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ST - Star Trek

TM2YC

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Great news. I like the Kelvin cast a lot and was sad when it looked like we'd get no adventures just when they were getting the characters and tone right.
 

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Happy 25th, Voyager. No matter what anyone says, you had Seven of Nine fight The Rock, and that cannot be taken from you. :p

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I never did watch all of Voyager back in the day but I popped on a random episode on Netflix: S01E09 'Emanations'.

After watching hating the first few episodes of the new 'Picard' show, this was like a cool soothing breeze. Ahhhhhh... proper Star Trek. A clever premise approaching the question of an afterlife from an intellectually stimulating angle.

captainrisa.jpg
 

Jrzag42

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I really need to get back to watching Star Trek. The plan was to watch all of the series in order. But I left off on The Menagerie Part 1 and never got around to watching part 2 because I watched the first part with someone and was waiting to watch the second with them, but it's been so long so I may as well go ahead and watch it anyways. I can't just bring myself to skip around episodes or watch something from a later series.
 

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I don't care what anyone says; I love Generations. :D Happily, the Mr. Sunday Movies gang don't hate it, either.



I remember enjoying the infamous "A Night in Sickbay" as being goofy fun, which is more than one could say for the mostly dull and drab ENT S1/2. In my defense, I was a high schooler at the time. Also, I'm starting to think Scott Bakula, bless him, was horribly miscast. Then again, that whole ensemble was really pretty terrible, with only John Billingsley really standing out. I mean, Connor Trineer and Elizabeth Blalock were okay, I guess. But Linda Park, Anthony Montgomery, and the British guy? Not good at all.


(No, it wasn't ENT's highest-rated episode up to that point; it was S2's highest-rated up to that point. People bailed in droves during S1, and who could blame them?)
 

TM2YC

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Oooooh this is nice:


I notice like me, he's still using Paint Shop Pro 6 from the 90s. Respect.
 

Gaith

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It's long been known that the painstaking, back-to-celluloid process necessary to convert TNG to glorious HD is too expensive to justify similar efforts on behalf of DS9 and Voyager... but, as a valiant citizen-scholar is demonstrating, AI might well come to the rescue, and produce a good enough facsimile of the same!



There are rough patches, to be sure, but if an everyday fan could produce results like these on a home computer, one can easily imagine a team of professionals with high-end equipment smoothing out the subpar bits... Voyager-era Seven of Nine in HD is the sort of happiness the world could use more of right now. :p
 

TM2YC

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^ The HD re-upscaling of what is effectively downscaled "HD" 35mm film looks very impressive, the upscaling of the SD video portions (e.g. the FX shots) does not look so good. I guess the computer can be taught to put the detail back but not to invent detail that was never there.
 

Gaith

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TM2YC said:
The HD re-upscaling of what is effectively downscaled "HD" 35mm film looks very impressive, the upscaling of the SD video portions (e.g. the FX shots) does not look so good. I guess the computer can be taught to put the detail back but not to invent detail that was never there.

Indeed. Presumably a studio effort could selectively scan the original film negatives to feed genuine detail into the software for optimal results in an economically feasible manner...  :)
 

TM2YC

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Gaith said:
TM2YC said:
The HD re-upscaling of what is effectively downscaled "HD" 35mm film looks very impressive, the upscaling of the SD video portions (e.g. the FX shots) does not look so good. I guess the computer can be taught to put the detail back but not to invent detail that was never there.

Indeed. Presumably a studio effort could selectively scan the original film negatives to feed genuine detail into the software for optimal results in an economically feasible manner...  :)

 IIRC one of the problems that has made creating HD versions of DS9 and Voyager nigh-on impossible and prohibitively expensive is that there never was an assembled negative (unlike with TNG). They shot the shows on "HD" film, scanned the reels into the computer in SD and only then started editing the episodes in whatever program they used. So you'd have to get all the reels back out of storage, scan them in HD and then go through every reel to find all the shots needed (with presumably no record to guide you) and remake every scene from scratch for all 350 episodes. That's just for the live action.

However, with advances in AI technology, I believe it would now be entirely possible to get the computer to find all the footage for you in a very short amount of time. Just feed the AI all your newly scanned footage and your SD masters and let it match the two. This AI technique was used to reconstruct Orson Welles' last film by giving it the new scans and the workprint (https://apnews.com/ac7d3dc991bc49c6bf65936c80ef00e3).

If they've also retained the original data for the FX shots on hardrives somewhere, it should be possible to load the assets up on modern hardware and render them out in HD. It wouldn't make the texture detail or realism of the FX up to modern standards but it would be sharp. A guy on youtube somehow got access to some original assets from Babylon 5 (a show from the same TV era) and did just that in widescreen 1080p:

 

Gaith

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TM2YC said:
IIRC one of the problems that has made creating HD versions of DS9 and Voyager nigh-on impossible and prohibitively expensive is that there never was an assembled negative (unlike with TNG). They shot the shows on "HD" film, scanned the reels into the computer in SD and only then started editing the episodes in whatever program they used. So you'd have to get all the reels back out of storage, scan them in HD and then go through every reel to find all the shots needed (with presumably no record to guide you) and remake every scene from scratch for all 350 episodes. That's just for the live action.

I'm pretty sure that's exactly what they did for TNG, which was originally edited on videotape, not film or computer, and I believe the same is true for DS9 and VOY. As I understand it, the only real difference between TNG and DS9/VOY in this respect is the number of CG elements for which HD material just doesn't exist. (Apart from maybe software potential, as you say.)

 
TM2YC said:
However, with advances in AI technology, I believe it would now be entirely possible to get the computer to find all the footage for you in a very short amount of time. Just feed the AI all your newly scanned footage and your SD masters and let it match the two.

Aye, that thought occurred to me yesterday. It'd obviously be ideal, because then the HD live-action footage would be authentic rather than upscaled. But, if that would still be too labor-intensive/costly in terms of gathering and scanning the film reels, scanning just enough film to teach the AI how to properly upscale the actors' faces might be a solid bare minimum, as this YouTuber seems to be demonstrating. :cool:
 

TM2YC

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Gaith said:
I'm pretty sure that's exactly what they did for TNG, which was originally edited on videotape, not film or computer, and I believe the same is true for DS9 and VOY.

 Oh yeah you're right. This guy is talking about it:


Wow, that must have taken time and resources, even with the detailed notebook he's got in his hands.
 

asterixsmeagol

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TM2YC said:
However, with advances in AI technology, I believe it would now be entirely possible to get the computer to find all the footage for you in a very short amount of time. Just feed the AI all your newly scanned footage and your SD masters and let it match the two. This AI technique was used to reconstruct Orson Welles' last film by giving it the new scans and the workprint.
Exactly. My friends and I were talking about this after the What We Left Behind documentary came out and they were talking about how hard it was to get the right footage.
 

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And now, tonight, your (Riker) Moment of Zen:

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