Star Trek TNG Seasons Remastered on Blu-Ray - Page 49

SotF looks a lot more grain reduced than the other 2 episodes. Very smoothed in most scenes and not loaded with grain start to finish like TIL.

TIL might be a stylistic choice. Looks like a lot of it was filmed in dim interiors with spotlight in the windows to get the supernova sun effect. Outside shots were always slightly overexposed too.

Man, wish Okuda wasn't so tight lipped about these things.

About the new lossless audio: Do we know that these are new mixes? Maybe they just took the latest 5.1 mixes, expanded them to 7.1, and then just encoded them on the BD as lossless.

Therefore, has anyone compared the DVD mix of Farpoint w/ the new BD mix? Maybe that episode was always mixed poorly.

Doug

See how different the brightness is as well? I mentioned earlier in the thread that I didn't dig the overly bright nature of these new transfers; the lighting has a lot more character in the promo shot, regardless of any "crush".

I hope that they didn't up the brightness after showing the eps to their execs or some daft focus group or whatever. It looked beautiful before but now it looks too harsh to my eyes.

I agree. I think the zoomboxed episode is outrageous, just as bad as the pilot which is framed too wide. This sampler is a living advertisement for why 16/9 would be better. Correct top and bottom 'action safe" information + expanded sides = winning.

They could just as easily screw that up, too. What would be best is sticking to what they said they were going to do. A mistake like this is just utter carelessness.

What's funny is that everytime there's a live action shot with VFX, they use the larger image as on the DVD (actually even a bit more, just as you'd expect). For instance, when Riker, Data and Geordie are looking at an LCARS display on the bridge or when Kurn steps off the transporter pad and the camera pans with him you can see the soundstage rafters above the set. Then when the cut happens, they're back to the overly cropped image.

It has to be intentional. I just wonder why they didn't move some of the act one credits up in the frame back to the tile safe area.

The pilot looks the same as on the DVD, the only change is we get back some picture information on the sides that used to have thin black pillar bars on NTSC video. For all intents and purposes, the framing is the correct 1.33:1 TV area that was intended back in 1987. The pilot and "The Inner Light" look just fine. It's "Sins" that really has the issues (missing footage, cropped image).

It's just so odd that they even chose Sins of the Father as an episode for the sampler disc in the first place... there are so many other episodes that would have been more appropriate, like...

Q Who?
Tinman
Yesterday's Enterprise

Even Where No One Has Gone Before except for the fact that Season 1 coming out soon anyway so that would have been not worth it.

Best of Both Worlds would have been a bit much to ask I guess, but I still find SotF a puzzling choice. Not that I'm saying SotF was a bad episode, it was pretty decent, just not as good as some...

One undesirable effect of this release is that it's heightened interest in star trek as a whole: the price of the original star trek movies boxset has skyrocketed in price since the launch of TNG on blu ray.

Well, that begs the question, why don't you already have it? I'm sure it will come back down before too long. And it has heightened my interest. I'm rewatching my TOS BDs as I'm eagerly waiting for the full season sets of TNG to hit the streets. And I'm waiting for DS9 and Enterprise to be annouced that they're coming to BD, but I guess we'll have to wait a while for those to materialize.

I can't speak for him but I don't own the films on Blu-ray because they are gawdawful filter fests. $5 or $20, they're still not worth owning. Paramount can do better. They proved it with TOS and now with TNG.

I haven't bought the Trek movies on Blu-ray because they're an atrocious DNR fest.

Maybe when they clean up their act for the Blu-ray 4K release I'll buy them.

Suddenly, I feel a whole lot better about not having bought the star trek boxset, lol.

I know what you all mean: I picked up a copy of enter the dragon and the dnr is way over the top. I would much rather have had film grain and detail rather than having both scrubbed out.

I hear you, alas, this framing was intended for CRT TVs. It doesn't work for recent plasma / LCD TV because the top and bottom, which were previously overscanned, in addition to the CRT TV plastic frames over the tube working as hard mattes, are now exposed. To get a correctly, "as intented" frame, using the industry "common top", as well as near the 'action safe' which is the true intended frame, you have to zoom it 1.1, resulting in an image about 1.44:1 wide. Even then, there's still some air above heads, but it works fine.

I really hope the 16/9 master will be made carefully, because if they go beyond cropping up to the action safe, it will look bad.

CBS isn't Paramount.

And that my friends is the difference. CBS seems to take greater pride in archiving their products correctly.

Thanks for posting this, Maxwell. Good info. The one comparison shot I'd like to see is the extreme closeup on Worf when he first steps up to speak before the High Council. I thought that shot looked a shade too close when I watched it, so it would be interesting to see what it looked like on DVD.

