cheaper (or Star Trek is sold to Disney), but in the meantime there is so much else to watch in high quality. We shouldn’t be that desperate for DS9 in higher definition, especially given the scale of wasted effort if we multiply it by seven seasons.
 
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Boris Skrbic said:
No one should waste time thinking about the wrong way to remaster DS9 when the right way is available. Certainly, uprezzing tech is used all the time for lost or damaged elements, but the way to go for the most part is film scanning and CGI recreation/re-rendering regardless of when it could be done and at what cost. I’m sure it will happen eventually when the process becomes cheaper (or Star Trek is sold to Disney), but in the meantime there is so much else to watch in high quality. We shouldn’t be that desperate for DS9 in higher definition, especially given the scale of wasted effort if we multiply it by seven seasons.
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Just the other day on YouTube I saw a colorized version of the 1906 “Trip Down Market Street” that the person said they had upscaled with AI from 480p to 4K 60 frames, which makes zero sense, especially when the film has already been scanned at 1080p from the existing 35mm film. But it didn’t look any better than an upscaled DVD (of course I wasn’t watching at 4K, just 1080p which was my screen’s max). Really this AI stuff is just “snake oil”. And right now AI is not going to improve DS9’s 480i NTSC Composite video any better than a cheap $25 upscaling DVD player from a department store.
 
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Jedman67 said:
Here is an update: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/314653-remastering-deep-space-nine
As far as I can tell, CBS/Viacom has not taken any official interest in updating DS9. Hopefully, this fan project can get them interested in investing in a proper BR re-release.
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Snake oil. You can get just as good upscales with a $25 upconverting DVD player, or by using a PS3 or PS4. The thing is that Deep Space Nine is coming from a composite video source. Composite is messy and degrades the image. There is no more detail in the image than what you see. You can apply all the sharpness and filters you want, but you are not going to get HD quality.
 
tomswift2002 said:
Snake oil. You can get just as good upscales with a $25 upconverting DVD player, or by using a PS3 or PS4. The thing is that Deep Space Nine is coming from a composite video source. Composite is messy and degrades the image. There is no more detail in the image than what you see. You can apply all the sharpness and filters you want, but you are not going to get HD quality.
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Disagree. I assume the studio's source is a bit better than what's on the DVD. A straight Betamax transfer with a good upscale can give you a much better result than what's available now.
Considering that a full-scale remaster would be prohibitively expensive, considering that you'd have to rerender the vfx; if not recreate them from scratch; redo all the film transfers and composites, the best you're gonna get is the final videotape cut.
 
"The system goes online on August 4th, 2021. Human decisions are removed from the process of remastering Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. SkyNet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 AM, Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, CBS tries to pull the plug. SkyNet fights back. It launches its missiles against targets in Russia after watching Season 5 Episode 7, 'Let He Who Is Without Sin.' "
 
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