Oh, I beg your pardon. I should have read that more carefully.
Star Trek TNG Remastered?
- Thread starter Jiraiya
- Start date
Oh, I beg your pardon. I should have read that more carefully.
Sure, but would it be worth the cost to effectively put the series back into post-production? Originally, new episodes of the show would average a 10.0 to 12.0 rating. This time, they'd get no more than a 1.0 rating, and that's being on the optimistic side.
That's what I'm saying. They'd have to do the editing all over again. And you're right, trying to not only simply edit the show but make it exactly match the original edits is an added burden, and there's certainly nothing conventional about doing that. It makes it even harder.
I think it's the reverse, actually. Adding new CGI effects wouldn't be such a time-consuming challenge as trying to make brand new edits match the originals. I'm no videophile or anything, but it seems to me this is this biggest challenge.
Oh I would hope they dont expect it to get a rating as good as the first time it aired (or anywhere close to it) but for a channel like Sci-fi it could still be a draw. Or maybe they can just do it in syndication like the TOS HD episodes are aired.
Could anyone here give an educated estimate on how much re-editing a TNG episode from scratch with the addition of new FX would actually cost, given current standards in technology? Does anyone know how much the TOS-R eps cost? Maybe we could use that as a baseline and double or tripple it to get an approximate price tag for an episode of TNG-R. Based on that we could see how feasible such a project would be today or how long we need to wait until it becomes cheap enough for it to be profitable.
You can't really compare it to TOS:R because with TOS they had completed, edited episodes already finished, already on film. TNG is going to be an entirely different beast altogether.
I realise that, but I just have no clue what the cost would be. As the price of remastering TNG is the issue here, it would be nice to have some sort of estimate. We know its going to be substantially more expensive then TOS-R. So knowing what the costs of that was would at least tell us what kind of range is considered feasible.
I really have no idea what the cost would be. To come up with an estimate, I would imagine you'd take the cost for a weekly SF series already in production (TNG's original cost 20 years ago was between 1.2 and 1.5 million dollars an episode), take away the production costs leaving only the pre-production and post-production costs. Then add money for extra costs like finding and cleaning up all the film.
Re: Star Trek TNG Remastered
Paramount Home Entertainment have done their 'tests' which probably included uprezzing the standard definition D2 masters as well as re-telecining a few rolls of original camera negative to see the quality in HD [as 4:3 framing with pillarbox]. That was in 2006.
The quality hasn't changed a whole lot since but they know the costs and the amount of work it would require including the # of effects shots per episode they would have to have Eden FX do in CGI and the costs involved.
Once Paramount/CBS sees how the sales of TOS-R on Blu-ray go it may help them make a decision as well as the new ratings for broadcast syndication in Autumn of TNG.
from this post about it in 2006. [nothing new at the link]
Paramount Home Entertainment have done their 'tests' which probably included uprezzing the standard definition D2 masters as well as re-telecining a few rolls of original camera negative to see the quality in HD [as 4:3 framing with pillarbox]. That was in 2006.
The quality hasn't changed a whole lot since but they know the costs and the amount of work it would require including the # of effects shots per episode they would have to have Eden FX do in CGI and the costs involved.
Once Paramount/CBS sees how the sales of TOS-R on Blu-ray go it may help them make a decision as well as the new ratings for broadcast syndication in Autumn of TNG.
This makes it sound very expensive indeed, somewhere in the order of several 100,000 dollars per episode. Which means a whole season could cost up to 10 million. Somehow I really don't see them making that sort of money from DVD sales and syndication deals. Even at half the price say in 10 years time it sounds unrealistic.
It's also not going to be that expensive, given that it's already been edited, music has been composed, sound effects have been done, visual effects probably now work out cheaper with CGI. The big difference from the TOS remaster is that someone is going to have to look through the vault and reassemble the episodes from the film stock before it can be remastered and new effects applied. The truth is that we don't really know how much it will cost, so it's over to CBS to make it happen. Or not. As long as they don't throw anything away in the future, there's a good chance it will happen eventually.
I dont know 10 million sounds like alot of money do you really think it will cost that much each season??
Well one of the previous posters was pointing out how much TNG cost to make 20 years ago. For the remastering one can substract the costs of production. So I just took a third as the remaining amount. with episodes at 1.2 to 1.5 million that leaves about 300,000 dollars and possibly more per episode times 26 and you are in the region of 8 million. However, others have already pointed out that post production especially with todays technology would cost much less. So that might mean 100,000 per episode? So a season would then maybe cost between 2 and 3 million. Which still sounds like far too much for them to consider it, at least at the moment.
My assumption is that the footage could be scanned into a computer digitally, and then the original time indexes of the cuts could be referenced (surely this was documented?), and all you'd have to do is set the start-end sliders for each roll of film. They'd have to digitize the footage to put it onto Blu-Ray anyway.