I don't have time to superimpose them, but here are the appropriate frames. It's roughly the same amount of cropping you see on all the non VFX shots (about 15%-17%):

Blu-ray:
http://tng.trekcore.com/bluray/exclu...nner/sins5.jpg

DVD:
http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albu...efather113.jpg

Yeah, I'd like to see someone contact CBS about this to see if it's an error that will be corrected on the official sets or if it's intentional. Seems to me that this framing puts important things like people's heads dangerously close to the frame's edge. On a tv with even a little overscan, that head is getting clipped into. Also, the other episodes don't exhibit the cropping.

That being said, on a 16:9 version, I would expect that level of vertical cropping on each episode. They'd have no choice.

These two images are clearly not the same frame, as you can tell from the angle of Worf's body and the expression on his face.

I watched the Blu-ray before reading the complaints in this thread. Without a direct side-by-side comparison to the DVD, the framing looked fine to me. It did not seem any more uncomfortably cramped than the other episodes on the disc, which I chalked up to a stylistic decision of late '80s television programming, when it was expected that the entire audience would be watching on small low-def TVs. Maybe there's more information available on the camera negative, but framing variances like this aren't uncommon when dealing with two separate transfers.

Basically, this seems like a lot of nit-picking to me that 99.9999% of the audience will never notice or care about.

I had watched the first part of Farpoint on my basement TV using only the TV speakers. Last night I watched the remainder on the HT, where I bitstream from the BD player to a Marantz receiver (downmixed from 7.1 to 5.1). Although it did seem like the score was a little louder in the surrounds than the other two episodes, I didn't think it sounded bad or wrong. I think that Farpoint just had more of a bombastic score, and it sounded appropriate.

Doug

Having also had the benefit of watching it before I read about the "issue", I agree.

Tell that to "My Fair Lady." It's an atrocious Blu-ray that isn't even sourced from the 65mm restoration that Mr. Harris supervised. If they had scanned that at 8k and done further frame-by-frame touch ups, it could have looked spectacular.

I don't trust CBS any more than I do Paramount or Universal for catalog titles. Even their Star Trek TOS Blu-ray's have a very low bitrate (too many episodes per disc) with too much filtering.

I didn't say they were. Admittedly it wasn't clear:

"Paramount can do better. They (CBS) proved it with TOS and TNG."

Paramount should learn from CBS.

You're right. I was trying to save myself time by simply linking to images that were already publicly available. Once Michael Dorn hits his mark and begins his dialogue, the camera settles and then only he is moving. Here is a direct screenshot comparison and an overlay of the exact frames:



http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/107219

***

The Blu-ray has 83.8% of what the DVD shows. In other words, 16.2% of the image has been cropped. It's likely intentional for some unknown reason, as the live-action VFX shots in "Sins" seem to show slightly more than 100% of the DVD image. Again, "The Inner Light" and "Encounter at Farpoint" do not have this kind of episode-wide issue and in most shots we actually get about 2% more image.

What are the odds we're just seeing overscan compensation here? They would have shot with safe areas in mind, which aren't an issue in HD.. they may only have trimmed what was originally going to be out of frame anyway.

Just a thought, I'm not trying to defend it or anything, but it does look fairly consistent.

I'm going to go ahead and say the odds are fairly low, in my opinion.

Again, I'm starting to sound like a broken record here, but... the other two episodes on the Blu-ray sampler are showing around 100-102% of the DVD image. It's only this one episode (Sins of the Father) that has a substantial difference from the DVD (i.e., we're only getting about 83-85% of the DVD image). If what you're speculating is true, then why the inconsistency between the three episodes? Shouldn't they all have the same relative amount of crop?

Also, don't most HDTVs today still have overscan turned on right out of the box? Don't you have to manually enable a 1:1 mode; how many consumers do that? (I ask because I don't own an HDTV with such a mode -- but my projector is 1:1, obviously). That's why I think it's safer to stick with the originally intended active picture area from the DVD. They clearly thought that was a good idea with the other two episodes.

Okay, I didn't realize it was just one of the episodes that was showing this. My bad...

Regarding the zoomed in episode, I think they may have mixed up the framed for 16/9 version top and bottom specs wiith the framed for 4/3 one.

Only now you loses the sides on most of the shots. The SFX shots may be framed wider because they aren't from the same sources as the live action shots.

So in essence, this may be representative of the top and bottom information we will get on the 16/9 masters. Just a hunch.

Hmm. You may be onto something there. Robert Meyer Burnett did say he saw a 16:9 test of TNG at CBS. Maybe it was "Sins of the Father"? I always figured it was "Encounter at Farpoint." Looking at where Super 35mm 1.78:1 Transmitted Area would fall over the "Sins" screencaps, it does roughly correspond to the height of the Blu-ray image. Maybe they did just do a 4:3 crop from a 16:9 scan... perhaps they were too pressed for time to do a proper 4:3 scan and figured they'd get to it when they tackled Season 3?

Though, it seems unlikely they'd do an entire episode this way. Regardless, here's a look at where the framing would just about fall: