Star Trek TNG Seasons Remastered on Blu-Ray - Page 30

As I understand it, they are scanning *everything* at 4K, then putting the episodes together digitally. If the 13 seconds is in another box, mislabeled, they will eventually find it as they scan in other reels.

This is merely my hypothesis, but what they probably did was pick these three (four) episodes to put on the sample and grabbed only those reels first. Then, after scanning those, they started scanning in every other episode, in sequential order, one can after the next. This is going on while other crews are piecing together the sampler episodes in the digital space. For all we know, they have scanned two seasons worth of film and they will find the 13 seconds as they scan season three.

If they don't ever find it... so what? They will upconvert their SD source and it will likely still be better than the DVD looks upconverted on home AV gear. At some point, yes, if they are missing entire episodes or something, then it will be up to each consumer to decide what the cut-off is. Hopefully, if something like that does happen, they would also adjust the price accordingly - even if it's only a couple dollars. (probably wishful thinking)

And the sky is ALWAYS falling @ the AVS Bluray section

I was addressing the idea that they would go through and check every shot for every episode before producing anything at all. It would be a massive waste of time.

Well, making sure the project is viable before announcing it should be worth something to any company that wants to succeed in the market.

They likely have every reason to believe it is viable. 13-seconds doesn't negate the viability of the project.

"...the remastering team always expected that there would be a 'few missing pieces'."

"There is a possibility that the footage has simply been mis-labeled and is stored in a box that hasn't yet been checked, so there is still a hope that the footage will be located at some point (hopefully before the 3rd season set is released)."

Wow, 13 seconds of film couldn't be found? Sound the klaxons. Um, yeah, didn't we all know that this kind of thing was going to happen. This project is a truly unprecedented undertaking, so allow me to quote myself from last July in this thread, and get back to my drooling anticipation.

They can look at their archive and estimate how much material they have for the show without reviewing every single piece. As to what specific scenes are there and which ones aren't, they'll be the same scenes that are there or are not there when they go to transfer the footage. So no, they'd gain nothing.

Everyone should realize they're not doing this just to sell some blurays. Like the TOS effort, they're doing this to preserve the material for decades to come. It's in everyone's best interest to do this regardless of how much material is lost.

Read: renew flagging tv syndication contracts

Could be, but the press release indicates that they are cutting the film and then transferring it. Did someone involved say otherwise?

Yes, they'll have a product to sell in a high quality format, that we consumers want very much. Being cynical about it doesn't make it wrong.

Plus the 4k bluray release down the road

Who's being cynical?

You know, I've heard all the back-and-forths over that. I just don't think I care about whose neurons fired first over a nugget of an idea. All I cared about as a sci-fi fan was that DS9 came after B5 with the same idea for a series, and I remember feeling short-changed, because, in my view, Star Trek was better than that.

13 seconds!?....So that's what the Omega-13 was for.

I must have mised this. Is 1.33:1 confirmed?

Reshoot the scene with Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver? Nobody will notice the difference.

Officially confirmed? No. But thedigitalbits unofficially confirmed it with their sources back in late September following the official announcement... Rik1138 over at blu-ray.com (who revealed what scene those 13 seconds were from) maintains that it will be 1.33:1 based on either first hand knowledge or a source that he knows... and the only live-action footage that we have of the remastering is 1.33:1 (the last shot of Picard from "Encounter at Farpoint").

Like some have said... I don't care about the 13 seconds, even if they never find it.

What I care about is the possibility that they get a couple of years into this and then find a HUGE hole in the source material. By then many consumers will be invested... some will have sold their DVDs to get money to use to buy the first Blu-ray sets...

So what happens if a huge roadblock comes up and they scrap the project?

It just seems prudent to me that for an undertaking like this that will be expensive... if they don't have some way of verifying that they have all the source material available, why would they make the huge up front investment?

I know 13 seconds isn't much... but flip this around... they only completed 3 episodes before finding a problem. What if they keep finding problems with season 3? Or what if other seasons are worse.

Doctor Who comes to mind... The first and second Doctor are missing a bunch of entire episodes, and fragments of others. Nobody even knew how bad it was until they started releasing VHS (and later DVDs of course) because the BBC had a practice of overwriting old stuff anyway without plans for syndication back in the 1960s.