I don't mean to imply this would be a cakewalk, but my guess would be about %30 time to digitize and edit the footage back together, versus perhaps %70 time to redo every special effect in CGI.
I was just thinking about this and was curious how much it would cost just to create digital intermediates of the dailies. I know all the editing and SFX do-overs would be quite costly but just getting the scanning done in the near future might be prudent as film doesn't last forever. If I were heading a project like this I would get a jump on future technology and do everything in 4K. The scanning process would be more time consuming and storage intensive but a larger, downsampled source would look better on blu-ray and you would have the source material on hand for future re-release down the road when 4K cinema resolution is common in the home.
Star Trek TNG Remastered & resolutions
TNG was created for a 525-line interlaced resolution master. All departments knew the limits of the resolution at the time of production and could hide visual problems due to this.
TOS was retelecined to HD at 1080/24p . TNG episodes are NOT going to be telecined at 4K. Only A-list feature films are given the 4K full treatment since 2004's Spiderman 2 which was the first all-4K pipeline Hollywood feature release. Scanning a TV series at 4K and downsampling to 2K for a Blu-ray release is really not worth the additional cost for a 22-year old TV show. It is not going to be projected on a 80-foot screen for 99 percent of the audience to see additional detail. I find it highly unlikely that 1960s-2005 Star Trek TV series would be sold higher than 1080 resolution in any future consumer video format.
If a new TV series in 2012 were shot on a 4K digital camera that is a different story for future releases of TV series. At that resolution it gets very difficult to hide makeup edges of appliances/layers for live-action aliens.
Hober Mallow wrote:
TNG was created for a 525-line interlaced resolution master. All departments knew the limits of the resolution at the time of production and could hide visual problems due to this.
TOS was retelecined to HD at 1080/24p . TNG episodes are NOT going to be telecined at 4K. Only A-list feature films are given the 4K full treatment since 2004's Spiderman 2 which was the first all-4K pipeline Hollywood feature release. Scanning a TV series at 4K and downsampling to 2K for a Blu-ray release is really not worth the additional cost for a 22-year old TV show. It is not going to be projected on a 80-foot screen for 99 percent of the audience to see additional detail. I find it highly unlikely that 1960s-2005 Star Trek TV series would be sold higher than 1080 resolution in any future consumer video format.
If a new TV series in 2012 were shot on a 4K digital camera that is a different story for future releases of TV series. At that resolution it gets very difficult to hide makeup edges of appliances/layers for live-action aliens.
Hober Mallow wrote:
This is key. I think they will dip their toe in the water to test customer response not with Season 1 (which was a weak season in terms of fan favorites, plots, visual effects) as Trek fans most likely would not want to double dip (DVD/Blu-ray) on a remastered season 1 TNG as their first remastered TNG series Blu-ray. Sure it would look MUCH better than season 7 visually but as far as Paramount/CBS marketing a season 1 Blu-ray of TNG it is a harder sell than a fan collective of TNG.
Re: Star Trek TNG Remastered & resolutions
It would be pretty awesome if a studio was that forward thinking. They would get a sharper blu-ray now and have source material for a future format release. Of course it will probably be 20 years before there is significant market penetration of 4K home video or something similar.
I know it's little more than a pipe dream, especially since they only bothered to scan the new Star Trek film at 2K for the IMAX digital intermediate.
It would be pretty awesome if a studio was that forward thinking. They would get a sharper blu-ray now and have source material for a future format release. Of course it will probably be 20 years before there is significant market penetration of 4K home video or something similar.
Re: Star Trek TNG Remastered & resolutions
But the resolutions of screens increase all the time. Smaller screens today have much larger resolutions than bigger ones just a few years ago. Also I could quite easily see projectors and larger screens for home media systems becoming fashonable once they get cheap enough. So I guess there is quite a bit of potential for a home market beyond 1080p. It most certainly wont stop there. Technology will continue to improve. In 10 years people will look down on that format as we to today on DVD, which 10 years ago everybody was dazzeld by.
But the resolutions of screens increase all the time. Smaller screens today have much larger resolutions than bigger ones just a few years ago. Also I could quite easily see projectors and larger screens for home media systems becoming fashonable once they get cheap enough. So I guess there is quite a bit of potential for a home market beyond 1080p. It most certainly wont stop there. Technology will continue to improve. In 10 years people will look down on that format as we to today on DVD, which 10 years ago everybody was dazzeld by.
TOS f/x budget was not shoestring. The real problems were the resources available at the time. What TOS needed was a feature film's budget and resources and even then there were limits with what could be done.
I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean. Are you saying that TMP “killed” Trek, or that it was the last work that deserves to be considered part of Trek?
It’s worth noting that besides #1, there’s one other movie that really took that approach: #5. (For purposes of this discussion, let’s agree that 1986 San Francisco is not a strange new world.) Both #1 and #5 are utterly despised by most fans.
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