NOTE: I see a lot of people saying DS9 and Voyager were all shot on tape. I don't know where this is coming from, because it's not true. Both shows were shot on 35mm like TNG. The quality of 90s video tape just doesn't look remotely the same and all the behind the scenes photos show film cameras. I think this is a myth based on a misunderstanding surrounding the, shot on film, edited on tape system. Secondly, others are saying a lot of the original files for the CG VFX shots still exist and could be re-rendered. That would certainly help in remastering those sequences. If anyone can link me to that info I'd be keen on checking that info out.
Enterprise was the only of the 'original' series shot entirely on tape, in HD (probably HDCAM SR but I could be wrong) actually. And it was shot on tape, not on SSD or high performance proprietary recording formats that really went from marginal use to widely adopted because of the 2011 Japanese tsunami and the. destruction of the main broadcast Sony tape manufacuring facility. All of sudden HDCAM tapes went from $50-$75 each to $1,000 (I'm not joking). 4K cinema/tv was in its infancy and cost a fortune to shoot.
Technology Connections went a bit all over the place in "Film: the reason some of the past was in HD". See pinned comment and from 9m34s in the vid. I watched the vid when he put it out thought nothing more of it, when I watched yours I thought that either DS9/VOY were tape, or DS9/VOY were film but that had been lost/destroyed. I think at least in my case the TC vid was the source of the confusion.
if you followed the DS9 doc, you would see they pulled Negatives from storage which was in a salt mine. I don't see why CBS wouldn't scan those in to make a blu-ray release since it's partially paid for via this Documentary. I hope they do it. at least DS9
Thank heaven Desi Arnaz was forward thinking enough to make sure all of the series shot at Desilu were shot on 35 mm film. The old I Love Lucy shoes look absolutely fantastic in HD as a result, let alone ST TNG. Editing on video tape explains why the next generation shows had a kind of washed out look.
I was part of the team that remastered ST TNG Season 3 and 4. Recompositing the VFX shots was very time consuming. I worked on hundreds of shots. You know the light sequence at the bottom of the main bridge view screen? Those lights are in dead sync with the original in very shot. An incredibly small detail but all of it was rebuilt like that. I remember one shot of the Enterprise I was working on had 17 separate passes or layers. What you don't see here is the incredible "analog" processes. Remember the first time you saw the Borg cube regenerating? Reverse photography of a plastic model being melted by a blow drier. :) An amazing team of very talented people. Everyone should be happy they got all of the TNG season because it was getting really expensive and sales of the Blu-rays was not meeting expectations.
Thank you, sir, for all your hard work remastering TNG. I'm watching the complete series right now on Bluray and it's astounding. It looks and sounds gorgeous on my home theater. Each time, it feels like watching a big budget movie from the 80s/90s. Truly exceptional work. In fact, it's made me fall in love with Star Trek. Thank you greatly! 🙏
It would cost the budget of a movie to remaster DS9 and VOY... but I think in the long run it would be worth it. They would then forever exist in HD for streaming and sale for decades to come.
The Blu-rays of TOS and TNG didn't make their money back, and those two series are more popular than DS9 or Voyager. Paramount/Viacom concluded that if true HD versions of the most popular Trek series didn't sell well enough, it simply wasn't worth spending the huge amount of money it would cost to remaster the less popular ones.
@@dunebasher1971 I wonder what it might've done for people's interest in Star Trek however - Bringing newer generations in, that might not have wanted to see it in 480p. Making people interested in old, and new Trek alike, bringing in more "sales" for Trek as a whole, through other means than pure disk sales, by improving the overall name/quality of the franchise. I know that doesn't show directly on the bottom line however.
Think I read somewhere that the remaster of TNG cost 20 million and with the extensive use of CGI (and if the original files even exist) both DS9 and VOG would cost more. That being said I would purchase a DS9 BluRay.
The original cgi assets DO exist! The artists that worked on the shows all kept personal copies of the files & are willing to give them to CBS if they want them
20 or even 40 Million really isn’t that much, of you get those shows in HD with somewhat modern CGI. Voyager was insanely successful on Netflix. I believe Endgame is one of the most watched episodes on the platform as a whole. There clearly is a market.
@@shaggy72 that’s great to know, I know they did that for B5 and recovered supposedly lost files, didn’t know if it was feasible for Trek (though of course Foundation Imaging was involved with both so I shouldn’t be too surprised).
@@kaitlyn__L Actually, that has yet to be seen. The only scene files that we know Mojo Lebowitz found was the battle scene from "The Sacrifice of Angels." He's been pretty quiet about what else he has. I have to think he found some of the files for TMP, otherwise they'd have to do everything all over again. Unfortunately, Paramount's still not answering that question, and I find it hard to believe that redoing all that CGI would take just eight months.
People ALWAYS think technical tasks involving computers are easy. Thank you for explaining clearly why this isn't just a matter of running the tape through some kind of magic box to make it all sparkle. There is a hard cost in time and resources, and it has to make business sense to make that investment.
The revenue Paramount+ could make by having exclusive rights to every episode of every live action Star Trek show ever produced (DS9 and VOY included) in HD makes good business sense to me.
"running the tape through some kind of magic box to make it all sparkle" I still believe that this is how it all works and the computer guys are just making excuses to look more important and to cash in more dough. :-D :-P
"running the tape through some kind of magic box to make it all sparkle..." Except every other studio went remaster/re-release crazy HARD the past few years. I felt like my entire lifetime of shows I watched right up until now got re-released.
That short battle scene from the What We Left Behind documentary was incredible. I know it probably won't happen but an entire remaster of DS9 at that level of quality would be epic.
I thought it was a good teaching moment of the limitations of simply re-rendering CGI scenes built for SD-TV. You had all the sharp edges you'd expect from a Bluray video, but the models were extremely blocky, the textures too flat, and it looked too much like a video game because of that. If you want to properly remaster 90s CGI you'll have to improve the models I think. Increase polygoncounts and redo the textures at the very least.
The CGI footage in the DS9 documentary wasn't redone. It's actually the original CGI files that was saved by the animators. The DS9 animators said they actually “overbuilt“ their 1990s CGI models to be HD quality because they knew that HDTV technology was just around the corner and they wanted to try to future proof their work. And all it would take would be to open the original software and hit re-export at higher resolution (albeit with a few small tweaks)
So the person who made this video is totally wrong on his main point? He must have had some source or reason to say they were only rendered at 480i. It would seem logical that they would make the models at a high res but the final render of all the elements together was at SD. I guess that would make you both right. I think it would be quite a head start if CG animators could get their hands on the original model files and either reskin them in HD or simply reanimate scenes. If you can get the defiant, the station, three classes of gem jhdar, kligion, and cardasian ships you could use them for %80 of the shots and be a lot further along than starting from scratch as this video says has to be done.
@@brianaple The animators didn't say that they rendered it higher than 480i back in the day, they simply meant that the used textures had higher quality so that you could render it to higher quality which is what they did with that particular scene. Then comes the question if all of those source files still exists for all the cgi scenes in the series, and that all textures where "overbuilt".
I was thinking finding the original assets would require new textures but it’s great to know that most of them would likely look fine. Especially with ray tracing renders! Though of course therein lies the question of making every hull light and phaser beam emissive lights, or only some of them. Plus how many passes/samples you do with your rays. But still, getting more elaborate light and shadow on the greebles is what I want heh. Also we can fix the Defiant’s nose in the title sequence :)
@@brianaple I've been in the movie/tv industry for 23 years now, on the sw/hw video editing side of things but still. First ever NAB I attended in 1999. HD was the talk of the town, it wasn't there for cinema but it was definitely there for TV episodical and was making its way slowly but surely in the mainstream. I had a content producer who was going over thousands and thousands of hours of family footage shot mostly in 8MM B&W than color than VHS and the like and had signed a deal with both NFB and French Canadian Historia channel. One day, he asks me my opinion about telecine transfer format I'd recommend, new content shooting I'd do (they were shooting scenes out of a fake basement studio where you'd have this 8MM projector showing the opening content of the show with the animator explaining the context as each episode would be about a traditional Quebec activity or season. I told him to shoot all new content in HDCAM, telecine everything to BetacamSX or better, deliver in BetacamSx in 16:9 SD (that was the mastering format the broadcaster was asking for). He asked me why would I fo that? it's going to cost me 20% more at least in prod/post! I told him, yeah! but in 20 years, when you want to sell the rights to a broadcaster in the States in Europe or the States, all you'll have to do is dig your HDCAM master your made at same time as the Betacam SX one and sell it ;-). Of course, delivery is all file based now but back then it was all Betam, sometimes HDCAM and file delivery really only started after the Japanese tsunami. Official common standard is also barely 5 years old: IMF for ota/ott compliance, DCP for Digital Cinema compliance.
@@Henrik_Holst So the source files would hold up to a modern 4K HD render. Well then it would seem to be quite doable. I think paramount has a good idea of what the incremental revenue would be with all the data they can pull from their streaming service. I must say though that the current look of the series with whatever type of up scaling used is quite good. It is not the "could have been shot yesterday" quality that TNG has but it is much better than the early versions that BBC had access to years ago.
I already knew some of the reasons: not as popular as TNG, and more expensive because of the need to redo CGI. Though you made a good point about the Blu-rays - it came out before streaming became so prevalent, and they stood to make a lot more from the box set releases. That said, I love that they still had all the original model/effects shots, allowing them to bring out all the detail we couldn't previously see. I just hope they one day take the plunge with the remaining 2 show. 🥺🙏
This was a wonderful video, Rowan. Instead of refraining from nerding out, please do it more often. This finally answered a question I couldn't quite find an answer for. Take care!
It should be noted while some CG shots are lost and unrecoverable. The majority of scene files still exsist. And rather than remaking the scenes from scratch, could be rerendered at the higher res, and some modern day post processing done to make them a bit better... This is basically what IRML did with the DS9 remaster vfx.
I don't think that it would be a easy as that. For one thing, the models and their textures were likely,y built with a lower res image in mind, this means that you would probably have to go in and tweak both the model and the textures so that they'll look just as good in hi-def and they did in standard. The once you have the models prettied up, you still have to recomp them into the scenes and unless you have the original comp files, assuming they were done digitally and the software still exists, you're going to have redo all of the composites all over again which is going to take all the time effort it did the first time around.
@@Riceball01 while it's a job. Reworking textures and models and keeping the majority of scene files is still verydoable. But as fot the defiant the cg model was good enough to use in first contact...
@@kyle8952 I had no idea that Lightwave still around, I hadn't seen any mention of Lighwave in ages. It seemed to me that everybody (professionally) uses either Maya or 3DS Max, and hobbyists like Blender.
I saw TNG when it came out & bought the dvd's when released. Must have seen every eps like 10 times. After a break of about 15 years I finally just finished the remastered version I bought years ago & the quality in comparison with SD is incredible. The colors, the effects are really good. Let's hope they do DS9 & VOY, I'll would buy them on release.
It's especially higher quality when you watch on your phone while in a bathroom toilet. Once you get past the 10 minute mark the way the toilet seat makes your legs start to fall asleep helping you be distracted enough you could watch it on a early 2000s flip phone without a single thought on video quality. Too bad it doesn't also work with toilet paper quality...
What an excellent video! I work in digitization of historical materials, and I constantly get asked about quality of scans, especially when it comes to old newspapers. I always tell folks: you either have to go back to the original newsprint or you use master microfilm. Microfilm is still the best medium for long-term preservation and duplication. This video really underscores the value of film to other productions. Unfortunately, DS9 and Voyager were made in a transitional time between SD and HD and became a casualty of it. I'm with you in hoping they make HD remasters of them; it would be truly amazing to see those shows with their fullest potential.
Of course that all depends on the quality of the remaster. Some are a lot more detained than others. Some even go so far as to enhance the audio or even add digital surround sound.
One thing, a while back, some of the effects artist that worked on DS9 and Voyager said that they still have much of the files, and that they massively overbuilt most of the CG models. They took the Nebula class model and did a simple rendering pass on it and it looked AMAZING in higher resolution. But it's been a while, who knows if those drives are even still working at this point.
It wouldn't be unlimited money, it's two more steps that they don't have to talk about again. I think someone at the studio hates those shows and doesn't want them to get a remaster, that's all there is to it.
