Season FOUR OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Discussion Thread

[dg1379]

Gotta stay out of this thread til after BOBW. I want to see trailer on the big screen first!

 

[jimbotron]

That trailer sure was goofy.

The Worf/Lwaxana bit followed by the Enterprise firing? Cute.

The visual effects look great (despite it being the fugly 4-footer). Modern Video pulled it off. They have my blessing for season 6.

 

[bullethead]

Yeah, Modern Video is alright in my book. They're pretty close to CBS-D quality, with a few iffy shots (the Enterprise turning away from the purple rift, the sparks from Guinan's gun, and the shot at 1:52 - from Clues IIRC). I wish they'd been contracted for S2.

 

[mr.peany]

Yeah it looks good. I guess one thing to keep in mind is that there is still a bit of time for some of the shots to change like they did with the season 3 trailer. Miles ahead of season 2 though.

 

[Mutai Sho-Rin]

Thread stuck. Ultimately, there will be seven of these babies at the top of the forum. Might get a tad crowded up there.

 

[Dac]

Thread stuck. Ultimately, there will be seven of these babies at the top of the forum. Might get a tad crowded up there.

Perhaps merge Seasons 1 and 2 when Season 5 rolls around? Then add in 3 as 6 comes out etc.

 

[Dream]

Thread stuck. Ultimately, there will be seven of these babies at the top of the forum. Might get a tad crowded up there.

Perhaps merge Seasons 1 and 2 when Season 5 rolls around? Then add in 3 as 6 comes out etc.

Please god NO! The last thing anyone wants is one big clump full of several seasons of posts! Talk about one big unreadable mess!

 

[Aatrek]

It's probably safe to unstick S1 and S2 by now.

 

[TheSeeker]

Personally I wouldn't mind having all 7 seasons up there for a while. It's been so long since I've been this excited about TNG, or Star Trek in general.

However, having the latest two seasons stickied is probably enough if it gets too crowded.

 

[Mott the barber]

Any speculation on the Season 4 Theater event? Are they going to do the same thing like they did with Best of Both Worlds and combine Redemption as a feature film? I hope not. Personally, I would love to just have a Best of Both Worlds/Family night and make it a whole trilogy. Considering that won't happen, I wonder what episodes they could use to feature the season. If they wanted to go full fledged visual effects, I would do Galaxy's Child and The Loss. If they wanted to do good storytelling, perhaps Remember Me and The Wounded. Did Season 4 have really popular episodes? It seemed to me that it was the season where it was mainly business as usual.

I'm predicting The Wounded or The Drumhead will make the cut, probably along with Redemption.

Oh and you didn't just mention "The Loss" did you?!?!



Edit: Nevermind. Looks like its Redemption.

 

[Mott the barber]

Thread stuck. Ultimately, there will be seven of these babies at the top of the forum. Might get a tad crowded up there.

Honestly, this is the meat and potatoes of TNG now. I'd leave them all up for the foreseeable future. We can all scroll down but it's worth it so they're easy to find. Even the older ones.

 

[tomalak301]

Any speculation on the Season 4 Theater event? Are they going to do the same thing like they did with Best of Both Worlds and combine Redemption as a feature film? I hope not. Personally, I would love to just have a Best of Both Worlds/Family night and make it a whole trilogy. Considering that won't happen, I wonder what episodes they could use to feature the season. If they wanted to go full fledged visual effects, I would do Galaxy's Child and The Loss. If they wanted to do good storytelling, perhaps Remember Me and The Wounded. Did Season 4 have really popular episodes? It seemed to me that it was the season where it was mainly business as usual.

I'm predicting The Wounded or The Drumhead will make the cut, probably along with Redemption.

Oh and you didn't just mention "The Loss" did you?!?!

I did mention The Loss, and there was one reason for that. I'm looking forward to how the FX will look on the Cosmic String. It's one of the more underrated shots in the season and if they wanted to feature visual effects, you can't get much better than the Cosmic String shot.

 

[RAMA]

The Redemption footage from the trailer looks amazing!! It's a good pick for the theater event!!

 

[Kirks_Flying_Wig]

That trailer sure was goofy.

The Worf/Lwaxana bit followed by the Enterprise firing? Cute.

The visual effects look great (despite it being the fugly 4-footer). Modern Video pulled it off. They have my blessing for season 6.

