DS9 remastered Sacrifice of Angels battle in 4K

[Romulan_spy]

I stumbled on this video of an upscaled 4K remaster of the battle in Sacrifice of Angels:

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The ships look so sharp, detailed and the battle looks oddly colorful.

 

[USS Firefly]

I stumbled on this video of an upscaled 4K remaster of the battle in Sacrifice of Angels:

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The ships look so sharp, detailed and the battle looks oddly colorful.

Wow that looks great!

 

[Romulan_spy]

Wow that looks great!

Yeah, the ships look gorgeous. I especially love how crisp and distinct each race's ships look. It is so easy to tell apart the Starfleet ships from the Dominion, or Cardassian or Klingon ships.

I think my favorite part is the arrival of the Klingon ships. Talk about the arrival of the calvary! Seeing those Vorcha class ships with the star behind them, just racing in with their forward weapons blasting. WOW!

 

[Dukhat]

Question: Is this a remastering of the original VFX, or is all the VFX new?

 

[Romulan_spy]

Question: Is this a remastering of the original VFX, or is all the VFX new?

Here is what the description of the video says:

"Using the AI-powered Video Enhance AI software I upscaled some of the battle footage remastered for the DS9 documentary "What We Left Behind". This clip shows the most exciting part of Operation Return, in the season 6 episode "Sacrifice of Angels". The documentary remastered it to 1080p and using AI I increased this resolution to 4K. Let me know what you think of the results."

 

[FanST]

Epic!

 

[Qonundrum]

Too much compression, if nothing else. On a 4K monitor at full screen the jaggies and other issues reveal excessive compression that hamper it more than it should. The waxy facial detail also makes me think this is an upscale...


I then read previous responses and - yup, I was right. Upscaled. Not a shocker. That and this video had surely been posted before because I recall making the same patented whiny grumble about the ersatz 4K. The shoulder pads on the uniforms should reveal a heck of a lot more detail, even in that lighting and even considering it's a 1080P source. They're motionless for just long enough.

Still a lovely scene but no way does that pass, in full screen mode or otherwise, as anything approaching true 4K.

The overall scene with scenario and acting - still as magnificent as ever.

 

[Romulan_spy]

Too much compression, if nothing else. On a 4K monitor at full screen the jaggies and other issues reveal excessive compression that hamper it more than it should. The waxy facial detail also makes me think this is an upscale...


I then read previous responses and - yup, I was right. Upscaled. Not a shocker. That and this video had surely been posted before because I recall making the same patented whiny grumble about the ersatz 4K. The shoulder pads on the uniforms should reveal a heck of a lot more detail, even in that lighting and even considering it's a 1080P source. They're motionless for just long enough.

Still a lovely scene but no way does that pass, in full screen mode or otherwise, as anything approaching true 4K.

The overall scene with scenario and acting - still as magnificent as ever.

I think the video only upscales the battle scenes to 4K. So the parts on the bridge of the Defiant with the crew is not upscaled.

 

[Firebird]

The HD upscale really hits home how the CGI artists forgot to pay attention to the background action in the scene. Once you look past what the "hero" ships are doing, the rest of the Dominion fleet just... lays there and does nothing. They're just windowdressing.

 

[DS9forever]

The HD upscale really hits home how the CGI artists forgot to pay attention to the background action in the scene. Once you look past what the "hero" ships are doing, the rest of the Dominion fleet just... lays there and does nothing. They're just windowdressing.

It was 1997. They did what they could at the time.

 

[kkt]

Yes. They did not anticipate very high-resolution releases of the show and fans looking at it frame by frame.
(Or even if they did anticipate that, shows have a budget based on releasing something watchable on the TVs of the time, not what might be available 20 years later.)

 

[Tuskin38]

It was 1997. They did what they could at the time.

The battle footage was newly rendered for the DS9 Doc, it's not the original 1997 footage.

Though it is a 1:1 recreation, which is probably why it still looks pretty tame.

 

[F. King Daniel]

The live action looks so drab in comparison to the space stuff.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I stumbled on this video of an upscaled 4K remaster of the battle in Sacrifice of Angels:

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The ships look so sharp, detailed and the battle looks oddly colorful.