Voyager is the worst / least good out of all the live-action ST shows. It completely failed its original amazing concept à la 'Lost in Space' and instead we got a diluted second-rate clone of TNG where nothing of consequence can happen to the hero ship and its crew, and Status Quo is at its "primest". All because the network execs wanted to play it safe. That is why Ronald D. Moore abruptly and angrily left the writing staff of the show (after the end of DS9 and his transfer to VOY), because he simply did not want to write that sXXt and instead began developing the reboot of Battlestar Galactica where he wanted to properly show what it should look like when a starship gets into a desperate situation with no help in sight. So the greatest positive about Voyager basically was that thanks to its being so sterile, so bland and so family friendly we've got one of the greatest sci-fi shows of all time, the BSG. :-) P.S. - Star Trek staff sort of vindicated itself later on by producing the fantastic third season of Star Trek: Enterprise (some of the bestest Star Trek ever made) which is what tonally and stakes-wise Voyager should have been like as a show.
That was extremely interesting. I am grateful for you discussing this. I never truly understood what remastering involved. Personally, I will always be a person who wants physical media. I just don't care about streaming. I never have had it, and I won't get it. I don't watch much new offerings at all, and it isn't worth the money I would pay for it. I mean, when I heard how good Star Trek Picard Season 3 was, I bought the bluray. It was simply based on feedback as to whether I wanted to see it and make the purchase. I am fine sticking with physical media. I have the things I want or care about.
I expect that eventually we’ll have AI upscaling that can use more inputs than just the original edited render. Namely, something where it could consume all the raw scanned footage, as well as production stills and photos of props, to have more basis to fill in details during upscaling than just the image in the final edit. There’s also been interesting work in “style transfer”-there could come a day where you could re-do just a few effects to modern standards by hand, then have the AI try to replicate that in other scenes. (Often-reused effects like transporter sparkles or phaser fire are probably the most likely to see success with this.)
I’ve been thinking the same thing. If you could give the film stills and allow it to upscale the VFX then that’d be quite useful I think. Unfortunately I feel even the DS9 remaster has that wax figure look to it. Also I like your glowy sona!
@Bob Thornton it’s true that we can have GANs create realistic images from scratch but, the real devil in the details is integrating that with the other video upscaling NNs. You’re not just asking it to spit out brand new images of the Defiant being shot every which way, it has to know when the Defiant is in a video frame and when it isn’t, and then correlate that to the angles etc it’s meant to do. Same for any NN that’s trained on the original film stock to correlate that with a video frame for cropping and colour grading and so on. Then integrating that with another layer to apply any VFX when necessary. It’s definitely technically possible with current techniques if someone slots them all together and trains them appropriately. But of course that’s the hard part!
@Bob Thornton Any generic effort would of course look pretty bad, you’d absolutely need a new NN training for every TV show, possibly every season. Since the goal is for some ML tech to assist in studio-quality remasters, it’s entirely separate from “how might the current fan projects improve their results” which I feel you’re maybe coming from that direction? Otherwise, I’d already addressed what you said in my previous comment, about how it’s all about tying together the dozens of different kinds of NNs; above and beyond getting a GAN to spit out arbitrary images of the Defiant or DS9 getting shot-at with torpedoes. Of course that GAN would have a huge training set, so I’m not sure why you’re repeating that part.
@Bob Thornton for seasons one and two of DS9 it’s 4:3. Everything following was framed widescreen safe so we would largely match the 4:3 matte but opening it up. To be honest, I sidestepped the matter of how we actually train the GANs, and just assumed we’d do it successfully and focused on the rest. Plus issues like whether it’s one GAN for everything or one GAN per ship, that’s all implementation details rather than the underlying methodology imo.
@Bob Thornton I certainly hope we can get there! Given the ways current GANs can need extensive tweaking for just one purpose I’d wager we’re not quite there, but then I am a year or two behind on the newest developments (except for the style-transfer GAN Intel demo’d in GTA, which I actually thought had pretty ugly results albeit it’s an impressive concept).
For me, the TNG remasters are the gold standard for bringing FX up to date. I know that they're using all new visual effects, but it never pulls me out of the story - they just prevent poor, old effects from doing that very thing. Unlike TOS, TMP or Star Wars special edition (or even Red Dwarf.)
@@Reggie1408 it wouldn't surprise me if there have been some internal conversations around having "another go" at TOS eventually. Presumably some of the hard work around digital transfer of the raw footage has already been done.
This is difficult for me because I really want those shows in HD simply for longevity reasons (those tapes won't be in paramounts basement forever) but I understand entirely how difficult it would be, and that paramount doesn't have unlimited money to spend on their fans wants alone. Maybe they could outsource it somehow, even to fan volunteers? They scan all the film and then send each episode to a bunch of super nerds to put it back together. I dunno, I just want it to happen somehow. Great video, really broke down how hard this stuff actually is
Movie and TV studios rarely throw away film stock. One reason is that it's a much better archival medium than anything else. Shine light through it, and you can see the picture. Every analogue and digital tape or computer format comes and goes over time. If you backed up rushes when Voyager was on the air, reading those files now would be harder and in 20 years perhaps impossible.
@@ian9outof10 As they read your comment, long term Doctor Who fans are laughing cynically and then gently weeping...! That being said, the DW community did have the DW Restoration Team - a dedicated team of talented fans who painstakingly restored and remastered what had not been thrown out - a fascinating story if you are into that kind of thing.
CBS should let the public take care of redoing / remaking the effects, while the studio handles the film scans. I am sure there are a bunch of talented fans out there that would do it for free.
Even the AI upscaling can't replace the missing color information. Look at the footage for WHAT WE LEFT BEHIND that they actually remastered for HD - very rich color. As far as the question of remastering for streaming - the quality of streaming is actually worse for SD than the DVDs. DS9 & VOY stick out like a blurry & sore thumb.
I didn't realise how many steps were needed to remaster those Next Gen episodes until this video. I can totally understand why the studio would reluctant to remaster DS9 and Voyager given how much effort it would take,
Thank God that at least the Enterprise was already shot in HD and thus does not need any remastering nowadays. Well, at least for now. It still may become obsolete during the upcoming decades, owing to the ever-advancing technologies.
Well Voyager also has the problem with missing 3D assets. The later seasons used CGI models and sadly the Postproduction company who did that does no longer exist. And nobody knows where the 3D assets are. Babylon 5 had a similar fate but thankfully all the original 3D assets still exist and were preserved. There has been even fan attempts to re-render these effects in HD and it looks amazing.
@Bob Thornton And the video shows, it a very expensive project, and they take a chance on recouping their investment (and making a profit) if the finicky public decides they no longer want to invest in discs.
@Bob Thornton These are the new generation of sci-fi producers. I suspect they know (or don't care) what the fans want. Like most of Hollywood nowadays, they're likely more concerned with spreading their liberal PC agenda than anything else.
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 Many of the 3D assets are floating around with various people, Rob Bonchune did a massive upgrade to the Voyager CG model a few years back in the event of a Voyager remaster. Shoot, I myself have the Bird of Prey 3D model used in Enterprise.
I fully understand why they can't easily remaster DS9 and Voy, it's just a damn shame. I would LOVE to own Blu Ray copies of these shows and would buy copies as soon as they came out.
I was lucky enough to see What We Left Behind at the cinema. Seeing that one scene remastered brought me to tears. I understand why it may never happen. But I still hope It was so beautiful. Also B5 is a bloody beautiful remaster
DS9 is just as popular as TNG if not more, I agree with your assessment of Voyager thought. I feel that Voyager was the beginning of the end for Star Trek. That being said a Blu-ray of both would sell like crack and would probably only cost the amount of one Hollyweird Movie. Perhaps if Paramount had done this and a few more good decisions like it they wouldn't be in the predicament they're in now being sold to Skydance for scrap...not to mention if you gave it to the fans they'd probably do all the work for you, for free.
8:45 - Streaming quality has improved, but it still doesn't hold a candle to physical media. Especially for 4K content. Convenience is its main benefit. That said, I thought the B5 remaster was worth watching. No amount of AI upscaling can improve the quaintly lo-res textures used on planets in the CGI shots, but the live-action material was noticeably improved, both in sharpness and color. I'd replace my DVD set in a heartbeat if they ever put it out on Blu-ray.
To save money, they didn't scan the original B5 film negatives. Instead they scanned some broadcast tapes which had higher quality than DVD but still less quality than full HD.
@Bob Thornton For me, new Star Trek is enough of an edge, though Strange New Worlds is the one I'm least interested in. They're going back to their roots rather than carrying on in new directions. I mean, I'm sure it'll be good (they've earned the benefit of the doubt with what they've made so far) but I doubt it'll be near the top of my rankings for favourite Trek shows.
I also hope 'Voyager' and 'Deep Space 9' are remastered. 'Voyager' is my favorite Star Trek series. I haven't seen TNG remastered version but I hope it is better than the original Star Trek series. There's a youtube channel where compares original Star Trek remastered with o cgi and a new version where many scenes do use CGI. The scenes where planets, especially Earth appear are obviously much better on the CGI version. But scenes with Enterprise and other ships appear look so fake with cgi compared to the older remastered version.
kinda true, if for example as in CSI type of shows you have a car plate you cannot read by yourself cause the quality is that bad, but (future) AI could be able to reconstruct it just based on how the few pixels look like
Topaz AI video upscaler is amazing. Been rewatching voyager on my projector and its a million times better than the blur of the original DVDs on a bit screen. Properly impressed, and well worth the time to go and upscale it all. Its taking about 4 hours per episode to upscale with Topaz on my Nvidia 1070. I just saw the image from voyager on this video at 7 mins 13 seconds and that looks horrible! The upscaling im doing with Topaz looks waaaay better so far.
I would pay a premium to get those blurays for Voyager and DS9. I'll take it a step further, I'll buy the blurays to complete Discovery and I'll buy the Star Trek Picard seasons 1 and 2 bluray. Season 3 and SNW are a given, but I'll complete those sets out of respect if I get DS9 and Voyager on bluray.
at least in the US we are starting the process of losing Trek from other streaming services at the end of this month as they try to make everything Paramount Plus exclusives. It could be a selling point to offer the remastered versions of these series exclusively on that platform eventually? I do believe Netflix shared that Voyager was the most watched Trek (or had the most watched episode at least) on their service while they had it.
No wonder Voyager was very popular on Netflix. I discovered Star Trek with The Next Generation and started watching it with "The Best Of Both Worlds" no less. This episode alone made me a Star Trek fanatic. Then I came to see Star Trek The Original Series and I loved it (the Kirk-Spock-Bones relationship was everything). Then I saw Deep Space Nine, loved it too (especially the first 2 seasons with independent stories and no story-arcs, sorry but that's what I like about Trek) but when I saw Voyager, even though the first 3 seasons weren't perfect (it became good when the Kazon were gone and very good when the Borgs appeared), and that was it. I was obsessed. My favorite Star Trek series ever was born and I was ecstatic. I liked all Star Trek series, yes even Discovery, Picard and Enterprise but Voyager will always have a special place in my heart and will always be the best Star Trek series for me and for a number of reasons : 1 the first female captain (and I love Kate Mulgrew), it was about time women of power became a reality there and women were finally taken seriously and were not wearing mini-skirts anymore. A huge step forward. I say that and I am a man. 2 a lot of Borg stories (when even TNG and DS9 were all about the boring and annoying Klingons) 3 very few religion-related episodes (sorry DS9 but it's not what I'm after when I look at science-fiction) 4 very few violence, war stories, dark and gruesome scenes (again sorry DS9, Discovery I'm talking about you too !) 5 never the Star Trek characters seemed more relatable and well-written since TNG and TOS 6 they were really going were Trek wasn't gone before (the Delta Quadrant) finally new vilains ! (especially loved Species 8472)
I've been watching DS9 on Netflix for the first time over the course of the last year or so (I'm on the last season now), and I really like it, it's so good! But I've been finding the Netflix quality stuff for any of the shows prior to Enterprise have pretty low quality and show up very dark, at least on all the 3 displays I've used (FHD ThinkPad, 2012 Retina MacBook Pro, and 1600p Gateway monitor via miniDisplay to VGA adapter). But honestly, I could see myself buying both DS9 and Voyager if they had higher resolution and better lighting, which is pretty easy to do, I've had to do a lot of lighting fixes since my camera doesn't have built in white balance correction in video mode.
