Star Trek Enterprise coming to Blu-ray on March 26, 2013 - Page 2

In real life there have been lots of ships named "Enterprise"... so that was fine with me.

I know I just mean I would have preferred something different than the Enterprise. Tell the story of another early ship maybe. Have it set on an alien planet before the Prime Directive existed. Something different. I just think they played it too safe.

The Prime Directive didn't exist... they even talked about it during the first season... how they might need to come up with some rules for interacting with other alien worlds...

Except for the overly-long Xindii plot, I actually liked Enterprise a lot. I think a lot of the flaws are from people who were burned out from seeing Star Trek non-stop and multiple shows since 1987 after being deprived of it on tv for over 20 years prior.

I think much the hate on Enterprise was the result of Voyager screwing the pooch and the fact that Enterprise was not appealing to the core fanbase who sodomized every episode of the show for daring to go before the original series and the fact that Enterprise was kinda like a metro-sexual version of Star Trek with it's easy-listening soft rock theme and jazzy end credits. I would have made the show a lot grittier but still hopeful and it would have shown the build-up to an Earth-Romulan war over several seasons with the war being the focus of the final season, resulting in the birth of the Federation.

I'd go with the 'burnout' theory, as I hated Enterprise on first run because it seemed like the same tired old ****, and I gave up on it completely when they dredged up the Borg for that S2 episode. But in later years I saw bits and pieces of the later seasons, and the Mirror Universe two-parter convinced me that I should give ENT another shot, and when I recently re-watched the whole show I loved it.

All the nods to established Trek lore were a particularly geeky treat, and when watching the show in sequence it really started to feel like it was laying the foundation for the Federation. I've warmed to the characters too, especially the classic Trek-style triumvirate of Archer, T'Pol and Trip.

Damned shame that they never got to the Romulan war, though the non-canon books fill it all in. I dug the reasoning for TOS-era technology looking as clunky as it does versus the typically 'busy' modern displays seen in ENT (even if it was pinched from nu Battlestar Galactica) and it would've been fascinating to see that play out on-screen, had they gone that route.

Yes I know it didn't exist yet, that's why I mentioned it. That was kinda my whole point.

I honestly believe it wasn't really burnout (by the public) because the reboot movie wasn't that many years after Enterprise ended and it's really revitalized Trek. It was really just lack of imagination. The reboot movie was treading on old territory too but it did it in a kind of non-trek way. It was Star Trek but less...geeky. More modern and "realistic" from a character and world standpoint. That's why I liked it so much. I think that's why everyone else did too. Sometimes it's hard to remember that to the typical non-trekkie a lot of Star Trek can be really nerdy. This is what I mean when I talk about Enterprise. They should have approached the franchise from a different point of view. Less about the technical crap and more about making it seem somewhat believable for once. They actually did a fairly decent job in the first season at times but once the show got going and they had to one-up themselves to keep it interesting it just seemed to fall into the same old Star Trek trap. Upgraded weapons to seem more powerful, go to war and last seasons on end, Mirror Universe, Time Travel, alien of the week, etc. etc.. Blah. That to me is why it failed.

Anyway enough about that, I'm assuming the BD will be a somewhat decent improvement over what I've seen on HDNET and other channels?

Seems to be the first to review with caps:

http://www.blu-raydefinition.com/reviews/star-trek-enterprise-season-blu-ray-review.html

The pq of the caps are all over the place, some pretty good, some ok, some with strong artifacts. Only a small sample of course.

I'll be picking this up this weekend.

I'll be skipping season one and two.
But I'm in for season three and four on Blu-ray!

Those caps look pretty terrible for film.

The VFX is also upscaled, right? But 720 > 1080 is as bad as it could be, and was fine for BSG too.

"As I've discussed in previous articles, CG and VFX sequences for the first three seasons of Enterprise were rendered at 720p resolution during the show's production (CORRECTION: It seems most VFX shots were actually produced at 480p resolution, with shots only being rendered at 720p/1080p if the visual effects team thought aliasing issues were too severe). Rather than re-render these shots at full 1080p (which would have proved prohibitively expensive for CBS due to the reduced market for Enterprise) the shots have been up-scaled. The results seem to be very much dependent on the (admittedly variable) quality of the CG that was produced back in 2001-2002 rather than any upscaling algorithms CBS may have used."

http://trekcore.com/blog/2013/03/review-star-trek-enterprise-season-1-blu-ray/

Best Regards
KvE

Ironically the original vfx and matte paintings in TOS hold up better then what little I have seen of Enterprise vfx. Were all the seasons done with 480p vfx? It's rather odd they choose to do that at the time, it's not like 1080p was unknown.
Edited by wuther - 3/22/13 at 6:03pm

It all comes down to $ (profit) in the end: that's why so many Bluray are simply tweaked 1080i masters. Would have been much more expensive to render above 480p at the time.

Wait a second... businesses try to earn profit?

I don't think the question is why studios don't always release flawless products, I think it comes down to why the mass population doesn't care.

And much cheaper to shot the entire show in SD. So what? The point of doing a show in HD is the High Definition, not cost, it was more likely do to tight deadlines. Each lead actor probably cost more then the entire vfx budget.
Edited by wuther - 3/23/13 at 8:58am

I'll tell you these look pretty much identical to the HDnet broadcast that was done some time ago.