Whoever cut the trailer together has obviously been watching a little too much TNG Recut on YouTube!

Season 4 looks great! I can't wait til it's out!

 

[LogicDeLuxe]

Are you sure? That pan included live action elements, which would have been shot on film, which is only 24 frames per second. The only time the frame rate varied in production from 24 to 30 frames per second would be model shots.

I am pretty sure. I bought the NTSC DVDs in order to do my own norm conversion since the PAL DVDs have it done with very poor scaling rendering the quality even worse than it already is (was, thanks to Blu-Ray). I prefer a PAL speed up over NTSC 3:2 pullup anytime, as I find the pitch shift far less distracting that the judder.

If you're watching a Blu-ray on an older HDTV that only refreshes at 60Hz, then you will experience judder as you would from a DVD.

Of course, I watched it in 24p. I guess, people who don't notice the issue don't have 24p displays and see judder all the time. Maybe that would hide the issue with this scene. Those in charge for the editing do watch on 24p displays, don't they?

And since I did a norm conversion of the entire show for private use, there was no way around noticing certain oddities like "Identity Crisis" has 30fps throughout major parts of the episode.
Btw., the editing job of TNG is still rather consistent. The editing in LEXX is far more crazy for instance.

 

[Jefferies]

I am somewhat sceptical about the trailer. It seems that all the good looking space FX are shots from episodes remastered by CBSD i.e. BOBW and Redemption. In the shots of the other episodes the use of shadow and lighting as well as the blending into the scenery are much less impressive. The Enterprise looks rather plastic and toy-like in the Modern Video scenes. Might not be as bad as HTV but it's still clearly not as good as CBSD. I truly hope this is a work in progress but at this late point I doubt it.

 

[jimbotron]

The Enterprise looks rather plastic and toy-like in the Modern Video scenes. Might not be as bad as HTV but it's still clearly not as good as CBSD. I truly hope this is a work in progress but at this late point I doubt it.

That's not the remastering, that's the nature of the 4-footer. Season 4 gets away from much of the stock footage of the 6-footer. It inherently looks plastic and toy-like. That model only looks good from overhead, and when in darkness. Then it was not shot very well, because it was meant for SDTV. When the lighting is bright, the ship loses that sense of scale. The initial ILM work was feature quality, but later work by Image G was meant for TV, and wasn't meant to hold up in HD. No remastering in the world can fix all of that.

 

[Jefferies]

That's not the remastering, that's the nature of the 4-footer. It inherently looks plastic and toy-like. That model only looks good from overhead, and when in darkness. Then it was not shot very well, because it was meant for SDTV. When the lighting is bright, the ship looks terrible. The initial ILM work was feature quality, but later work by Image G was not. No remastering in the world can fix all of that.

I disagree, you can do a lot by sensible use of shadowing and lighting. CBSD shows this off very clearly in the 4-footer shots from Redemption. Outstanding stuff. In the Modern Video scenes on the other hand the Enterprise looks bland and overexposed. Space is dark. Somehow this is lost on everyone but CBSD.

 

[jimbotron]

It all depends on the situation.

I'll take Redemption out of the equation since CBS-D worked on that.

00:00: Modern Video - the Enterprise looks properly lit
00:09: CBS-D
00:19: CBS-D
00:30: Modern Video - kinda ugly, but that's inherent to the footage, as FrontierTrek mentioned
01:23: CBS-D
01:40: Modern Video - looks great
01:47: Modern Video - kinda bright, but the lighting is darker and more realistic than the original: http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/s4/4x10/theloss277.jpg
01:53: Modern Video - lighting is good, the shine is intentional
02:04: Modern Video - heavily backlit, but it's not overly bright
02:07: Modern Video - looks good

True, you can see what's CBS-D and what's MV, but the difference is negligible, IMO. Definitely not an HTV hackjob. We'll know for sure when we see their take on the ILM stock footage.

 

[SpHeRe31459]

Nice rundown of who did what in the trailer jimbotron

I think 1:47 looks true to the original, even in the original you see it kind of looks like the Enterprise stands out from the cosmic string, like you can clearly tell the Enterprise is at a different z-index than the string is.

But I do agree it seems CBS-D puts in 110% and puts some extra love into their scenes, instead of being 100% recreations of how it looked in SD.