Whoever asked about the Star Wars Retrospective - I highly recommend the ones done by sfdebris - his work in looking at the Star Wars retrospective cannot be matched. His Star Trek reviews are also hilarious :)
my mind boggles about the connecting of Star trek with star wars. one is a geeky SF series, the other is a fantasy kids(words of george lucas) franchise.
The TNG blu-ray/HD remaster was a godsend for us fans. But even it, one of the most culturally relevant Trek shows available, didn't sell all that well. That process was so expensive that CBS ended up charging an arm and a leg for on Blu Ray set, especially on release, so no one but super fans bought them. It's safe to assume CBS lost a ton of money on that investment, even if it was great for us. DS9 and VOY would unfortunately lose them even more money because so much more work would be involved, and corporations will always care about that bottom line I'm afraid. It's a real shame since DS9 and VOY were actually framed for 16:9, unlike TNG.
Remember that Deep Space 9 Documentary? They remastered all the clips you see in that Documentary, not full episodes though, just the snippets that were used in it.
A concept like "selling well" is irrelevant these days. Physical media is a dying/dead format. In five years time nobody is going to be watching blu-rays. This is about taking proper care of Star Trek's heritage and future-proofing the franchise (all of it) for future generations. CBS-Viacom leaving DS9 and VOY to rot in murky, grainy, washed-out SD hurts my soul.
@@jackdubz4247 Well i guess i'm a "nobody" bc I will always take physical media (DVD/Bluray & now 4k UHD) over streaming any day! 1. Streaming rights switch periodically so you have to continuously pay for whoever owns the rights at that time to watch a certain show + the show comes & goes & is not always available. 2. The bandwidth & compression makes the picture quality not so good, sometimes worse than standard definition,. 3. Internet connection is always needed. Nope, i'll stick with Bluray for as long as they make em, thank you very much. It's much more practical & efficient for me regardless of the popularity of the much inferior format of streaming.
I was following it and really excited for release, but it was something like £60-70 a season which was just too much for me at that time. Then it later came down to £15-20 a season but by then it was over and CBS already said it hadn’t sold enough to warrant doing the others. I wonder if they’d priced lower to begin with, maybe they’d have sold better. The TOS remaster was announced with television screenings of select episodes and they had a DVD release as well. I’d probably have bought such DVDs if they were cheaper just because the extant TNG DVDs had such a soft picture anyway. I do agree that the high initial sale price killed it.
Great video. I knew that the TNG remaster was difficult enough to not hold my breath about the remaining 2 series, but I still didn't appreciate just how monumental a task this was. Never occurred to me how many thousands of reels of film it takes to store 9 series of television. And I didn't know how many layers got composited together for the model-shots! Cool stuff. Perhaps we should petition some billionaires to see if any of them want to create the Star Trek Preservation Fund.
I think the streaming landscape makes it even more feasible for a DS9 remaster. A $100 box set may be a hard sell but being able to say, DS9 now available in remastered 4K exclusively on paramount + might get a lot of people to put up $8 for that. I bet a lot more money is "lost" in free trial subscriptions than it would cost to do the remaster. As a cost of getting maybe millions of new sign up it might be worth the cost. Well millions might be a bit much but they would get me and I am sure I represent a lot of fans that would spend $8 but never +$100 to see DS9 in proper 4K. Then in a few years when the hype dies down they could syndicate it and let the BBC advertise it as the 4K broadcast premier.
Great video. But one quibble. You said that to watch TNG in its highest quality, you no longer need to buy the Blurays. Not true! The streaming quality of TNG is FAR lower than their Bluray counterparts on both audio and video due to compression. The Bluray discs are still the only source for watching TNG in the highest A/V quality. Of course, the streaming companies would like you to think otherwise...
The obvious thing is that the first two series were head and shoulders the most popular, so of course they would make a good profit on the remastered home releases. The later spinoff series? Not so much. Plus, who still buys physical media now anyway? 5% of how many people used to. Those first TOS remasters came out more than 15 years ago when box set physical media was at its height. edit : ok he said it at the end.
Watching this, I'm struck with how good some of the CGI explosions were on Voyager. That scene from Dragon's Teeth looks like Orville levels of quality, all be it 4:3
Foundation Imaging really knew their CGI explosions, there’s interviews when they talked about spending days tweaking the shrapnel and size of the combusting part and so on. Though I think the interview was for the Borg exploding in the teaser to Scorpion pt 1. But it’s their general ethos too. Tweaking them so they’re as meaty and satisfying as they can be, but without looking overwrought or disproportionate.
@@kaitlyn__L It also didn't hurt that Lightwave improved by leaps and bounds once they uncoupled it from the Amiga and the Video Toaster, and I say that as a die-hard Amiga fanatic.
@@AndrewD8Red yeah, some of their practical explosions look really good. An underrated one is when the Enterprise nacelle explodes in that time loop episode with Captain Frasier Crane. But those were limited to 6-10 attempts at best, each one another copy of the model. With the CGI they spent days tweaking hundreds, if not thousands, of versions of the explosions! Sometimes the CGI shots can look a little “too” perfect, like when the shrapnel is distributed super evenly instead of clumping, but I think they moved past that pretty quickly.
DS9 and VOY are from early CGI, and there are some issues with rendering in VOY (several details fail to render at points, and it's not noticeable in SD) so this also means they have to find the original files, hope they still compatible with modern tools, find the original models, add new detail to the models, etc. It would effectively be like creating those series all over again from scratch.
Never ask for a remaster where those who would be charged to do so dont care, or cant afford to effectively do it. Remasters are complex and require time, effort and understanding to do. Imo one for the sake of it isnt worth it. If your gonna do it do it right. If we are to look at it when it is done so poorly, we mearly have to look at the shit-show of the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" remaster. A Remaster so bad its shameful.
yeah 20th Century Fox really sucks at HD remastering their TV shows… Even the X-Files looks terrible… way too bright and they even changed aspect ratio to 16:9 for the early seasons. Even if shooting for 16:9 only happened in later seasons, which were framed with 16:9 widescreen in mind but also framed for 4:3.
Thanks for the time and effort you put into making this video. I truly hope there is a way that these series do have a modern HD remaster one day whether that is via work from the fans in combination/under licence from Paramount & Viacom with new FX shots or quality AI upscaling work. I would happily pay for the effort involved to re-watch these great series in modern picture and sound quality at home.
It's pretty insane that Paramount would even attempt a shot by shot remaster/recreation of _TNG._ It's a shame the blu sets underperformed because the end product is absolutely beautiful.
Here's a non-techinal argument against remastering: As much as I would love to see DS9 remastered, I realized after seeing a remastered TNG that the alien make-up of the era does not always stand up to high-def scrutiny. It takes you out of the show when you can now notice the seam on Michael Dorn's Klingon forehead, giving it away as a prosthetic. Examples like that make remastering not always a good thing.
Sloppy remaster job, not that hard to remove the Worf seam. Not saying you should do this for every "issue" like this but Worf is a main character, they could have done it there.
To be fair that's fixable, but it would ramp up the cost. Just fixing it fore Worth in every episode would be expansive but doable. Fore every Karakter? Yeah....no not feasible in the slightest fore most.
We were so fortunate, that nearly all the TNG negatives were intact. They could have been lost in a fire, misplaced, thrown away, or sold on eBay. The TNG BluRays are worth every penny! 🖖😀
Bro your retrospectives are the best researched and presented. You would absolutely bring something to the table with Star Wars Retrospectives. I would love to watch and listen.
If Babylon 5 can have a Blu-Ray release and an HD version of the show, why can't DS9 and Voyager? Maybe it's still impossible but remastered clips by fans look really good.
The cgi sceen in the ds9 doc was a rerender at higher res, most the data files still exist from the series. CBS should have put the money they wasted on new trek into remastering ds9 and voy. They could have released them first on their streaming service, I'm sure that would have brought in more subs.
F*ck off with the "wasted on new trek" shit. Just because you don't like it doesn't make it worthless. The new shows are successful, likely making CBS more than if they restored and remastered 20 year old TV shows. I too would love to see it done but I would never degenerate another show to argue for it.
When streaming services pay Three-Digit-Millions of Dollars for streaming-only series and movies, paying 40-50 Million Dollars for over 370 episodes of Star Trek in HD is like a drop in the bucket. The marker "does it sell on media" is obviously of no value anymore.
Fantastic presentation! You’ve got a new subscriber here. I’m a big Dark Shadows fan and wondered why MPI hasn’t released it on Blu-ray. Now it makes a lot more sense. Thanks!
“If you wanted to re-watch TNG in it’s highest quality, you had to buy the Blu-rays, but that’s not true any more.” It’s _absolutely_ still true. Maybe you can stream the HD remasters on Paramount+ or wherever, but there’s no streaming service that comes _close_ to the quality of a standard Blu-ray for viewing HD content. Your typical Blu-ray encodes HD video at well upwards of 25 mbps. Streaming services don’t stream _4K_ content at that high of a bit rate, let alone HD content. Streaming’s no substitute for Blu-ray when it comes to quality.
In the interests of finding out by how much, I just checked a 1080p video I'd saved from RUclips. Peaks at 4.4Mbps, typically hangs around in the 1.5-2Mbps range, though it does drop under 1Mbps at times. If RUclips is typical, you're not even getting 10% of what you'd get out of a Blu-ray.
I think the reason they haven't done them is because they use money as an excuse, a multibillion dollar company worried about money, rather than future proofing the shows, the longer they wait, the less likely they'll be able to rescan the original film, etc.
There was also the issue of the disappointing sales of the TNG blu rays. They set the price point way too high on release, and a lot the folk who would purchase them had just recently spent a fortune on the DVDs.
With TOS that's a whole other dilemma. Because every episode only cost around 170k USD or something. That included optical effects and model shots. And from a technical standpoint the quality of the space ship models shots and shuttles were very subpar, even for 1960s standards. And sadly the quality often suffered even more from cheap and rushed optical printing. This is why sometimes the ship is barely visible and almost drowning in the backgrounds and sometimes the shots look a lot better. Technically it WAS possible to make it look better even back then. But the original TV show of Star Trek was considered "Low budget". And even that budget had to be constantly fought for and justified by the fans, By Gene himself and the cast, as well as the production designers.
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 The TOS remastered FX were totally redone. I've never actually checked out the cleaned up original episodes. Strange that I didn't considering I actually prefer the "concrete windsock" planet killer in "The Doomsday Machine". 😛 The recreated one is too flexible and moves too quickly. And when it's chasing the Enterprise, it's like, RIGHT on their tail. 😛It is really amazing what they were able to do with such a limited budget on the original show, though. But, man, in high def you REALLY see the janky craftsmanship on much of the set(s).
Paramount+ exclusive, since they seem to be pulling the licenses from competitors now. Would surely help retain fans between new shows, or whichever fans don’t like all the new series. A few years of that, then they can sell complete set blu rays.
The technical explanations are interesting in and of themselves but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the lack of DS9/Voy remasters. Paramount are on record stating that the sales for TNG Remaster were not encouraging enough for them to be willing to spend the money on remastering the other shows. That said, what they could have done is rather than make a shit show like STD or Picard, they could have gone down the HBO route and remastered the other series exclusively for (what was at the time) Paramount Plus. But that would require business sense and if Paramount had that they wouldn't be in the financial deep and stinky.
Great video 😃Amazing to think how much work went into basically remaking the show for Blu-Ray! Thanks to you I also know now that an upscaled Babylon 5 exists, and I must go start that ASAP!
FYI- for those who have Voyager on DVD, if you RIP them and convert them to MKV via the Handbrake program using the "light" "unsharp mask" filter setting it will very nicely improve the appearance of the video. Combine this with the Decomb "eedi2 bob" setting to adjust for the framerate variety in the show and you have a very watchable TV series on a large television.
I'm sure AI remastering would work better when you have access to the master tapes like what the studio has vs. just the DVD's which has compression, etc.
The master tapes (the analogue video like VHS but slightly larger) were of barely BARELY more quality than DVD at the time. The studio would beam the feed via satellite to the station a week early (I used to watch them when I had one of those giant satellite dishes) & the local stations would record them onto tape. And getting AI from the original reels would be pointless when one could just as easily rescan like they did with TNG.
