I'm mostly talking about Starfields, and flame packages for phasers and beaming FX.
For runabouts, you have the actual model shots on film (Danube shots specifically made for DS9), CG, or AI upscaling for that.
Poll Would you purchase a legit remaster of DS9?
- Thread starter SlayerSantiago
- Start date
I'm mostly talking about Starfields, and flame packages for phasers and beaming FX.
For runabouts, you have the actual model shots on film (Danube shots specifically made for DS9), CG, or AI upscaling for that.
I think you've misunderstood my position.
I don't want an upscale. I want a nice new build.
The upscale thing was in reply to someone who said they should leave the effects untouched, and I said the effects should at least be upscaled. (ie: I want more than that, but that should be the absolute bare minimum.)
My bad, bicubic or Lancoz would probably be good for that.
That's as basic as it gets.
Silver lining would be there, but the foundation for a rebuild would be an upconversion either way, so they'd be getting upscaled.
Sorry lol.
It all depends on the quality of the work. But if Yes/No, then Yes.
Original elements need to be studied to check for re-use and cleaning. That's a whole conservation effort.
Digital assets need to be built for shot replacement and upgrades. There is no library of assets that is ready to go; the modeling and texturing done on the originals is mostly garbage.
Most of DS9 and relevant fx models are gone or destroyed. Many will need digital replacements if their film sources aren't usable.
FX need to be created and if replacing live action bg, hopefully that on-set camera movement data still exists, but it's doubtful.
Camera choices need to be ditched in favor of better shot design. A lot of sequences will need to be lengthened. Data still exists for spaceship porn shots etc, but it's a lot of bad framing and movement. Oh, '90s, you have a lot to answer for. Audio cue implications here too.
Folks who could have been great sources of insight and problem-solving are far less interested now, and more than a few are already gone. Whoever takes on supe positions has to be willing to put the time in to understand how things were solved, and translate. The project will also need multiple teams. And certain folks from the original work will need to be kept away from it.
This isn't a 2- year project like Paramount, in its idiocy, wanted it to be.
Original elements need to be studied to check for re-use and cleaning. That's a whole conservation effort.
Digital assets need to be built for shot replacement and upgrades. There is no library of assets that is ready to go; the modeling and texturing done on the originals is mostly garbage.
Most of DS9 and relevant fx models are gone or destroyed. Many will need digital replacements if their film sources aren't usable.
FX need to be created and if replacing live action bg, hopefully that on-set camera movement data still exists, but it's doubtful.
Camera choices need to be ditched in favor of better shot design. A lot of sequences will need to be lengthened. Data still exists for spaceship porn shots etc, but it's a lot of bad framing and movement. Oh, '90s, you have a lot to answer for. Audio cue implications here too.
Folks who could have been great sources of insight and problem-solving are far less interested now, and more than a few are already gone. Whoever takes on supe positions has to be willing to put the time in to understand how things were solved, and translate. The project will also need multiple teams. And certain folks from the original work will need to be kept away from it.
This isn't a 2- year project like Paramount, in its idiocy, wanted it to be.
Okay, so let's assume that most of these things are garbage.
The Roddenberry Archive exists, and likely is rebuilding those digital assets, couldn't those be used?
They seem to be built for cinematic productions.
Also, why do sequences and shots need to be lengthened?
As for framing, what is the worst framed camera choice in the VFX that needs to be changed?
Like, if they were aiming for something between TNG:R and Babylon 5:R, couldn't they hit that without having to go to the trouble of complete shot recreation?
There are plenty of wide matte painting shots that in many cases could simply be upscaled, they don't contain live actors, and there are high res scans of those, if one chose to use them.
As for recompositing, most of it's blue screen, and there's a rich history of roto there.
So It looks like you have a handful of challenging shots with odo, many of those don't seem like they'd be hard to do now.
Hollywood has been able to do the T 1000 for nearly 30 years.
I'd think it would take two years to get the basic masters together, if it took two years to get X files completely scanned and conformed, then it would take two years to get the foundation ready.
The Conservation effort of 35mm elements shouldn't be that long. iConform would help.
That's the most important part of that.
The second team would be dealing with 35mm VFX assets. Model shots, etc.