Any updated CGI in HD converts well to 4K - no surprise there - but the studio-based shots do not look much better than the DVDs. I get better results for the studio shots by using Topaz Video Enhance AI to convert from SD to HD so I wonder if the program settings were off somehow. I don't quite achieve what I'd expect if rescanning were done but the picture is sharper, the colours are brighter, the colour balance is much improved from the muddiness of the PAL DVDs, and the AI-interpolated detail is generally very convincing. The original CGI and model work is also improved but not to the same level as in WWLB.

However, the maximum conversion rate that I get with the GPU in my PC is such that it takes 3 hours to convert an episode plus a few minutes to remux the audio and subtitles. I'll probably convert my favourite episodes but I doubt I'll get around to all 176.

ETA: I don't crop the picture to 16:9 when converting - that's a real no-no for me.

 

[Timo]

The HD upscale really hits home how the CGI artists forgot to pay attention to the background action in the scene. Once you look past what the "hero" ships are doing, the rest of the Dominion fleet just... lays there and does nothing. They're just windowdressing.

Not sure this is a bug. The Starfleet ships are firing and dodging and doing stuff all right, even on the deep background. But the Dominion is supposed to be winning the battle exactly because they are standing still and maintaining iron discipline and not budging an inch. Very few Starfleet vessels have penetrated as deep into the enemy formation as the Defiant has, yet. So there shouldn't be all that much action in those shots.

It's a different issue that we can rather easily see how the vast cloud of starships is still a pretty compact affair overall, and how it should be utterly trivial to just fly around it. It's not a "choke point battle" deep inside the system, either: after our heroes break through, it's still about a minute at best possible warp till DS9.

I have no use for quality higher than this. Starship are always going to look fake, because they are; more detail won't help there. This is already so many lightyears better than the pieces of wood or plastic we originally got that it's probably way too good already. DSC sort of has it right in doing what Babylon 5 did decades earlier: pretty backgrounds are the beef of these visuals, and never mind how unrealistic those are at a conceptual level already.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[tomswift2002]

I think the video only upscales the battle scenes to 4K. So the parts on the bridge of the Defiant with the crew is not upscaled.

The video came from the DS9 doc Blu-Ray where the live action & CGI were rescanned and rerendered at 1080p and in 16:9 widescreen.

But YouTube always adds heavy compression to any video. Most 4K and even 1080p videos are edited at a constant-bit-rate of 100 Mbps or higher (some pro 1080p is around 50 Mbps, while consumer camcorders are around a variable-bit-rate of 54Mbps at the high end). But YouTube compresses 4K videos to about 22.2 Mbps VBR (that’s even lower than the old D-VHS 28.8 CBR bitrate for 1080i Video) and 1080p to about 6 Mbps VBR.

The original Blu-Ray had an average bitrate for that scene around 35 Mbps VBR at 1080p. So a 4K upscale on YouTube is, at most, equivalent to playing the Blu-Ray on a 4K TV in 720p.

 

[Paul Weaver]

Very few Starfleet vessels have penetrated as deep into the enemy formation as the Defiant has, yet.

imagine if the klingons and romulans had cloaked a few ships and bypassed the battle at high warp by a couple of light hours.

 

[VoyagerSeason8]

What I never understood about this scene was the destruction of the Dominion ship at the very back on the fleet. Surely it would be the one with the least damage done to it? It blows up so easily. Yes I know it was done for dramatic effect, but the teenager in me saw it back then and I can never dismiss it! :-D

 

[TopperHenly]

I think my favorite part is the arrival of the Klingon ships. Talk about the arrival of the calvary! Seeing those Vorcha class ships with the star behind them, just racing in with their forward weapons blasting. WOW!

The arrival of the cavalry is the oldest trick in the book of cinematic battle scene book but it still works.

I love the same trick when used in the new Star Wars films where the X-fighters came to the rescue in the Battle of Scarif scene from Rogue One. .

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Music plays a big part in heighten the emotional response to these scenes. I'm not sure if it is sound quality of the Star Trek youtube clip but it does sounds really low and flat but if you listen carefully it does heighten the entrance of the Klingons.

 

[Tosk]

I'm not sure if it is sound quality of the Star Trek youtube clip but it does sounds really low and flat

That's at least partly due to them having to come up with a new cue for the scene. The music in the actual episode is better suited to the scene, IMO. But then, David Bell had a much bigger budget and an actual orchestra, so it's not really fair.