@@shaggy72 just a slight correction. By the later years of DS9 and Voyager they wouldn't have been on analogue tape. They almost certainly would have been mastered on DigitalBetacam, which is about a high a quality you can get for NTSC video. But those were probably what was used for the DVD transfers, I would think. So, ultimately you're right. I don't think it would make much of a difference for the AI upscale..
@@adamlytle2615 I had suspected there was such a transition to digibeta, given the colour purity is so much better in later DS9 and Voyager, but it’s nice to have confirmation haha
@@kaitlyn__L oh, to be clear, that is just an educated guess. I work in television so know that that was becoming the standard by the late 90s. In fact, it's very possible earlier seasons were also digital, as the D2 format was around as early as 1988.
@@adamlytle2615 ah I see, appreciate the clarification! I’m aware of the early digital video tape formats, though was under the impression they weren’t used very much. But I’m younger than all that so it’s just whatever people wrote from their memories.
I have been keeping tabs on this sort of stuff, for SG1 also. Some of the work they have to do is astounding. Damaged footage can be processed frame by brake and reconstructed from the additional data in other frames, a single pass may recover astonishing quality but further passes can use the now largely repaired footage to clean itself up even further, with manual input again better improvements. Originally pioneered to try recover stuff like Charlie Chaplin movie and stuff even older than that it can be done along side colourisation and other techniques. Seen 35mm footage as old as the media itself restored and played back like HD full colour video, with higher frame rates, HDR level tweaks and more. Pretty mind blowing stuff.
Here is one issue I have with waiting for the other remasters. Those negatives are not going to be getting any better over time, and I am not getting any younger.
I think you missed an option on the DS9 CGI. You said the two options are totally recreating it, and upscaling it. However, if the original "source code" of the CGI is available - that is the project files from whatever 3D modeling and rending system they used - then they can simply re-render them at a higher resolution. It might take a conversion from those original source files to some newer 3D modeling system, especially if they used some proprietary rendering toolchain. However, that would still be a lot less work than re-creating the CGI.
It's super simple! Opening 3D files with programs which are either completely outdated and run on OS's which don't exist anymore or require hardware which is not available anymore (refurbished SGI, yay!). And even if you managed to open the files, you would then have to recreate the original directory structures (because assets and textures are linked files). And even if you managed this step, you then would have to recreate all textures, because rendering an image to 4K with textures which were fine for 480p will merely produce super sharp images with blurry details in between... And about conversion... Oh boy! You would have to convert the models (ok), convert the textures AND the texture mapping (ok, but will involve more work) and finally you would have to convert the shaders (basically redo the shaders), the lighting, the animation system (e.g. keyframe interpolation) I tried all that once for an HD version of a 120 seconds 3D short I did back in 2002 in college... I gave up. Even though the software still existed, nothing in the original files worked anymore. Everything was messed up and it would have required way more work then redoing it from scratch. I did a bit of research and it looks like the VFX for VOY were done with LightWave on Amigas and on SGI hardware. Both being hardware systems that are not available anymore. Source: memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/CGI - quoting Star Trek: The Magazine Volume 3, Issue 3, p. 112.
HD means that you see all the imperfections and corners that were cut. Futuristic tech becomes painted props, a glowing energy being becomes an actor with a tube sock over his head and a blurry background becomes plywood with visible screws, Borg start looking like actors wearing thick white facepaint and knit brown bodysuits with plastic glued on, and so on
Great video. I’d be happy with the approach they used for the Firefly blu-ray back in the day - HD film scans for the studio footage and upscaling for the special effects. AI upscaling could make the old CGI look passable too, nowadays. This method would have to be a lot cheaper to achieve than what they used for TNG, surely?
Couldn't have explained it better myself. Thank you for going through the trouble. I am currently watching an AI upscaled fan "remaster" of Voyager myself. There are lots of DS9 and Voyager upscales out there, but this one is something else, the best one I've seen by far. All of the other fan upscales seem to have an uncanny valley feel to them. Most of them look *very* artificial, and are waxy and sterile, with too much grain/noise removed. This upscale on the other hand looks very natural, and retains and adds fine detail. It actually looks like it was shot on film, with healthy levels of noise/grain preserved. It's far from the TNG remaster, but still a great improvement.
Why not rescan and remaster the original 35mm live-action elements and then let AI upscaling have its way with the effects shots? Sounds like a fair compromise between, well, nothing and the full-tilt effort that went into TNG. This is similar to what they did with X-Files a few years ago - although, to be fair, a LOT less effect shots to deal with there.
Star Trek TOS could do with a re-remaster as so many of the ship shots in the remaster were so poor. Would love to see them remaster using the original elements as the blue screen 35mm shots of the ship seem to exist as seen in 'The Roddenbury Vault'. Or perhaps using a real physical model to upgrade the shots.
Some VFX elements still exists as seen in the Vault, but the record is far from perfect. TNG had almost all VFX elements preserved, but TOS only has a few bits and pieces here and there, the archive is incomplete.
Finally, someone who says my name right the first time! But seriously, thanks for answering my question. I really enjoy your content and I actually found out about you through Twitter. Looking forward to that Voyager Retrospective!
If we don't get official remasters of Deep Space Nine and Voyager, find yourself a nice large CRT and enjoy the DVDs! AI upscaling is a good option for modern displays too! Perhaps a native 720p display that does no additional upscaling would look great!
While VOY and DS9 were shot on 35mm, but only exist in completed form in SD, they could still benefit from a BluRay release. There's been a number of TV shows that were shot on videotape, but the added size of the BluRays allow them to maximize the detail. Take a look at the Red Dwarf BluRays. That was shot on cheap tape, with weird reflection marks and everything. But somehow, the Blu's still look better than the DVD.
Mainly down to film stock that sometimes can be a problem with colour correction when comes to digitising old film negatives it’s like taking an black and white film negative and adding an colour filter over it and reprint it and to find out many problems with it so it can help with these questions
In 1987, I wrote a paper for my film appreciation class explaining how one day, possibly around 2000, all old TV shows and films would be re-released in "higher than HD" and in widescreen. I explained that AI would convert the old 4:3 format to 16:9, not by chopping the top and bottom of the film, but by adding to picture on the left and right. I was describing generative fill, even though I was unfamiliar with the term back then. I used Gone With The Wind and Star Trek as my examples, and got an A for my effort. I might have been off on my estimated date, but it's coming!
HD DS9 is my grail. But sadly the way things are going, I suspect any HD upgrade will only every exist through streaming. I am just glad that the current series of Trek shows are still seeing a physical release. While streaming for TV shows is very convenient, the fracturing of the streaming market means people won't always have subscriptions to the services which have these shows.
Interesting. When watching Voyager for the first time a few years ago I was struck by how "fuzzy" it looked compared to DS9, which my wife and I had just finished. Was VOY shot with lower quality stock?
Pardon me if this was mentioned earlier. The first run of ST:TNG was not delivered to stations on tape. Paramount shot the episode to a dedicated satellite and beamed to stations the week of broadcast, where the local station would record it to tape for broadcast. The station would have to strip in the local commercials and station i.d. Of course TNG was sold as full barter so most of the commercial time was taken up by national ads. I know this because one of the members of the local ST club worked master control at the station that ran TNG. We watched the episodes before the scheduled air date. Ah what a time.
I've read that for the What We Left Behind documentary, someone from the original team who made the CGI shots kept the programming files for them & so they used those with newer versions of the ship models to recreate the scenes shown in it in HD. So, they wouldn't need to recreate everything for the CGI if they remaster it into HD.
The missing negative for "Sins of Father" that is shown as an example was located in time for the release of the Blu-Ray sets. There are luckily only 3 episodes that uses a little bit of upscaled footage due to them not being able to locate the negatives... This is a 2 second long reaction shot of Riker in "We'll Always Have Paris" 2 minutes of footage for "Power Play" and 1 minute of footage for "The First Duty".
I'm thrilled that we have the remastered/digitally augmented TOS to enjoy. Replacing the 1960's television effects with CGI, coupled with enhanced colour and sound, provides fitting respect to a series of such historic significance. I'm happy to rely on my television's upscaling for the others. Regardless, thank you for a well presented analysis. I had never considered the effect of upscaling on computer graphics created for a set resolution within the context of television, even though I experience it all the time upscaling vintage computers for use with modern displays.
NOTE: I see a lot of people saying DS9 and Voyager were all shot on tape. I don't know where this is coming from, because it's not true. Both shows were shot on 35mm like TNG. The quality of 90s video tape just doesn't look remotely the same and all the behind the scenes photos show film cameras. I think this is a myth based on a misunderstanding surrounding the, shot on film, edited on tape system.
Secondly, others are saying a lot of the original files for the CG VFX shots still exist and could be re-rendered. That would certainly help in remastering those sequences. If anyone can link me to that info I'd be keen on checking that info out.
Enterprise was the only of the 'original' series shot entirely on tape, in HD (probably HDCAM SR but I could be wrong) actually. And it was shot on tape, not on SSD or high performance proprietary recording formats that really went from marginal use to widely adopted because of the 2011 Japanese tsunami and the. destruction of the main broadcast Sony tape manufacuring facility. All of sudden HDCAM tapes went from $50-$75 each to $1,000 (I'm not joking). 4K cinema/tv was in its infancy and cost a fortune to shoot.
That's also not entirely true. The first three seasons of Enterprise were shot on film. Only season 4 was shot with digital cameras.
Technology Connections went a bit all over the place in "Film: the reason some of the past was in HD". See pinned comment and from 9m34s in the vid.
I watched the vid when he put it out thought nothing more of it, when I watched yours I thought that either DS9/VOY were tape, or DS9/VOY were film but that had been lost/destroyed. I think at least in my case the TC vid was the source of the confusion.
if you followed the DS9 doc, you would see they pulled Negatives from storage which was in a salt mine. I don't see why CBS wouldn't scan those in to make a blu-ray release since it's partially paid for via this Documentary. I hope they do it. at least DS9
Thank heaven Desi Arnaz was forward thinking enough to make sure all of the series shot at Desilu were shot on 35 mm film. The old I Love Lucy shoes look absolutely fantastic in HD as a result, let alone ST TNG. Editing on video tape explains why the next generation shows had a kind of washed out look.
I was part of the team that remastered ST TNG Season 3 and 4. Recompositing the VFX shots was very time consuming. I worked on hundreds of shots. You know the light sequence at the bottom of the main bridge view screen? Those lights are in dead sync with the original in very shot. An incredibly small detail but all of it was rebuilt like that. I remember one shot of the Enterprise I was working on had 17 separate passes or layers. What you don't see here is the incredible "analog" processes. Remember the first time you saw the Borg cube regenerating? Reverse photography of a plastic model being melted by a blow drier. :) An amazing team of very talented people. Everyone should be happy they got all of the TNG season because it was getting really expensive and sales of the Blu-rays was not meeting expectations.
Thank you, sir, for all your hard work remastering TNG. I'm watching the complete series right now on Bluray and it's astounding. It looks and sounds gorgeous on my home theater. Each time, it feels like watching a big budget movie from the 80s/90s. Truly exceptional work. In fact, it's made me fall in love with Star Trek. Thank you greatly! 🙏
Thank you for your work! I appreciate it.
Ty for doing what you did! You kick serious butt and my gf and I are big Trek fans.
It would cost the budget of a movie to remaster DS9 and VOY... but I think in the long run it would be worth it. They would then forever exist in HD for streaming and sale for decades to come.
unfortunately corporations in America are aware of whatever financial quarter comes next and after that the world can end for all they care
The Blu-rays of TOS and TNG didn't make their money back, and those two series are more popular than DS9 or Voyager. Paramount/Viacom concluded that if true HD versions of the most popular Trek series didn't sell well enough, it simply wasn't worth spending the huge amount of money it would cost to remaster the less popular ones.
decades? more like a few years until people start demanding 4K. if they're gonna do it, they'd be better off remastering to 4K right away.
@@dunebasher1971
I wonder what it might've done for people's interest in Star Trek however - Bringing newer generations in, that might not have wanted to see it in 480p.
Making people interested in old, and new Trek alike, bringing in more "sales" for Trek as a whole, through other means than pure disk sales, by improving the overall name/quality of the franchise.