The 3rd Doctor would have been missing more episodes BUT those were shot in color and black & white so while a lot of color footage was lost, they still had b&w footage.

It wasn't because the earlier footage was old necessarily... they have the first episodes of Doctor Who.. and the 2nd Doctor is affected much more than the 1st...

Doctor Who has been a story-by-story release, though... not seasons... so people have gotten used to not having some stories likely to ever be available.

With Star Trek we are talking about season sets... so if we are finding this out now... what happens in 6 months if we find out there is more missing footage?

I hope we don't... but "what if" now is a game that we didn't think we would be playing back when everyone was worried over aspect ratio... nobody considered "what if" the footage doesn't exist.

Wow this missing footage news is not good. Especially the fact that it is in one of the showcase episodes being used. They could have picked any episode other than Sins of the Father. If the one they picked has issues well as you all say above, what does that mean for the rest of the series??

Hmmmm..... not sure about the aspect ratio debate now.... I guess it may have been a major reason why they are sticking with 1.33:1, especially if there are many episodes with missing footage.

I'm a bit more hesitant about this whole release now.... I really hope this is an isolated case.

Oops, I misread the PR. I thought they were scanning it all, then editing. However, I'm not sure that changes my point: they grabbed the reels identified as the selected episodes first. If a segment is missing, they may find it later as they go through the rest of the episodes of the season - but in a box instead of scanned in already. So the sampler will probably be SD for the 13-seconds no matter what, but when Season 3 is released it will be HD if they find it.

"CBS is, in fact, returning to the original film negatives, a mother lode of material encompassing 25,000-plus reels of footage, and editing the episodes together precisely as they were when they originally aired between 1987 and 1994. Visual effects will not be upconverted from videotape, but instead will be recompositioned. The freshly cut film will ultimately be transferred to high definition with 7.1 DTS Master Audio."

C'mon, guys, try to stay positive!

Bear in mind that the person(s) writing and approving the press release may not necessarily have a full and/or accurate understanding of the production workflow.

An interesting contrast...

We aren't panicking over 13 seconds of a scene that will be upconverted instead of original film scanned to HD.

In the Nightmare on Elm St thread, people are mad because the old New Line logo was replaced with a newer logo. Not a scene missing or upconverted... but the movie studio logo.

Perspective.

Re: "freshly cut film"; I don't see the point in conforming the negative to the final edits. Everything from the initial scan onwards will be done in the digital domain, so what good would a cut neg be? I doubt that they'll need to run off prints or anything. Heck, even in that rare case the easiest thing would be a film-out of the finished digital files which could then be used to create prints, instead of using the neg to print an IP, then an IN and so on. And what about the episodes with missing material? Are they gonna cut in a film-out of the upscaled SD footage?

This was my thinking, as well. Hence my speculation that the press release details may not actually reflect the production methodology with complete accuracy. It would be expensive to bring a negative cutter into the project and I can't see any purpose in doing so, either. And certainly if they were going to, you'd think they would wait until the new HD fx shots were completed, so they'd still want to scan and then edit digitally first, anyway, as far as BD production goes.

I'm worried about 13 seconds missing being an indicator of future problems, however, I'll buy the sampler disc with the hope that should that footage be found the episode will be corrected on the actual season set when it's released.

It is worrisome that footage would go missing completely though. But I've never been involved in television production, and have no idea what kind of security is involved. I am curious though. :P

I doubt it's a question of security; rather, one of organization.

Agreed... which is why it makes a lot of people nervous that it might be the tip of the iceberg. What are the odds that those 13 seconds will be all that was misplaced?

I guess my concern when I questioned how their security was was more to do with wondering if it would ever be found: organizational issues could lead to that footage being found at some later date; security issues would imply that the footage is lost forever.

At any rate, hopefully there's no iceberg (or an ice-cube instead) and this is just an isolated incident.

New extended sampler trailer, more footage in ~HD to discuss and breakdown:

http://www.startrek.com/article/the-...launch-in-2012

Ooooo, the bridge looks so crappy. CAN'T WAIT!