Some of that content would come from archives from ILM, that were used on TNG:R, and the 4k film restorations.
The B team here would probably deal with viewscreens of actors, upscaling when necessary, Console animations, Matte Paintings and the like.
The third team would be dealing with particle effects, phasers, transporters, ETC.
The Fourth team would probably be CG and would interface with Roddenberry Archive, A team would probably be a mix of VFX supervisors of the original with assets, and new people, B team would be finishers under the supervision of the Okudas.
Five teams altogether?
If you were to do Voyager and DS9 together, 10 teams."
If "What We Left Behind" is any indication, the Wormhole asset either survived or upscaled very nicely, and from what I gather, the main challenge is probably going to be Odo, and likely space battles.
If you interfaced with the fans who make these models as a hobby and compensate them, then you would be able to put this together even faster.
I'm doing research on the series, and from what I gather, CGI shots across DS9 amount to anywhere from 20 minutes in total of CGI throughout the series, to if I'm being generous 2-3 hours in total.
This only applies to space battles and Odo. Many of these are basic and probably don't require complex solutions.
This only applies to space battles and Odo. Many of these are basic and probably don't require complex solutions.
It's funny to see the breadth of opinion on how extensive a theoretical HD release should be approached.
On one end, people who say 'just upscale it with a computer!' and on the other end you've got some wanting the props replaced digitally and others wanting the actual shots themselves changed.
Neither, it was a re-creation. (A very nice re-creation in my opinion!)
From the What We left Behind Blu-ray fact track:
It's funny to see the breadth of opinion on how extensive a theoretical HD release should be approached.
On one end, people who say 'just upscale it with a computer!' and on the other end you've got some wanting the props replaced digitally and others wanting the actual shots themselves changed.
Neither, it was a re-creation. (A very nice re-creation in my opinion!)
From the What We left Behind Blu-ray fact track:
View attachment 49380
I gotta know how they did it, because they did it perfectly.
Is the Fact Track something on the disc, or something produced independently? I think this is the first I've heard of it, and now I'm embarrassed by the idea that I missed something on the disc.
Same guys that did the marvelous DS9 season trailers.
Niners
We are David Frank and Christian Lerch. We are Motion Graphics Artists from Germany and we love Star Trek - Deep Space Nine. Watching "Star Trek: The Next Generation" on Blu-Ray we developed the idea to create some (non-profit) teasers featuring animated interface designs from our favorite Star...
www.youtube.com
It's on the disc. Though I can't say for sure if it is on the commercially available Shout Factory releases or just on the Backer's Edition, which is the one I have. I do know there are some differences between them.
Edit: According to an old TrekCore article, the Fact Track (or "Technical Trivia Track") does indeed seem to be exclusive to the Backer Edition.
Last edited:
A lot of Trek visual artists are germans, and one on ID was from my hometown.
It's wild how many Trek fans there are.
In a heartbeat.
I tried streaming DS9 and VOY once and they looked far worse than the DVDs thanks to frame reduction combined with using what looked like stripped interlace fields given how jaggy everything looked. Most VT shows on streaming appear to have been reduced from 29.97fps to 24, or maybe 20 is it all looked very choppy.
I'd settle for live action and the phasers redone, with all outer space shots and CGI upscaled. Obviously, Odo morphing could be extracted from deinterlaced SD and enlarged, but Odo's home planet with the liquid ooze everywhere might have to be redone from scratch or processed more. Makes for a lovely what-if thought, if nothing else. Not unlike Babylon 5's treatment, which is unfortunate in ways as most fans were hoping for a widescreen CGI redo to match up with the original 35mm films, though as many B5 scenes also had composited effects with mismatched FPS, and assuming the raw film negatives still existed and not the interpositives or whatever, a TNG-level remastering would be a very small chance at best. Most shows from the 80s and 90s filmed but edited on VT will never get that treatment. So fans of "Sliders", "The Norm Show", and every other show from back then are largely stuck. Granted, even going to the uncompressed VT source and upscaling can do more good than a compressed DVD source could ever do (sorry youtube channels, it's still no less waxy and ugly), just nothing near what the original material holds in terms of sharpness and color gamut/shadow detail.