I know that doesn't show directly on the bottom line however.
I'd rather have DS9 and Voyager (and enterprise actually) remastered than a new movie.
Think I read somewhere that the remaster of TNG cost 20 million and with the extensive use of CGI (and if the original files even exist) both DS9 and VOG would cost more. That being said I would purchase a DS9 BluRay.
The original cgi assets DO exist! The artists that worked on the shows all kept personal copies of the files & are willing to give them to CBS if they want them
20 or even 40 Million really isn’t that much, of you get those shows in HD with somewhat modern CGI. Voyager was insanely successful on Netflix. I believe Endgame is one of the most watched episodes on the platform as a whole. There clearly is a market.
@@shaggy72 that’s great to know, I know they did that for B5 and recovered supposedly lost files, didn’t know if it was feasible for Trek (though of course Foundation Imaging was involved with both so I shouldn’t be too surprised).
@@kaitlyn__L Actually, that has yet to be seen. The only scene files that we know Mojo Lebowitz found was the battle scene from "The Sacrifice of Angels." He's been pretty quiet about what else he has.
I have to think he found some of the files for TMP, otherwise they'd have to do everything all over again. Unfortunately, Paramount's still not answering that question, and I find it hard to believe that redoing all that CGI would take just eight months.
It was the largest film restoration project in history. Still is.
People ALWAYS think technical tasks involving computers are easy. Thank you for explaining clearly why this isn't just a matter of running the tape through some kind of magic box to make it all sparkle. There is a hard cost in time and resources, and it has to make business sense to make that investment.
The revenue Paramount+ could make by having exclusive rights to every episode of every live action Star Trek show ever produced (DS9 and VOY included) in HD makes good business sense to me.
@@jackdubz4247 it makes EXCELLENT sense, so obv Viacom won’t do it! 🙃
@@adamjohnson5931 That thought had occurred to me. :(
"running the tape through some kind of magic box to make it all sparkle"
I still believe that this is how it all works and the computer guys are just making excuses to look more important and to cash in more dough. :-D :-P
"running the tape through some kind of magic box to make it all sparkle..."
Except every other studio went remaster/re-release crazy HARD the past few years. I felt like my entire lifetime of shows I watched right up until now got re-released.
That short battle scene from the What We Left Behind documentary was incredible. I know it probably won't happen but an entire remaster of DS9 at that level of quality would be epic.
I thought it was a good teaching moment of the limitations of simply re-rendering CGI scenes built for SD-TV. You had all the sharp edges you'd expect from a Bluray video, but the models were extremely blocky, the textures too flat, and it looked too much like a video game because of that.
If you want to properly remaster 90s CGI you'll have to improve the models I think. Increase polygoncounts and redo the textures at the very least.
@@tharqal2764 Which is what they did for those CGI scenes, they really revamped the CG models, improved the explosions, lighting, etc.
"This video is my excuse to get really really nerdy about film stuff...." - Say no more, I'm all in on this one.
Yeah, I was thinking "We know where we are, that's what we came for"
Why I clicked
The CGI footage in the DS9 documentary wasn't redone. It's actually the original CGI files that was saved by the animators. The DS9 animators said they actually “overbuilt“ their 1990s CGI models to be HD quality because they knew that HDTV technology was just around the corner and they wanted to try to future proof their work. And all it would take would be to open the original software and hit re-export at higher resolution (albeit with a few small tweaks)
So the person who made this video is totally wrong on his main point? He must have had some source or reason to say they were only rendered at 480i. It would seem logical that they would make the models at a high res but the final render of all the elements together was at SD. I guess that would make you both right. I think it would be quite a head start if CG animators could get their hands on the original model files and either reskin them in HD or simply reanimate scenes. If you can get the defiant, the station, three classes of gem jhdar, kligion, and cardasian ships you could use them for %80 of the shots and be a lot further along than starting from scratch as this video says has to be done.
@@brianaple The animators didn't say that they rendered it higher than 480i back in the day, they simply meant that the used textures had higher quality so that you could render it to higher quality which is what they did with that particular scene. Then comes the question if all of those source files still exists for all the cgi scenes in the series, and that all textures where "overbuilt".
I was thinking finding the original assets would require new textures but it’s great to know that most of them would likely look fine.
Especially with ray tracing renders! Though of course therein lies the question of making every hull light and phaser beam emissive lights, or only some of them. Plus how many passes/samples you do with your rays. But still, getting more elaborate light and shadow on the greebles is what I want heh.
Also we can fix the Defiant’s nose in the title sequence :)
@@brianaple I've been in the movie/tv industry for 23 years now, on the sw/hw video editing side of things but still. First ever NAB I attended in 1999. HD was the talk of the town, it wasn't there for cinema but it was definitely there for TV episodical and was making its way slowly but surely in the mainstream. I had a content producer who was going over thousands and thousands of hours of family footage shot mostly in 8MM B&W than color than VHS and the like and had signed a deal with both NFB and French Canadian Historia channel.
One day, he asks me my opinion about telecine transfer format I'd recommend, new content shooting I'd do (they were shooting scenes out of a fake basement studio where you'd have this 8MM projector showing the opening content of the show with the animator explaining the context as each episode would be about a traditional Quebec activity or season.
I told him to shoot all new content in HDCAM, telecine everything to BetacamSX or better, deliver in BetacamSx in 16:9 SD (that was the mastering format the broadcaster was asking for). He asked me why would I fo that? it's going to cost me 20% more at least in prod/post! I told him, yeah! but in 20 years, when you want to sell the rights to a broadcaster in the States in Europe or the States, all you'll have to do is dig your HDCAM master your made at same time as the Betacam SX one and sell it ;-).
Of course, delivery is all file based now but back then it was all Betam, sometimes HDCAM and file delivery really only started after the Japanese tsunami. Official common standard is also barely 5 years old: IMF for ota/ott compliance, DCP for Digital Cinema compliance.
@@Henrik_Holst So the source files would hold up to a modern 4K HD render. Well then it would seem to be quite doable. I think paramount has a good idea of what the incremental revenue would be with all the data they can pull from their streaming service. I must say though that the current look of the series with whatever type of up scaling used is quite good. It is not the "could have been shot yesterday" quality that TNG has but it is much better than the early versions that BBC had access to years ago.
I already knew some of the reasons: not as popular as TNG, and more expensive because of the need to redo CGI. Though you made a good point about the Blu-rays - it came out before streaming became so prevalent, and they stood to make a lot more from the box set releases. That said, I love that they still had all the original model/effects shots, allowing them to bring out all the detail we couldn't previously see. I just hope they one day take the plunge with the remaining 2 show. 🥺🙏
And they still didn’t make enough money to consider it profitable
This was a wonderful video, Rowan. Instead of refraining from nerding out, please do it more often. This finally answered a question I couldn't quite find an answer for. Take care!
It should be noted while some CG shots are lost and unrecoverable. The majority of scene files still exsist. And rather than remaking the scenes from scratch, could be rerendered at the higher res, and some modern day post processing done to make them a bit better... This is basically what IRML did with the DS9 remaster vfx.
I don't think that it would be a easy as that. For one thing, the models and their textures were likely,y built with a lower res image in mind, this means that you would probably have to go in and tweak both the model and the textures so that they'll look just as good in hi-def and they did in standard. The once you have the models prettied up, you still have to recomp them into the scenes and unless you have the original comp files, assuming they were done digitally and the software still exists, you're going to have redo all of the composites all over again which is going to take all the time effort it did the first time around.
@@Riceball01 while it's a job. Reworking textures and models and keeping the majority of scene files is still verydoable. But as fot the defiant the cg model was good enough to use in first contact...
@@Riceball01 It was done using lightwave, which still exists and has been ported to basically every computer platform in the past 25 years.
@@kyle8952 I had no idea that Lightwave still around, I hadn't seen any mention of Lighwave in ages. It seemed to me that everybody (professionally) uses either Maya or 3DS Max, and hobbyists like Blender.
I saw TNG when it came out & bought the dvd's when released. Must have seen every eps like 10 times.
After a break of about 15 years I finally just finished the remastered version I bought years ago & the quality in comparison with SD is incredible. The colors, the effects are really good.
Let's hope they do DS9 & VOY, I'll would buy them on release.
As would I. But it take a lot more than just us for the studios to make a profit.
The answer is simple - if you want them to look like higher quality just watch on your phone!
I agree small but high resolution screens can make DVD quality videos and movies look really nice
It's especially higher quality when you watch on your phone while in a bathroom toilet. Once you get past the 10 minute mark the way the toilet seat makes your legs start to fall asleep helping you be distracted enough you could watch it on a early 2000s flip phone without a single thought on video quality. Too bad it doesn't also work with toilet paper quality...
That's not higher quality. Just greater density.
Better yet, a CRT TV.
@@krane15 The point is a smaller screen is harder to resolve the detail. It's just about hiding the problems.
One more thing to note: Both ToS and TNG audio was re-mixed into 7.1 surround sound which is also a huge undertaking like remasatering the video.
seems like a waste of time.
@@Blink_____it’s not wasted on my 4K/7.2.4 Atmos/DTSX home theater 🎭 🤷♂️
@@jjlnguess7354 you are in the minority of home viewers
@@Blink_____ ok………………………………
@@Blink_____ What a ridiculous notion - just because you do not remotely care about Star Trek sound design doesn't mean others don't. ?
What an excellent video! I work in digitization of historical materials, and I constantly get asked about quality of scans, especially when it comes to old newspapers. I always tell folks: you either have to go back to the original newsprint or you use master microfilm. Microfilm is still the best medium for long-term preservation and duplication. This video really underscores the value of film to other productions. Unfortunately, DS9 and Voyager were made in a transitional time between SD and HD and became a casualty of it. I'm with you in hoping they make HD remasters of them; it would be truly amazing to see those shows with their fullest potential.
Film is so underrated, I’m lowkey furious with my teenage self for thinking we’d moved beyond it in freaking 2009.
Of course that all depends on the quality of the remaster. Some are a lot more detained than others. Some even go so far as to enhance the audio or even add digital surround sound.
One thing, a while back, some of the effects artist that worked on DS9 and Voyager said that they still have much of the files, and that they massively overbuilt most of the CG models. They took the Nebula class model and did a simple rendering pass on it and it looked AMAZING in higher resolution. But it's been a while, who knows if those drives are even still working at this point.
I think many people are not buying blue ray as much as streaming - so AI upscaling is good for enough for now…
It wouldn't be unlimited money, it's two more steps that they don't have to talk about again.
I think someone at the studio hates those shows and doesn't want them to get a remaster, that's all there is to it.
DS9 and VOY are both underrated Star Trek and they should be remastered in 4K HD.
No one under-rates DS9, it just wasn't nearly as popular.
These days, DS9 isn't really underrated. It got the recognition it deserved. Agree on Voyager, it gets more hate than it deserves IMO.
@@LasherTimora true
Voyager is the worst / least good out of all the live-action ST shows. It completely failed its original amazing concept à la 'Lost in Space' and instead we got a diluted second-rate clone of TNG where nothing of consequence can happen to the hero ship and its crew, and Status Quo is at its "primest". All because the network execs wanted to play it safe.
That is why Ronald D. Moore abruptly and angrily left the writing staff of the show (after the end of DS9 and his transfer to VOY), because he simply did not want to write that sXXt and instead began developing the reboot of Battlestar Galactica where he wanted to properly show what it should look like when a starship gets into a desperate situation with no help in sight.
So the greatest positive about Voyager basically was that thanks to its being so sterile, so bland and so family friendly we've got one of the greatest sci-fi shows of all time, the BSG. :-)
P.S. - Star Trek staff sort of vindicated itself later on by producing the fantastic third season of Star Trek: Enterprise (some of the bestest Star Trek ever made) which is what tonally and stakes-wise Voyager should have been like as a show.
@@subraxas my sister is a Voyage lover.
That was extremely interesting. I am grateful for you discussing this. I never truly understood what remastering involved.
Personally, I will always be a person who wants physical media. I just don't care about streaming. I never have had it, and I won't get it. I don't watch much new offerings at all, and it isn't worth the money I would pay for it. I mean, when I heard how good Star Trek Picard Season 3 was, I bought the bluray. It was simply based on feedback as to whether I wanted to see it and make the purchase. I am fine sticking with physical media. I have the things I want or care about.
