Any News On Star Trek  

Do you mean the movies? I believe all of the movies have had HD transfers made at this point. As for the TV series, the only one I know of that was filmed and post-produced in HD was Enterprise. TNG was definitely not post-produced in HD, but I don't know about DS9 or Voyager. Also, Paramount is releasing on both Blu-Ray and HD DVD, so they might show up on both.

I think I'm going to save you some money.

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/articl...h03studios.jpg

That little thing on the right should ring a bell...

If Voyager became available in HD I would be a very happy man!! Just imagine Seven of Nine in all her glory in HD. Those thick pouting lips and large
Breast! :eek:

Anything else in well....... "insufficient!"

Ben

Now if we could add E.T. on the bike or a dinosaur there would be less headaches.

Amazon has a preliminary listing for the "Ultimate Star Trek Movie Collection" HD-DVD, but I don't believe it's been officially announced:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...v=glance&n=130

Ask yourself a question......... will Paramount be releasing the directors cut of Star Trek - The Motion Picture and if so will they fix the low resolution effects shots they added ? if they don't then it will really pull you out of the movie as the current dvd format is more than enough to show some of the added effects as being less than stellar ( on a large projection screen )

Did they do the effects for ST:TMP at video resolution or native (4k)? I know there was some talk in the extras about matching the look of the original film and effects, including grain, etc. But I don't recall exactly if they were referring to the video transfer or the digital vault master....

If it was a 4k master then pulling a HD copy will be easy. But if you are correct and it was video-only, it will be more difficult and expensive. Still, it would be a nice selling point for the new formats.

-John

I just wish to hell they would release old films with restoration only and save new effects for new films.

Art

I wish that in the new formats every tittle that looked horrendous in dvd, will look much better, at least new transfers and remasters.

New transfers and restorations are always a good thing. It would be nice to have both the original and new versions of ST:TMP around, but I have to admit most of the changes they made were for the better and made everything look and flow more smoothly. And given the troubled (rushed!!) history of its production, I suppose on balance the newer cut preferable, at least to me.

You know, the only thing I didn't apprecate about the changes was the changes to the "Red Alert" sounds...I always liked the cool, mechanical male voice for them in the original movie.

Oh well.

-John

Oh, and on a related note -- I re-watched the portion about Foundation Imaging's work on ST:TMP last night and it still isn't clear to me if the effects were done in HD/4k or strictly for video. I would be a bit surprised if Robert Wise would go through all that work only for home video, with HD on the horizion.

I've also tried to track down an email or Web address for Foundation Imaging but I've only come up with dead ends. Can any insiders comment on this?

-John

Watch it for yourself on a projector and there is one shot that looks low resolution to me its the opening scene when a shuttle flies under the golden gate bridge .... in the background is clearly a drawing of Starfleet Headquarters and it sticks out like a sore thumb and never used to be there.... don't know if thats low resolution or easily fixable.

IIRC, Paramount only budgeted them enough for a standard-def rendering.

All of the CGI in Enterprise was rendered in SD and then upscaled for the HD broadcasts, even though the live action parts were shot on HD video. Paramount considered that "good enough", and felt similarly about the ST: TMP "Director's Edition".

Josh,

I hope you're wrong, but I strongly suspect you aren't! In any event, there will be a great outcry from Fandom if that's the case for the HD versions of ST:TMP (on either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray.) And at this point, since Fandom is all Paramount has left after driving a stake through the heart of Enterprise, they had better be getting their act together on this front.

I imagine after all the work that he put in, the estate of RKW would not be pleased to have the original version as the only "go-forward" version available in HD, much less a substandard upsampled copy from SD.

This could be a mess.

-John

Paramount is run by a bunch of fracking idiots if they went through all the trouble of trying to finish the SFX for Robert Wise's ST: TMP and only budgeted for SD effects!!! The same goes for Enterprise since it was shot on film and HD video!

At least Universal had the SFX for Battlestar Galactica rendered at high resolution (hopefully at least 1080p)! By the way, BSG is 100% better than Enterprise and 85-90% better than Voyager by a long shot! Still not absolutely perfect (with the human/AI Cylon clone back story still needing to be consistantly fleshed out), but something that Star Trek should have aspired to, but never did at the hands of the moron twins: Brannon Braga and Rick Berman!

I'd love to see BSG and the Star Trek movies on Blu-Ray at 1920x1080p with lossless audio! Come on Universal, switch to Blu-Ray already! :D

Ah, but you see, Paramount can sell us all HD discs of Star Trek with the effects done in SD and upconverted. Then they'll re-do the effects in HD and offer us all new "improved" versions so we can buy them all over again and they get our money twice. Mark my words, it will happen.

dugpa,

I don't doubt that for the TV shows (and in some ways, wouldn't mind it since I'm not in any hurry to buy them and the original effects were SD/NTSC anyway), but I'd hope for ST:TMP at least they did it right the first time by creating the effects for a 2K or 4K master. Surely even a group of fracking idiots aren't that thick.

