Starship EXETER upgraded?

[Bixby]

On Youtube, the Tressaurian Intersection just popped up yesterday...the version uploaded by the official channel, mind you. I noticed that you could only watch it in 480p at best, which is fine for the time it was made for, but in these days of 2160p it seems a bit lacking.

Some months ago I saw a couple of older cartoons and someone on his own blew up the image to 2160p using AI tech.

I don't know anything about this kind of doohickey, but is it possible to upgrade 480p live-action to 2160p, even at 1080p with AI?

Would the Johnson bros even consider re-releasing their 2 films in a modern format, or have they sworn off spending any more money than they have on their babies?

 

[Firebird]

There's a fan over in the DS9 forum that's working on AI upscaling of the various 480p laserdisc releases, which have better quality than the DVD masters. The results are questionable at this point.

 

[Mudd]

I don't know about Jimm, who's definitely moved on to other things since then.

Aside from all other questions and potential issues is the fact that the shows were shot on 720x480 video. When shows like TOS or TNG are released at higher resolution, they're rescanned from film prints. CG is used to generate any effects that don't hold up because they were composited for the relatively undemanding standards of NTSC broadcast in an era when such effects were a novelty on television.

So, no larger format prints or negatives of Exeter exist. I probably have the project files for...sixty percent of the effects that were rendered in Lightwave? It might be interesting to rerender a few of them in higher resolution but, again, the models are textured and lit to resemble as closely as possible what you'd see on 1966 broadcast TV. There are even a few hard-edged or "misaligned" mattes thrown in there and there.

Using AI upscalers do not, obviously, reveal previously unseen detail in an image or even necessarily aid in color correction of the kind that was done on the TOS episodes. They interpolate made-up texture and detail to "fill in" and sharpen the original image.

I'm currently working with Topaz AI to generate a book cover image. It's quite remarkable, what the software does - but the only reason it's worthwhile, in my case, is to refine a rendered CG shot for commercial use. There's no commercial motive in the case of Exeter.

So, a couple of considerations there.

Obviously, anyone with access to the tech could download the YouTube files and run an upscaler on them and probably achieve results similar to what we would.

And if I've misstated anything, perhaps one of the other Exeter alumnae who post or lurk on the board will correct me.

 

[Mudd]

BTW, someone did do an upscale of "The Tressaurian Intersection" on their own, two years ago:

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[Bixby]

Well, I guess you've answered my question, Mudd (or is it Dennis?) Unofficial or not, this Youtube channel DID do an AI upgrade on TTI, on Savage Empire and Night Shift as well!! It's amazing how much more vibrant the images and colours are...You can see all the hairgel on Jimm Johnson's head!!

I was actually more afraid that Savage Empire could never be upscaled, seeing as the videofiles seemed more "damaged" with scratches and those with effects seemed to need more care...I'm looking at Savage Empire now and 10 minutes in, so far so good.

It really is too bad that a third or even a fourth episode of this series never came to be...

 

[David cgc]

Aside from all other questions and potential issues is the fact that the shows were shot on 720x480 video. When shows like TOS or TNG are released at higher resolution, they're rescanned from film prints. CG is used to generate any effects that don't hold up because they were composited for the relatively undemanding standards of NTSC broadcast in an era when such effects were a novelty on television.

One consideration is that YouTube's 480p compression was and remains a big pile of poop. A reupload of even the original "master" video file after it was given a non-AI upscale to 1080p would make it look noticably clearer. If the original edit file was still available and the video could be scaled up before exporting, that'd be an even bigger improvement.

The example that always comes to mind for me is Farscape: The show was mastered in SD, but was eventually released on blu-ray. The upscale isn't that impressive technically, but there's still a clarity gain compared to the DVD compression. There's a key scene where there's a game of rock-paper-scissors, and I've seen people who watched it on DVD or streaming think that one character won by throwing rock, but on the blu-ray you can see much more clearly that they both played scissors and tied.

 

[Mudd]

Well, I guess you've answered my question, Mudd (or is it Dennis?) Unofficial or not, this Youtube channel DID do an AI upgrade on TTI, on Savage Empire and Night Shift as well!! It's amazing how much more vibrant the images and colours are...You can see all the hairgel on Jimm Johnson's head!!

I was actually more afraid that Savage Empire could never be upscaled, seeing as the videofiles seemed more "damaged" with scratches and those with effects seemed to need more care...I'm looking at Savage Empire now and 10 minutes in, so far so good.

It really is too bad that a third or even a fourth episode of this series never came to be...

Dennis, here.

 

[Maurice]

Scott Cummins upscaled TTI a few years back from an uncompressed render. The format of the raw footage meant the red channel is really chunky compared to the others, and the edges of the red uniforms looked bad when upscaled, though Scott got a tool that fixed this, which made a big improvement. He ran into a snag that a handful of shots looked bad because there was something wrong with the encoding when originally imported from the tapes. To fix it would probably require recapturing the footage from the originals, which only Jimm has…somewhere.

Perfectionism aside, the main issue is that uploading a new version wouldn't be seen by many people. Once we got near a million views, the YouTube recommendation engine kicked in, and TTI gets a pretty steady ongoing viewership of tens of thousands of views a month. Since YouTube doesn't allow replacing a video file, any new upload would start from zero and wouldn't be recommended, so the question becomes, how would anyone find it?

This was actually part of our upload strategy. Other fanfilms uploaded multiple copies or even versions, say to YouTube and Vimeo, etc., and that diluted the total view count on each, which kept them from hitting the magic number needed to get the recommendations going. We purposefully uploaded a single version in a single place to avoid that, and it worked. There are episodes of more well-publicized fanfilms that don't have anywhere near the number of views TTI got/gets. Over 2.6 million to date.

 

[Bixby]

Well the reasons make a lot of sense. And since someone DID do an image upgrade I'm satisfied for now and I get to see the episodes in this mode... But 2160p is already available out there, and who knows until an even higher grade is offered what may happen.
Thanks Maurice

 

[Maurice]

We're also not thrilled that people do this without at least asking if we're okay with it.