I expect that eventually we’ll have AI upscaling that can use more inputs than just the original edited render. Namely, something where it could consume all the raw scanned footage, as well as production stills and photos of props, to have more basis to fill in details during upscaling than just the image in the final edit.
There’s also been interesting work in “style transfer”-there could come a day where you could re-do just a few effects to modern standards by hand, then have the AI try to replicate that in other scenes. (Often-reused effects like transporter sparkles or phaser fire are probably the most likely to see success with this.)
I’ve been thinking the same thing. If you could give the film stills and allow it to upscale the VFX then that’d be quite useful I think. Unfortunately I feel even the DS9 remaster has that wax figure look to it.
Also I like your glowy sona!
@Bob Thornton it’s true that we can have GANs create realistic images from scratch but, the real devil in the details is integrating that with the other video upscaling NNs. You’re not just asking it to spit out brand new images of the Defiant being shot every which way, it has to know when the Defiant is in a video frame and when it isn’t, and then correlate that to the angles etc it’s meant to do. Same for any NN that’s trained on the original film stock to correlate that with a video frame for cropping and colour grading and so on. Then integrating that with another layer to apply any VFX when necessary.
It’s definitely technically possible with current techniques if someone slots them all together and trains them appropriately. But of course that’s the hard part!
@Bob Thornton Any generic effort would of course look pretty bad, you’d absolutely need a new NN training for every TV show, possibly every season. Since the goal is for some ML tech to assist in studio-quality remasters, it’s entirely separate from “how might the current fan projects improve their results” which I feel you’re maybe coming from that direction?
Otherwise, I’d already addressed what you said in my previous comment, about how it’s all about tying together the dozens of different kinds of NNs; above and beyond getting a GAN to spit out arbitrary images of the Defiant or DS9 getting shot-at with torpedoes. Of course that GAN would have a huge training set, so I’m not sure why you’re repeating that part.
@Bob Thornton for seasons one and two of DS9 it’s 4:3. Everything following was framed widescreen safe so we would largely match the 4:3 matte but opening it up.
To be honest, I sidestepped the matter of how we actually train the GANs, and just assumed we’d do it successfully and focused on the rest. Plus issues like whether it’s one GAN for everything or one GAN per ship, that’s all implementation details rather than the underlying methodology imo.
@Bob Thornton I certainly hope we can get there! Given the ways current GANs can need extensive tweaking for just one purpose I’d wager we’re not quite there, but then I am a year or two behind on the newest developments (except for the style-transfer GAN Intel demo’d in GTA, which I actually thought had pretty ugly results albeit it’s an impressive concept).
For me, the TNG remasters are the gold standard for bringing FX up to date. I know that they're using all new visual effects, but it never pulls me out of the story - they just prevent poor, old effects from doing that very thing.
Unlike TOS, TMP or Star Wars special edition (or even Red Dwarf.)
I really wish for a TOS version with the special effects re-done with the original model that's in the Smithsonian!
@@Reggie1408 it wouldn't surprise me if there have been some internal conversations around having "another go" at TOS eventually. Presumably some of the hard work around digital transfer of the raw footage has already been done.
@Bob Thornton agreed, so plastic. And the console displays are incredibly incongruous.
This is difficult for me because I really want those shows in HD simply for longevity reasons (those tapes won't be in paramounts basement forever) but I understand entirely how difficult it would be, and that paramount doesn't have unlimited money to spend on their fans wants alone. Maybe they could outsource it somehow, even to fan volunteers? They scan all the film and then send each episode to a bunch of super nerds to put it back together. I dunno, I just want it to happen somehow. Great video, really broke down how hard this stuff actually is
Movie and TV studios rarely throw away film stock. One reason is that it's a much better archival medium than anything else. Shine light through it, and you can see the picture. Every analogue and digital tape or computer format comes and goes over time. If you backed up rushes when Voyager was on the air, reading those files now would be harder and in 20 years perhaps impossible.
Yeah why would an entertainment company ever produce what fans want? That's just crazy talk!
@@ian9outof10 As they read your comment, long term Doctor Who fans are laughing cynically and then gently weeping...! That being said, the DW community did have the DW Restoration Team - a dedicated team of talented fans who painstakingly restored and remastered what had not been thrown out - a fascinating story if you are into that kind of thing.
CBS should let the public take care of redoing / remaking the effects, while the studio handles the film scans. I am sure there are a bunch of talented fans out there that would do it for free.
Exactly.
Even the AI upscaling can't replace the missing color information. Look at the footage for WHAT WE LEFT BEHIND that they actually remastered for HD - very rich color.
As far as the question of remastering for streaming - the quality of streaming is actually worse for SD than the DVDs. DS9 & VOY stick out like a blurry & sore thumb.
I didn't realise how many steps were needed to remaster those Next Gen episodes until this video. I can totally understand why the studio would reluctant to remaster DS9 and Voyager given how much effort it would take,
Thank God that at least the Enterprise was already shot in HD and thus does not need any remastering nowadays.
Well, at least for now. It still may become obsolete during the upcoming decades, owing to the ever-advancing technologies.
Well Voyager also has the problem with missing 3D assets. The later seasons used CGI models and sadly the Postproduction company who did that does no longer exist. And nobody knows where the 3D assets are. Babylon 5 had a similar fate but thankfully all the original 3D assets still exist and were preserved. There has been even fan attempts to re-render these effects in HD and it looks amazing.
@Bob Thornton And the video shows, it a very expensive project, and they take a chance on recouping their investment (and making a profit) if the finicky public decides they no longer want to invest in discs.
@Bob Thornton These are the new generation of sci-fi producers. I suspect they know (or don't care) what the fans want. Like most of Hollywood nowadays, they're likely more concerned with spreading their liberal PC agenda than anything else.
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 Many of the 3D assets are floating around with various people, Rob Bonchune did a massive upgrade to the Voyager CG model a few years back in the event of a Voyager remaster. Shoot, I myself have the Bird of Prey 3D model used in Enterprise.
I fully understand why they can't easily remaster DS9 and Voy, it's just a damn shame. I would LOVE to own Blu Ray copies of these shows and would buy copies as soon as they came out.
I was lucky enough to see What We Left Behind at the cinema. Seeing that one scene remastered brought me to tears. I understand why it may never happen. But I still hope
It was so beautiful.
Also B5 is a bloody beautiful remaster
DS9 is just as popular as TNG if not more, I agree with your assessment of Voyager thought. I feel that Voyager was the beginning of the end for Star Trek. That being said a Blu-ray of both would sell like crack and would probably only cost the amount of one Hollyweird Movie. Perhaps if Paramount had done this and a few more good decisions like it they wouldn't be in the predicament they're in now being sold to Skydance for scrap...not to mention if you gave it to the fans they'd probably do all the work for you, for free.
Oh man, this is so depressing, I REALLY LOVE VOYAGER and have been waiting for a remaster. :(
8:45 - Streaming quality has improved, but it still doesn't hold a candle to physical media. Especially for 4K content. Convenience is its main benefit.
That said, I thought the B5 remaster was worth watching. No amount of AI upscaling can improve the quaintly lo-res textures used on planets in the CGI shots, but the live-action material was noticeably improved, both in sharpness and color. I'd replace my DVD set in a heartbeat if they ever put it out on Blu-ray.
To save money, they didn't scan the original B5 film negatives. Instead they scanned some broadcast tapes which had higher quality than DVD but still less quality than full HD.
hard agree on the quality. Streaming is good, but it doesn't come close to a disc medium.
If Paramount+ uses HD Remastering of DS9 et al as the hook, then I may consider buying into their bugware next year.
@Bob Thornton
For me, new Star Trek is enough of an edge, though Strange New Worlds is the one I'm least interested in. They're going back to their roots rather than carrying on in new directions.
I mean, I'm sure it'll be good (they've earned the benefit of the doubt with what they've made so far) but I doubt it'll be near the top of my rankings for favourite Trek shows.
I also hope 'Voyager' and 'Deep Space 9' are remastered. 'Voyager' is my favorite Star Trek series. I haven't seen TNG remastered version but I hope it is better than the original Star Trek series. There's a youtube channel where compares original Star Trek remastered with o cgi and a new version where many scenes do use CGI. The scenes where planets, especially Earth appear are obviously much better on the CGI version. But scenes with Enterprise and other ships appear look so fake with cgi compared to the older remastered version.
AI upscaling is one step closer to "magnify and enhance"
kinda true, if for example as in CSI type of shows you have a car plate you cannot read by yourself cause the quality is that bad, but (future) AI could be able to reconstruct it just based on how the few pixels look like
Unfortunately it only really looks good for shows shot on video. Stuff shot on film never really improves the quality.
I've seen example videos of AI upscaling. The videos hurt my eyes. There's something about them that cause eye strain for me.
@@pferreira1983 You got that Bass-Ackwards, Bubba!😖
Topaz AI video upscaler is amazing. Been rewatching voyager on my projector and its a million times better than the blur of the original DVDs on a bit screen. Properly impressed, and well worth the time to go and upscale it all. Its taking about 4 hours per episode to upscale with Topaz on my Nvidia 1070. I just saw the image from voyager on this video at 7 mins 13 seconds and that looks horrible! The upscaling im doing with Topaz looks waaaay better so far.
I would pay a premium to get those blurays for Voyager and DS9.
I'll take it a step further, I'll buy the blurays to complete Discovery and I'll buy the Star Trek Picard seasons 1 and 2 bluray.
Season 3 and SNW are a given, but I'll complete those sets out of respect if I get DS9 and Voyager on bluray.
at least in the US we are starting the process of losing Trek from other streaming services at the end of this month as they try to make everything Paramount Plus exclusives. It could be a selling point to offer the remastered versions of these series exclusively on that platform eventually? I do believe Netflix shared that Voyager was the most watched Trek (or had the most watched episode at least) on their service while they had it.
there are still Networks like Heroes and Icons that run all 5 Star Trek series 6 nights a wk.
No wonder Voyager was very popular on Netflix. I discovered Star Trek with The Next Generation and started watching it with "The Best Of Both Worlds" no less. This episode alone made me a Star Trek fanatic. Then I came to see Star Trek The Original Series and I loved it (the Kirk-Spock-Bones relationship was everything). Then I saw Deep Space Nine, loved it too (especially the first 2 seasons with independent stories and no story-arcs, sorry but that's what I like about Trek) but when I saw Voyager, even though the first 3 seasons weren't perfect (it became good when the Kazon were gone and very good when the Borgs appeared), and that was it. I was obsessed. My favorite Star Trek series ever was born and I was ecstatic.
I liked all Star Trek series, yes even Discovery, Picard and Enterprise but Voyager will always have a special place in my heart and will always be the best Star Trek series for me and for a number of reasons :
1 the first female captain (and I love Kate Mulgrew), it was about time women of power became a reality there and women were finally taken seriously and were not wearing mini-skirts anymore. A huge step forward. I say that and I am a man.
2 a lot of Borg stories (when even TNG and DS9 were all about the boring and annoying Klingons)
3 very few religion-related episodes (sorry DS9 but it's not what I'm after when I look at science-fiction)
4 very few violence, war stories, dark and gruesome scenes (again sorry DS9, Discovery I'm talking about you too !)
5 never the Star Trek characters seemed more relatable and well-written since TNG and TOS
6 they were really going were Trek wasn't gone before (the Delta Quadrant) finally new vilains ! (especially loved Species 8472)
There’d also be the possibility of genuine widescreen versions as well; the later seasons were shot with that in mind.
Very interesting, thanks for this information, I really hope they can figure out the remaster and get it done for Voyager and DS9 on Blu-Ray 😁
HD DS9 will blow people away
already did
DS9 had the most solid episodes of any of the series in my opinion. I'd love a 4K set.
In The Pale Moonlight, Trials and Tribble-ations, and The Visitor just to name a few.
I've been watching DS9 on Netflix for the first time over the course of the last year or so (I'm on the last season now), and I really like it, it's so good! But I've been finding the Netflix quality stuff for any of the shows prior to Enterprise have pretty low quality and show up very dark, at least on all the 3 displays I've used (FHD ThinkPad, 2012 Retina MacBook Pro, and 1600p Gateway monitor via miniDisplay to VGA adapter). But honestly, I could see myself buying both DS9 and Voyager if they had higher resolution and better lighting, which is pretty easy to do, I've had to do a lot of lighting fixes since my camera doesn't have built in white balance correction in video mode.
