Paramount working on DS9 HD?
- Thread starter Captain Dax
- Start date
You may be right. I don't have any knowledge of DS9's cinematography, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn they used used smoke or possibly a diffusion filter (since it's cheaper/easier) to enhance the grimy lived in nature of the space station.
Robert Meyer Burnett and Bill Hunt have independently discussed the rumors as well.
One point of concern is altering the aspect ratio to 16:9.
No sale.
Exhibit A: the first two seasons of THE X-FILES. Very painful to watch if you know anything about framing. Let alone if they can't find a scene from the preserved film elements and have to center cut a patch from the 4:3 SD master.
Season 3 onward, if I remember rightly, was designed for 16:9 in mind...
Even better: Since they're going to the original film negatives, they have an opportunity to re-frame every camera angle change from the older seasons to best-fit the new ratio. So the net result may not be that bad, since the generic upscales and aspect ratio changes just slap on some matte bars without bothering to re-center vertically the old 4:3 material, leading to chopped off heads, hidden details needed for the plot's progression, and the opening/closing credits.
But the latter half of DS9 did have 16:9 in mind, so that's more than half the battle already. S1-3 does add to some costs, but it's nominal. Especially compared to the new f/x needing to be rendered or superimposed. (B5's original f/x are the same but they're not atrocious in of themselves. )
And after reading comments to other remastered goodies like:
Sifting through some of them and I hope I got the right one, some say that the upscaling AI isn't as much a panacea as some like to believe, and - more importantly despite the tangent - the master reels may have been destroyed, so what was released on blu-ray is the only surviving master. Modern AI techniques are definitely better than what was around then, and the higher-detailed the source material, the better the upscaled result will be -- so all the hype of "DVD to 4K", which is garbage because 480i simply lacks the detail end of story, the blu-ray surviving master is clearly grainy, but also has more detail than the 480i ever had -- this could be cleaned up a bit easier. But there's still an upper limit that's less than the original 35mm film negs, which sound like they're gone forever. That's when software algorithm alternatives genuinely come in handy. But if the original is there, definitely try to preserve it. If nothing else, what does exist does. If nothing else, the B5 scenes mixing the cgi with live action could potentially have the frame rate equalized by comparing an array of adjacent frames and smoothing them out. But I digress again.
* but the whiny comments are ubiquitous so it's all good
I really think you need to ask more people because the oblong box set with three different versions of the movie in 4K certainly begs to differ.
I am infinitely fascinated by a fan's ability to sustain themselves on the whispers of whispers.
I hear that Jadzia is going to be in the DS9 series finale.
Great news
This is really great news! DS9 for me is tied with TNG as my favorite Trek series of all time. Once this is complete, I will be watching the series again all the way through! I think they will make sure the quality will be top notch. I just hope there aren't any alterations to any of the content itself. Too many other series have fallen victim to "cancelled" episodes or altered dialog to make them less offensive to some. I truly hope that isn't entertained by Paramount.
Don’t get your hopes up. There isn’t even an official response from Paramount that this is happening.
Streamers pulling episodes has definitely happened, but what shows have they taken the expense to go back and alter dialogue?
Guaranteed Paramount does not have the money to re-frame every shot in the entirety of the first three seasons of DS9.
FTFY
To be honest, I am not sure that it makes much difference. Oh, I'd probably buy an upscaled version if they made one. But I wouldn't want them changing the aspect ratio or the composition of the shots, and there's not much detail that you could see in HD that you couldn't see in a broadcast signal in the 90s. The artists, costumers, and set decorators didn't spend their limited time and money on things that wouldn't show up to their target 1990s audience. What you might see is things intended as jokes - the fake business names on the directory of promenade businesses etc.
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