Star Trek TNG Seasons Remastered on Blu-Ray - Page 6

As long as we have TNG Season 1 Blu-ray in our hands sometime next year all is good

I wouldn't get too excited.

Too late, man... too late...

You should read Ken Rockwell's take on the megapixel race. Interesting stuff actually.

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/mpmyth.htm

Some news on the remastering. The current plan is to use the SD masters and upscale to 1080p. The result will be quite underwhelming and looks nothing like real HD. If they go ahead with this the backlash will be tremendous.
I have seen a short sample done by Lowry Digital. The SD is from telecine in 1998 with baked in sharpening halos. Basically garbage in, polished garbage out.
I hope Paramount comes to their senses and rescans from the negatives. The SFX will have all to be redone. Yes, it's very expensive. But without it the show will look poor on Blu Ray and no amount of processing can change that.

Wait, so they did a new SD telecine in 1998 but aren't willing to do an HD telecine 13 years later? What sort of reasoning is that? Even new HD masters with upscaled SD effects shots would be preferable to just upscaling the whole damn thing. This is a terrible idea but I guess we shouldn't put anything past Paramount.

The costly issue is not the new telecine but the redoing of all sfx in 1080p. That needs to be done or the new telecine is rather pointless.

That would definitely save me some money I suppose.

True to some extent... but if they don't do a new HD master of the film, then there isn't any point in doing anything, to me...

IF they at least made HD masters... everything but the F/X would be sharper... so that IF they decided to do the F/X they would be ready... IF they don't, then I really see the whole thing as wasted effort.

They won't sell these when they will not be better than the existing DVDs and those DVDs can be had for bargain basement pricing now.

Wait, I thought the costly and potentially insurmountable issue was having to re-edit all of the episodes from the original film elements, since they were shot on film, but edited at NTSC resolution?

If they do end up going back and re-editing/remastering from the original film elements, I think I could grudgingly live with upscaled fx-only shots, if that's the only way they can afford to do it. Obviously they'd have to rerender at least the mixed live action/fx shots to make it look decent though.

In any case, if it's true that Paramount is thinking about releasing an upscaled SD version on Blu-ray, they should just stop, immediately. If they really want to try and double-dip using existing masters, then just put the original NTSC releases out again on Blu-ray, with a season per disc or something. But they'd better price it competitively with the DVDs, and not dare call it anything like high definition.

They did that with trials and tribal-ations and it looked bad and more juddery than the SD version. What a greedy cash grab if they try this. They will boost the contrast and color and add more EE so they will "appear" to pop more visually but that's nothing we can't do ourselves with our own displays.

Yes this is the case.

I always thought it'd be a miracle if they even found all the original elements again.

I hope for all our sakes you're joking....

Yes the scanning costs will be somewhat trivial compared with the actual work of dredging through the lineup and reconforming the rescanned material. (there is probably a lot of it and I supect the take selection info is probaby not that easy to relate back to the actual neg, they will probably have to scan a lot of junk in order to figure out what the necessary material is) .I hope they remix the audio too , that was always something I found shocking on TNG. Its ironic the original series always sounded and looked better than TNG right from the original air date.

The VFX are not that elaborate on TNG (even for their day) if they stay similar to the originals but with just a little revamp they shouldn't be that tricky or expensive per episode.

Come on, this is Paramount we're talking about.

Still, it's several hundred quid saved for me not bothering to 'upgrade'. Plus I rather like my elaborate plastic DVD boxsets.

It would be better they didn't do anything at all than do a poor job.

Agreed. Crap like this can only hurt HD and blu ray sales

The only reason we got the films on BD was so Paramount could cash in on the popularity of JJ Abrams's new film; and we all know how that turned out.

Releasing a half-asked, pathetic SD-upscaled Blu-ray TNG collection to coincide with the sequel seems right up their alley to me.

-Posting while tired and grumpy.

... Plus the laser is blue, so you know it's better.

grr... I will be extremely disappointed if they go the upscale route. I agree that I would rather see a full season in SD on a single BD-50 than to buy upscaled crap. I won't do it.

mhafner, do you actually have a source for this info? I really find it hard to believe they would do that...

I hope you're right but they DID do it with DS9 Trials and Tribble-ations. If they couldn't be bothered for just ONE episode then imagine 150+

I'm not saying they won't take the easy way out, just that that's not really evidence that they will.

It's a little different, economies of scale and all that. It would have been cost prohibitive for just one episode while under the budget and time constraints of a single episode in the middle of a season. What they did with T&T is not indicative of anything, really.

When (if) they decide to go the same route as TOS, it will be a big ordeal and they will brag about it and have mini-docs showing them "going back to the negative" and all that. If this rumor is even true, we'll get all the details soon enough.

Yeh that episode was only a (tacked on) special feature after all.

If they give TNG the same TLC that TOS received, I will be in Trekkie heaven (AFAIAC, the road stops with TNG...) Paramount, if you are listening, I will pay top dollar for these if you do them right!

I know but they bothered to upscale it to HD. It would have been a great test run

You mean I made it up? :-)
The source is a talk by the people who did the upscaling and showed a clip. They also said Paramount might still change their mind.

Hopefully they will change out their minds for ones that work properly. Don't give us garbage upscales. Trek has made them a lot of money... why not sink a little back in for once and soak up the glory of a job well done for a change?

Petition time.