@@joylox Happy you discovered DS9. When you finish it, watch the documentary '' What we leave behind'' ....it is well done.
My only complaint was there seemed like there were too many ferengi based episodes. I did love quark
@@blackbirdfilms1966 The Ferengi were done poorly in STNG, but DS9 really fleshed out their greed based race.
Whoever asked about the Star Wars Retrospective - I highly recommend the ones done by sfdebris - his work in looking at the Star Wars retrospective cannot be matched. His Star Trek reviews are also hilarious :)
my mind boggles about the connecting of Star trek with star wars. one is a geeky SF series, the other is a fantasy kids(words of george lucas) franchise.
You’re the one of few people doing good quality Star Trek videos and the only one doing retros. Thank you and keep going. Xxx
The TNG blu-ray/HD remaster was a godsend for us fans. But even it, one of the most culturally relevant Trek shows available, didn't sell all that well. That process was so expensive that CBS ended up charging an arm and a leg for on Blu Ray set, especially on release, so no one but super fans bought them. It's safe to assume CBS lost a ton of money on that investment, even if it was great for us. DS9 and VOY would unfortunately lose them even more money because so much more work would be involved, and corporations will always care about that bottom line I'm afraid. It's a real shame since DS9 and VOY were actually framed for 16:9, unlike TNG.
Remember that Deep Space 9 Documentary? They remastered all the clips you see in that Documentary, not full episodes though, just the snippets that were used in it.
A concept like "selling well" is irrelevant these days. Physical media is a dying/dead format. In five years time nobody is going to be watching blu-rays. This is about taking proper care of Star Trek's heritage and future-proofing the franchise (all of it) for future generations. CBS-Viacom leaving DS9 and VOY to rot in murky, grainy, washed-out SD hurts my soul.
@@jackdubz4247 Well i guess i'm a "nobody" bc I will always take physical media (DVD/Bluray & now 4k UHD) over streaming any day!
1. Streaming rights switch periodically so you have to continuously pay for whoever owns the rights at that time to watch a certain show + the show comes & goes & is not always available. 2. The bandwidth & compression makes the picture quality not so good, sometimes worse than standard definition,. 3. Internet connection is always needed.
Nope, i'll stick with Bluray for as long as they make em, thank you very much. It's much more practical & efficient for me regardless of the popularity of the much inferior format of streaming.
Probably didn’t help that the later seasons are the more highly regarded, but they more or less had to go in chronological order.
I was following it and really excited for release, but it was something like £60-70 a season which was just too much for me at that time. Then it later came down to £15-20 a season but by then it was over and CBS already said it hadn’t sold enough to warrant doing the others. I wonder if they’d priced lower to begin with, maybe they’d have sold better. The TOS remaster was announced with television screenings of select episodes and they had a DVD release as well. I’d probably have bought such DVDs if they were cheaper just because the extant TNG DVDs had such a soft picture anyway. I do agree that the high initial sale price killed it.
Great video. I knew that the TNG remaster was difficult enough to not hold my breath about the remaining 2 series, but I still didn't appreciate just how monumental a task this was. Never occurred to me how many thousands of reels of film it takes to store 9 series of television. And I didn't know how many layers got composited together for the model-shots! Cool stuff. Perhaps we should petition some billionaires to see if any of them want to create the Star Trek Preservation Fund.
I think the streaming landscape makes it even more feasible for a DS9 remaster. A $100 box set may be a hard sell but being able to say, DS9 now available in remastered 4K exclusively on paramount + might get a lot of people to put up $8 for that. I bet a lot more money is "lost" in free trial subscriptions than it would cost to do the remaster. As a cost of getting maybe millions of new sign up it might be worth the cost. Well millions might be a bit much but they would get me and I am sure I represent a lot of fans that would spend $8 but never +$100 to see DS9 in proper 4K. Then in a few years when the hype dies down they could syndicate it and let the BBC advertise it as the 4K broadcast premier.
Great video. But one quibble. You said that to watch TNG in its highest quality, you no longer need to buy the Blurays. Not true! The streaming quality of TNG is FAR lower than their Bluray counterparts on both audio and video due to compression. The Bluray discs are still the only source for watching TNG in the highest A/V quality. Of course, the streaming companies would like you to think otherwise...
I don’t understand the fools who thumbed down this video. This was informative and really well done.
@@colinchapple1096 How do we know you're not just a bot?
@@colinchapple1096 Aw snap. You were supposed to say 'touche'!
The obvious thing is that the first two series were head and shoulders the most popular, so of course they would make a good profit on the remastered home releases. The later spinoff series? Not so much. Plus, who still buys physical media now anyway? 5% of how many people used to. Those first TOS remasters came out more than 15 years ago when box set physical media was at its height. edit : ok he said it at the end.
Watching this, I'm struck with how good some of the CGI explosions were on Voyager. That scene from Dragon's Teeth looks like Orville levels of quality, all be it 4:3
Foundation Imaging really knew their CGI explosions, there’s interviews when they talked about spending days tweaking the shrapnel and size of the combusting part and so on. Though I think the interview was for the Borg exploding in the teaser to Scorpion pt 1. But it’s their general ethos too. Tweaking them so they’re as meaty and satisfying as they can be, but without looking overwrought or disproportionate.
@@kaitlyn__L It also didn't hurt that Lightwave improved by leaps and bounds once they uncoupled it from the Amiga and the Video Toaster, and I say that as a die-hard Amiga fanatic.
@@cubdukat very true!
@@kaitlyn__L
In fairness, Star Trek as a whole has always managed to get quite good results from what they had.
@@AndrewD8Red yeah, some of their practical explosions look really good. An underrated one is when the Enterprise nacelle explodes in that time loop episode with Captain Frasier Crane. But those were limited to 6-10 attempts at best, each one another copy of the model. With the CGI they spent days tweaking hundreds, if not thousands, of versions of the explosions! Sometimes the CGI shots can look a little “too” perfect, like when the shrapnel is distributed super evenly instead of clumping, but I think they moved past that pretty quickly.
DS9 and VOY are from early CGI, and there are some issues with rendering in VOY (several details fail to render at points, and it's not noticeable in SD) so this also means they have to find the original files, hope they still compatible with modern tools, find the original models, add new detail to the models, etc. It would effectively be like creating those series all over again from scratch.
Never ask for a remaster where those who would be charged to do so dont care, or cant afford to effectively do it. Remasters are complex and require time, effort and understanding to do. Imo one for the sake of it isnt worth it. If your gonna do it do it right.
If we are to look at it when it is done so poorly, we mearly have to look at the shit-show of the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" remaster. A Remaster so bad its shameful.
I cannot believe they actually released that for sale. What a bloody tragedy.
True, I’d hate to have one of those efforts done merely to placate.
The shot of the camera crew at the edge of a scene in the Buffy remaster blew my mind. How incompetent can you truly be.
yeah 20th Century Fox really sucks at HD remastering their TV shows… Even the X-Files looks terrible… way too bright and they even changed aspect ratio to 16:9 for the early seasons. Even if shooting for 16:9 only happened in later seasons, which were framed with 16:9 widescreen in mind but also framed for 4:3.
Thanks for the time and effort you put into making this video. I truly hope there is a way that these series do have a modern HD remaster one day whether that is via work from the fans in combination/under licence from Paramount & Viacom with new FX shots or quality AI upscaling work. I would happily pay for the effort involved to re-watch these great series in modern picture and sound quality at home.
It's pretty insane that Paramount would even attempt a shot by shot remaster/recreation of _TNG._ It's a shame the blu sets underperformed because the end product is absolutely beautiful.
Technology and AI gets better all the time--I do hope one day for at least an upscaled Voyager. There are a few youtube tests that look fantastic!
Here's a non-techinal argument against remastering: As much as I would love to see DS9 remastered, I realized after seeing a remastered TNG that the alien make-up of the era does not always stand up to high-def scrutiny. It takes you out of the show when you can now notice the seam on Michael Dorn's Klingon forehead, giving it away as a prosthetic. Examples like that make remastering not always a good thing.
Sloppy remaster job, not that hard to remove the Worf seam. Not saying you should do this for every "issue" like this but Worf is a main character, they could have done it there.
i agree.i dont really want to see all the pores and pimples and makeup strokes on a actors face. i limit tv to 720 to 1080.
lol this is why high definition porn never took off, you can see all the imperfections in the bodies of the actors.
Yeah but then the shots of the ships always blow me away and make it worth the remastering.
To be fair that's fixable, but it would ramp up the cost. Just fixing it fore Worth in every episode would be expansive but doable. Fore every Karakter? Yeah....no not feasible in the slightest fore most.
I like the TOS remastered versions. They are better than the original special efx but still capture the classical essence of Star Trek TOS.
I honestly get a thrill out of both versions, which is why I love how the Blu-rays allow viewers the option to choose between the two versions.
We were so fortunate, that nearly all the TNG negatives were intact. They could have been lost in a fire, misplaced, thrown away, or sold on eBay. The TNG BluRays are worth every penny! 🖖😀
Doctor Who fans know the pain of what you describe as a hypothetical.
Bro your retrospectives are the best researched and presented. You would absolutely bring something to the table with Star Wars Retrospectives. I would love to watch and listen.
Would be cool if you did a breakdown of the Babylon 5 remaster!
If Babylon 5 can have a Blu-Ray release and an HD version of the show, why can't DS9 and Voyager? Maybe it's still impossible but remastered clips by fans look really good.
The cgi sceen in the ds9 doc was a rerender at higher res, most the data files still exist from the series. CBS should have put the money they wasted on new trek into remastering ds9 and voy. They could have released them first on their streaming service, I'm sure that would have brought in more subs.
F*ck off with the "wasted on new trek" shit. Just because you don't like it doesn't make it worthless. The new shows are successful, likely making CBS more than if they restored and remastered 20 year old TV shows. I too would love to see it done but I would never degenerate another show to argue for it.
Or . . . why not both?
I would buy DS9 and Voyager on blu-ray all day. DS9 was one of the best series IMO. Already own the TNG series on blu-ray. Great upload!
When streaming services pay Three-Digit-Millions of Dollars for streaming-only series and movies, paying 40-50 Million Dollars for over 370 episodes of Star Trek in HD is like a drop in the bucket. The marker "does it sell on media" is obviously of no value anymore.
Fantastic presentation! You’ve got a new subscriber here.
I’m a big Dark Shadows fan and wondered why MPI hasn’t released it on Blu-ray. Now it makes a lot more sense. Thanks!
“If you wanted to re-watch TNG in it’s highest quality, you had to buy the Blu-rays, but that’s not true any more.”
It’s _absolutely_ still true. Maybe you can stream the HD remasters on Paramount+ or wherever, but there’s no streaming service that comes _close_ to the quality of a standard Blu-ray for viewing HD content. Your typical Blu-ray encodes HD video at well upwards of 25 mbps. Streaming services don’t stream _4K_ content at that high of a bit rate, let alone HD content. Streaming’s no substitute for Blu-ray when it comes to quality.
In the interests of finding out by how much, I just checked a 1080p video I'd saved from RUclips. Peaks at 4.4Mbps, typically hangs around in the 1.5-2Mbps range, though it does drop under 1Mbps at times. If RUclips is typical, you're not even getting 10% of what you'd get out of a Blu-ray.
@@Roxor128 Absolutely right.
I think the reason they haven't done them is because they use money as an excuse, a multibillion dollar company worried about money, rather than future proofing the shows, the longer they wait, the less likely they'll be able to rescan the original film, etc.
YES YES YES! Please do Babylon 5 retrospective next!
It's the next thing after my Star Trek Retrospectives are done.
There was also the issue of the disappointing sales of the TNG blu rays. They set the price point way too high on release, and a lot the folk who would purchase them had just recently spent a fortune on the DVDs.
I liked the remaster of TOS for the most part, however some of the shots of maneuvering spaceships/shuttles looks a little janky.