Right now, upscaling is only selective edge enhancement and still can't add real detail. If that were true, every blu-ray release of every show shot on 480i/576i videotape would look just as glorious as every 35mm camera photo taken for promotional articles of the time and, nope, the edge enhancement techniques still can't add detail - only make the edges less blurry on a higher definition TV set. A couple obvious giveaways include medium or distance shots or, better yet, smaller text that could be legible on the original copy yet look distorted after processing.
I will say this - for older Simpsons and Futurama, it's very easy to take the uncompressed source material, clean up moiré, punch up some artificial gamut widening without adding blooming, deinterlace and strip down to 24fps and make the end result look near-filmic. It's far easier to use image vectorization* on drawn cartoon material than live action footage as such as it's easier to draw a higher resolution curved line over an interlaced jaggy one and smooth up/fill in the edges in the middle, using vectorization's coordinates instead of a raster line to make scaling far easier and futureproofing to the max for when 8k, 16k, 8675309k, etck, come out. Just load up the file, set the net resolution to whatever, and the larger graph is almost immediately compensated for when using differential equations to redraw relative coordinates for the new line to be crawn through that much smoother, wheeee!, but I never learned calculus along with little Harry and the other kids in "When the Bough Breaks" either. But I digress, those early Simpsons blu-rays came out long before these techniques were ubiquitous and thus have moiré and occasionally jaggy artifacts, but most cartoons stuck on VT can be made into near-perfect 35mm-scale equivalents and need double-takes or more to realize. Unlike live action where the giveaways are still quite obvious.
I tried streaming DS9 and VOY once and they looked far worse than the DVDs thanks to frame reduction combined with using what looked like stripped interlace fields given how jaggy everything looked. Most VT shows on streaming appear to have been reduced from 29.97fps to 24, or maybe 20 is it all looked very choppy.
I'd settle for live action and the phasers redone, with all outer space shots and CGI upscaled. Obviously, Odo morphing could be extracted from deinterlaced SD and enlarged, but Odo's home planet with the liquid ooze everywhere might have to be redone from scratch or processed more. Makes for a lovely what-if thought, if nothing else. Not unlike Babylon 5's treatment, which is unfortunate in ways as most fans were hoping for a widescreen CGI redo to match up with the original 35mm films, though as many B5 scenes also had composited effects with mismatched FPS, and assuming the raw film negatives still existed and not the interpositives or whatever, a TNG-level remastering would be a very small chance at best. Most shows from the 80s and 90s filmed but edited on VT will never get that treatment. So fans of "Sliders", "The Norm Show", and every other show from back then are largely stuck. Granted, even going to the uncompressed VT source and upscaling can do more good than a compressed DVD source could ever do (sorry youtube channels, it's still no less waxy and ugly), just nothing near what the original material holds in terms of sharpness and color gamut/shadow detail.
Right now, upscaling is only selective edge enhancement and still can't add real detail. If that were true, every blu-ray release of every show shot on 480i/576i videotape would look just as glorious as every 35mm camera photo taken for promotional articles of the time and, nope, the edge enhancement techniques still can't add detail - only make the edges less blurry on a higher definition TV set. A couple obvious giveaways include medium or distance shots or, better yet, smaller text that could be legible on the original copy yet look distorted after processing.
I will say this - for older Simpsons and Futurama, it's very easy to take the uncompressed source material, clean up moiré, punch up some artificial gamut widening without adding blooming, deinterlace and strip down to 24fps and make the end result look near-filmic. It's far easier to use image vectorization* on drawn cartoon material than live action footage as such as it's easier to draw a higher resolution curved line over an interlaced jaggy one and smooth up/fill in the edges in the middle, using vectorization's coordinates instead of a raster line to make scaling far easier and futureproofing to the max for when 8k, 16k, 8675309k, etck, come out. Just load up the file, set the net resolution to whatever, and the larger graph is almost immediately compensated for when using differential equations to redraw relative coordinates for the new line to be crawn through that much smoother, wheeee!, but I never learned calculus along with little Harry and the other kids in "When the Bough Breaks" either. But I digress, those early Simpsons blu-rays came out long before these techniques were ubiquitous and thus have moiré and occasionally jaggy artifacts, but most cartoons stuck on VT can be made into near-perfect 35mm-scale equivalents and need double-takes or more to realize. Unlike live action where the giveaways are still quite obvious.
* Hint: That could be part of the upscaling process too, along with mapping, localized edge detection and shadow detail altering, etc, etc, etc
Fixed. Those were clearly not taken from the original 35mm.
Wax mannequin with good edge sharpening for eyes and hair, color correction, but still looks liker a mannequin. The combadge looks like it's floating due to excessive unsharp masking and sponging plus color dodge (techniques used to selectively add some shadow detail), and how come the Trill splotches are still blurry? Compared to 480i VT it's still an improvement, not arguing on that, but that's a handpicked frame and there are going to be many more that will look pretty tacky by comparison. Especially seasons 5 onward...
Also, how was the original material filmed? Was it a film yielding a warmer color palette or cooler one, remembering some differences between TNG seasons 1 and 2 for example. (Hint: Season 2, with some tweaking, could easily blend in with the other seasons. Not perfectly, but it'd be closer. I like season 2 as it stands, though.)
I don't recall pink lighting, Miles being sunburned, and those two frames aren't the same frame either. The lips and pips prove that quick enough, ditto for the hair behind the right ear being visible in only one of them.
Oh come on, these are just easy pickings all selling the same theme three times over. Let's see mid- and long-shots with more detail than just a smacking great close-up of a face. There are plenty of times when quilting is blotted out, especially when removing DVD compression artifacting, among other issues.
Let's also do an experiment: Take a DVD screenshot, a 35mm remastered blu-ray screenshot, and an upscaled DVD screenshot to blu-ray resolution. Then take copies of the latter two and reduce their size to DVD size. A shame Trekcore took down all the screencaps, because the upscaled DVD screencaps don't look much better and reducing the sizes only shows more real detail in the 35mm remastered still there whereas the re-shrunk upscaled image looks... just like the DVD original.
Or, even faster still and to get what's closest to reality*, look up those scenes on the TNG blu-rays where they had to upscale. They did a great job in trying to get them to blend in, but telltale signs of the reality of the source material are still there. Especially in season 5 like "Power Play" where over a minute of footage was not found. The differences are striking, and even the near close-up of Riker's reaction in TBOBW pt2 is still noticeable, albeit barely and thankfully brief given the brevity of the clip.
* apart from the fact DS9 will never get a full film remastering, and the upscaling technologies currently available are no panacea beyond close-ups where the main image is already in full focus and thus easier to fiddle with than mid- and background detail
Last edited:
I honestly can't tell which "side" you're arguing for. It kind of sounds like you're claiming the Blu-ray quality is no better than the DVD, but it's hard to fathom that stance.
(Also I never said they were the exact frames. The two Dax shots aren't exact frame matches either. But they are the same shots more or less.)
...Why, exactly?
Will these do?
DVD is on the left, Blu-ray is on the right.
Last edited:
My issue with even these "professional fan jobs" is that certain stills - in isolation - might be passable at best once you accept the wax museum, but, as soon as they are viewed in motion, the fakery is quickly revealed to all but the most unobservant viewer. Increased pixel count is satisfied...and that's about it as far as consistent improvements are concerned. I simply do not feel comfortable plunking down Grant and his triplet (or quadruplet, possibly) brothers for a work of art given the pattern-producing software treatment.
You are wrong.
Now I understand at least, thanks to the edits made in the post. You're under the misapprehension that I am comparing DVD to an upscale of the DVD. You are mistaken.
The DVD caps are taken from the DVDs. The Blu-ray caps are taken from the documentary What We Left Behind, which re-scanned the film elements. So they have perhaps not been finished to the same degree they would be with a full-scale rebuild (and some shots are a bit de-noise happy) but they give a good idea of the details that were lost in the journey from the film to the tape masters to the DVDs.)
A lot of your comments now make more sense to me in that context. At least now I know I can disregard them.
Last edited:
35mm has more dynamic range.
...and that post of Jadzia Dax, was rescanned, that's not an unsharp mask.
People will deny it no matter what you put in front of them.
There were some alternate takes used in WWLB because they had to eyeball some of those shots.
Similar threads
- Poll