The big problem with TMP and upsampling would be that not all of the effects are "pure" (exterior, etc.) shots -- there are a few on the bridge towards the end where the viewscreen has been replaced with new visuals, and those would stick out like a sore thumb if they were upsampled and cut in with the rest.

I have someone checking on this and I'll report back as soon as I know anything. Could be a while, but hopefully we'll have some closure at least on this front.

-John

PS: BSG is great, isn't it? Heck, even my wife watches it with me, and she's not much of a sci-fi type at all. Goes to prove that a good story is more important than whiz-bang effects any day, not that theirs are shabby of course.

PPS: 200th post! :)

I don't hold out much hope for brand new worthy transfers in either of these formats early days, at least for releases that are considered niche or cult,

Does anybody here have "Outland" on dvd? While it looked great in 1997 compared to video tape, try to watch it now, and you'll see just how awful the "transfer" was. You'll notice I said transfer, because they didn't even bother to remaster from video tape, I'm fairly certain they used the same master they were using for VHS at the time, and you can clearly see the terrible de-interlacing they did on that release.

And If outland were the only case early in DVD's format I wouldn't worry but it took years for the majority of studios to do much more than basic DVD-5 editions of movies and most of those had pretty awful transfers. I just picked up the new Blazing Saddles DVD for about $8.00 and it's new HD master makes the original DVD look like crap.

Also I laugh quite alot when I see alot of people talking about the capacity for both of these formats, stating that because Blue Ray has more capacity that it will win in the end.

If history teaches us anything it is that these companies are as greedy as they come, and they will do ABSOLUTELY the minimum they have to, to sell their product and reap "HUGE" profits.

Just recently as a matter of fact, one of the most over marketed sequels released on DVD this year, "The Transporter 2" was only a 4.7 GB release.

If they at this late date in the DVD format, can still release a major studio movie in DVD-5 then be prepared to be let down on more than a few HD-DVD Blueray releases. I mean for gods sake, Full Metal Jacket is still only released as a Full Frame DVD currently, if I'm not mistaken.

And since theres still a hefty portion of the unwashed masses out there that still prefer "Full Screen" over "Widescreen" I think that both Blue Ray and HD-DVD may have a huge surprise waiting for them in that there just isn't enough people with HD Tv's yet for this market to support two standards.

I for one am not committing to either of these formats until I know whether or not I can watch them on a PC without having to move to Microsofts new DRM Platform (Vista).

I would like to hear other opinions on some of these topics, because while i'm very interested in where the next gen formats are going, I'm very angry that there isn't going to be one unified standard, and that I'm not going to have the same freedoms I enjoy with DVD right now, although they didn't want us to have these freedoms with DVD either, but just messed up on the Copy Protection.

TimT

TimT,

Fortunately, Star Trek movies are not not niche releases, so perhaps Paramount will do the right thing in that respect at least.

I do agree with you, up to a point -- most if not all studios are notoriously cheap. However, as they go through their old resources for these movies when they come up to be released on either of the HD disc formats, it will be obvious to them that some will simply have to have new (or first time) HD masters.

Now, I understand that a "HD master" can look just as bad as a SD one if the source elements are in sad shape. But hopefully the potential for (and competition from other) great HD transfers will shame them into improving the overall quality of their work for these catalog, B or C titles.

There's always hope -- look at the work various studios have done on the Wizard of Oz, Once Upon A Time In The West, Ben-Hur, etc. As technology improves and more digital restoration options are available, it becomes more cost-efficient to fix up the older works.

-John

AMEN! Everyone knows that special effects are more advanced these days but adding them to 20 yr old movies just takes me right out of the movie.

The good thing about Star Trek - The Motion Picture though was that basically they originally didn't have time to complete the effects due to a tight release schedule and those effects really stuck out badly so they completed them using only techniques available back in the late seventies so they didn't cheat and try and put modern effects into an old film..... all this information is both in the commentary and on disc 2 of that film.

There's quite a bit of CGI in the "Director's Edition" of ST:TMP. They tried to do as many effects in the old methods as they could, but due to budgetary concerns they had to cut a lot of corners.

Yes, but at least they tried their best to match the CG to the look of the original film and in many ways mimic what was possible in the late 1970s.

As revisionist films go, this one isn't so bad. It had a very rushed (!!) release and there were always parts that felt a bit incomplete. And fortunately, Robert Wise had the opportunity to tweak it while not changing any major plot elements. There was no "Spock shoots first" problem, so to speak.

-John