With TOS that's a whole other dilemma. Because every episode only cost around 170k USD or something. That included optical effects and model shots. And from a technical standpoint the quality of the space ship models shots and shuttles were very subpar, even for 1960s standards. And sadly the quality often suffered even more from cheap and rushed optical printing. This is why sometimes the ship is barely visible and almost drowning in the backgrounds and sometimes the shots look a lot better. Technically it WAS possible to make it look better even back then. But the original TV show of Star Trek was considered "Low budget". And even that budget had to be constantly fought for and justified by the fans, By Gene himself and the cast, as well as the production designers.
@@KRAFTWERK2K6 The TOS remastered FX were totally redone. I've never actually checked out the cleaned up original episodes. Strange that I didn't considering I actually prefer the "concrete windsock" planet killer in "The Doomsday Machine". 😛 The recreated one is too flexible and moves too quickly. And when it's chasing the Enterprise, it's like, RIGHT on their tail. 😛It is really amazing what they were able to do with such a limited budget on the original show, though. But, man, in high def you REALLY see the janky craftsmanship on much of the set(s).
Paramount+ exclusive, since they seem to be pulling the licenses from competitors now. Would surely help retain fans between new shows, or whichever fans don’t like all the new series. A few years of that, then they can sell complete set blu rays.
Sorry but I'm in the sacrilegious *Deep Space Nine is better than The Next Generation* team. Bring me a Blu-Ray with updated CGI and take my money!
They are different series, and IMO neither is better than the other, but the perception might skew one way or the other depending on your preferences.
The technical explanations are interesting in and of themselves but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the lack of DS9/Voy remasters. Paramount are on record stating that the sales for TNG Remaster were not encouraging enough for them to be willing to spend the money on remastering the other shows. That said, what they could have done is rather than make a shit show like STD or Picard, they could have gone down the HBO route and remastered the other series exclusively for (what was at the time) Paramount Plus. But that would require business sense and if Paramount had that they wouldn't be in the financial deep and stinky.
After finishing DS9 on Netflix I would be like “take my money” for a HD version.
id be the same but with Voyager
9:43 For anyone interested, SF Debris made a great video series all about the making of the original and prequel star wars movies.
So, my takeaway here is we *may* see an upgrade, but specifically for Paramount+.
Great video 😃Amazing to think how much work went into basically remaking the show for Blu-Ray!
Thanks to you I also know now that an upscaled Babylon 5 exists, and I must go start that ASAP!
TLDR: tape bad film good.
I love these "really really nerdy stuff" videos. Nice work! Interesting, informative, and a bit educational.
Who needs hi-def versions of VOY/DS9 when you have the brilliance of Discovery!?? 4k streams of Burman crying almost weekly is all I need.
FYI- for those who have Voyager on DVD, if you RIP them and convert them to MKV via the Handbrake program using the "light" "unsharp mask" filter setting it will very nicely improve the appearance of the video. Combine this with the Decomb "eedi2 bob" setting to adjust for the framerate variety in the show and you have a very watchable TV series on a large television.
I'm sure AI remastering would work better when you have access to the master tapes like what the studio has vs. just the DVD's which has compression, etc.
The master tapes (the analogue video like VHS but slightly larger) were of barely BARELY more quality than DVD at the time. The studio would beam the feed via satellite to the station a week early (I used to watch them when I had one of those giant satellite dishes) & the local stations would record them onto tape.
And getting AI from the original reels would be pointless when one could just as easily rescan like they did with TNG.
@@shaggy72 just a slight correction. By the later years of DS9 and Voyager they wouldn't have been on analogue tape. They almost certainly would have been mastered on DigitalBetacam, which is about a high a quality you can get for NTSC video. But those were probably what was used for the DVD transfers, I would think. So, ultimately you're right. I don't think it would make much of a difference for the AI upscale..
@@adamlytle2615 I had suspected there was such a transition to digibeta, given the colour purity is so much better in later DS9 and Voyager, but it’s nice to have confirmation haha
@@kaitlyn__L oh, to be clear, that is just an educated guess. I work in television so know that that was becoming the standard by the late 90s. In fact, it's very possible earlier seasons were also digital, as the D2 format was around as early as 1988.
@@adamlytle2615 ah I see, appreciate the clarification! I’m aware of the early digital video tape formats, though was under the impression they weren’t used very much. But I’m younger than all that so it’s just whatever people wrote from their memories.
I have been keeping tabs on this sort of stuff, for SG1 also. Some of the work they have to do is astounding. Damaged footage can be processed frame by brake and reconstructed from the additional data in other frames, a single pass may recover astonishing quality but further passes can use the now largely repaired footage to clean itself up even further, with manual input again better improvements. Originally pioneered to try recover stuff like Charlie Chaplin movie and stuff even older than that it can be done along side colourisation and other techniques. Seen 35mm footage as old as the media itself restored and played back like HD full colour video, with higher frame rates, HDR level tweaks and more. Pretty mind blowing stuff.
Here is one issue I have with waiting for the other remasters. Those negatives are not going to be getting any better over time, and I am not getting any younger.
That was two issues
I think you missed an option on the DS9 CGI. You said the two options are totally recreating it, and upscaling it. However, if the original "source code" of the CGI is available - that is the project files from whatever 3D modeling and rending system they used - then they can simply re-render them at a higher resolution. It might take a conversion from those original source files to some newer 3D modeling system, especially if they used some proprietary rendering toolchain. However, that would still be a lot less work than re-creating the CGI.
It's super simple! Opening 3D files with programs which are either completely outdated and run on OS's which don't exist anymore or require hardware which is not available anymore (refurbished SGI, yay!). And even if you managed to open the files, you would then have to recreate the original directory structures (because assets and textures are linked files). And even if you managed this step, you then would have to recreate all textures, because rendering an image to 4K with textures which were fine for 480p will merely produce super sharp images with blurry details in between... And about conversion... Oh boy! You would have to convert the models (ok), convert the textures AND the texture mapping (ok, but will involve more work) and finally you would have to convert the shaders (basically redo the shaders), the lighting, the animation system (e.g. keyframe interpolation)
I tried all that once for an HD version of a 120 seconds 3D short I did back in 2002 in college... I gave up. Even though the software still existed, nothing in the original files worked anymore. Everything was messed up and it would have required way more work then redoing it from scratch.
I did a bit of research and it looks like the VFX for VOY were done with LightWave on Amigas and on SGI hardware. Both being hardware systems that are not available anymore.
Source: memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/CGI - quoting Star Trek: The Magazine Volume 3, Issue 3, p. 112.
They could probably remaster all 14 seasons for the cost of 1 season of whatever unwatchable crap they're making these days.
They really could.
Which would be smarter. Way more content to stream.
HD means that you see all the imperfections and corners that were cut. Futuristic tech becomes painted props, a glowing energy being becomes an actor with a tube sock over his head and a blurry background becomes plywood with visible screws, Borg start looking like actors wearing thick white facepaint and knit brown bodysuits with plastic glued on, and so on
Great video. I’d be happy with the approach they used for the Firefly blu-ray back in the day - HD film scans for the studio footage and upscaling for the special effects. AI upscaling could make the old CGI look passable too, nowadays. This method would have to be a lot cheaper to achieve than what they used for TNG, surely?
Couldn't have explained it better myself. Thank you for going through the trouble. I am currently watching an AI upscaled fan "remaster" of Voyager myself. There are lots of DS9 and Voyager upscales out there, but this one is something else, the best one I've seen by far. All of the other fan upscales seem to have an uncanny valley feel to them. Most of them look *very* artificial, and are waxy and sterile, with too much grain/noise removed.
This upscale on the other hand looks very natural, and retains and adds fine detail. It actually looks like it was shot on film, with healthy levels of noise/grain preserved. It's far from the TNG remaster, but still a great improvement.
Why not rescan and remaster the original 35mm live-action elements and then let AI upscaling have its way with the effects shots? Sounds like a fair compromise between, well, nothing and the full-tilt effort that went into TNG. This is similar to what they did with X-Files a few years ago - although, to be fair, a LOT less effect shots to deal with there.
Star Trek TOS could do with a re-remaster as so many of the ship shots in the remaster were so poor. Would love to see them remaster using the original elements as the blue screen 35mm shots of the ship seem to exist as seen in 'The Roddenbury Vault'. Or perhaps using a real physical model to upgrade the shots.
Get the model from the Smithsonian an re-shoot the ship shots!
Some VFX elements still exists as seen in the Vault, but the record is far from perfect. TNG had almost all VFX elements preserved, but TOS only has a few bits and pieces here and there, the archive is incomplete.
@@theemrpoint123 Thanks - I was hoping they had all the ship shots as there weren't really very many - what you see on the vault disc is really lovely
Finally, someone who says my name right the first time! But seriously, thanks for answering my question. I really enjoy your content and I actually found out about you through Twitter. Looking forward to that Voyager Retrospective!
No excuses man, we want those complete remastered of DS9 and Voyager on our desk 9 am tomorrow!
If we don't get official remasters of Deep Space Nine and Voyager, find yourself a nice large CRT and enjoy the DVDs! AI upscaling is a good option for modern displays too! Perhaps a native 720p display that does no additional upscaling would look great!
Oh yes, watching the DVDs on a good CRT absolutely is better than a huge HD/4K TV.
While VOY and DS9 were shot on 35mm, but only exist in completed form in SD, they could still benefit from a BluRay release. There's been a number of TV shows that were shot on videotape, but the added size of the BluRays allow them to maximize the detail. Take a look at the Red Dwarf BluRays. That was shot on cheap tape, with weird reflection marks and everything. But somehow, the Blu's still look better than the DVD.
Mainly down to film stock that sometimes can be a problem with colour correction when comes to digitising old film negatives it’s like taking an black and white film negative and adding an colour filter over it and reprint it and to find out many problems with it so it can help with these questions
In 1987, I wrote a paper for my film appreciation class explaining how one day, possibly around 2000, all old TV shows and films would be re-released in "higher than HD" and in widescreen. I explained that AI would convert the old 4:3 format to 16:9, not by chopping the top and bottom of the film, but by adding to picture on the left and right. I was describing generative fill, even though I was unfamiliar with the term back then. I used Gone With The Wind and Star Trek as my examples, and got an A for my effort. I might have been off on my estimated date, but it's coming!
I subscribe to Paramount+ if they Remaster DS9 and Voyager, there, theres the "WHY should they do it"! :)
HD DS9 is my grail. But sadly the way things are going, I suspect any HD upgrade will only every exist through streaming. I am just glad that the current series of Trek shows are still seeing a physical release. While streaming for TV shows is very convenient, the fracturing of the streaming market means people won't always have subscriptions to the services which have these shows.
Interesting. When watching Voyager for the first time a few years ago I was struck by how "fuzzy" it looked compared to DS9, which my wife and I had just finished. Was VOY shot with lower quality stock?
Pardon me if this was mentioned earlier. The first run of ST:TNG was not delivered to stations on tape. Paramount shot the episode to a dedicated satellite and beamed to stations the week of broadcast, where the local station would record it to tape for broadcast. The station would have to strip in the local commercials and station i.d. Of course TNG was sold as full barter so most of the commercial time was taken up by national ads.
I know this because one of the members of the local ST club worked master control at the station that ran TNG. We watched the episodes before the scheduled air date. Ah what a time.
I've read that for the What We Left Behind documentary, someone from the original team who made the CGI shots kept the programming files for them & so they used those with newer versions of the ship models to recreate the scenes shown in it in HD. So, they wouldn't need to recreate everything for the CGI if they remaster it into HD.
The missing negative for "Sins of Father" that is shown as an example was located in time for the release of the Blu-Ray sets. There are luckily only 3 episodes that uses a little bit of upscaled footage due to them not being able to locate the negatives... This is a 2 second long reaction shot of Riker in "We'll Always Have Paris" 2 minutes of footage for "Power Play" and 1 minute of footage for "The First Duty".
I'm thrilled that we have the remastered/digitally augmented TOS to enjoy. Replacing the 1960's television effects with CGI, coupled with enhanced colour and sound, provides fitting respect to a series of such historic significance. I'm happy to rely on my television's upscaling for the others.
Regardless, thank you for a well presented analysis. I had never considered the effect of upscaling on computer graphics created for a set resolution within the context of television, even though I experience it all the time upscaling vintage computers for use with modern displays.