Why Star Trek Remasters Are So Hard 

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.

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! 🙏

Yeah, I was thinking "We know where we are, that's what we came for"

Why I clicked

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.

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.

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.

I'd purchase the entire series (Enterprise included) if it was in a multi-steelbook limited blu-ray set.

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's been done a few times. The X Files is a notable example. but obviously the time and expense are large. the companies have to figure out a way to make their money back.

Yeah there really is no 80s or 90s shows that would warrent this kind of massive financial investment from a studio perspective but TnG did sadly

As would I. But it take a lot more than just us for the studios to make a profit.

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………………………………

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 think many people are not buying blue ray as much as streaming - so AI upscaling is good for enough for now…

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.

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.

And they still didn’t make enough money to consider it profitable

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).

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

already did

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.

@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.

@@colinchapple1096 How do we know you're not just a bot?

@@colinchapple1096 Aw snap. You were supposed to say 'touche'!

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.

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.

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.

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.

@@Andrew-pr9xv 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.

It's the next thing after my Star Trek Retrospectives are done.

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.

id be the same but with Voyager

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.

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).

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.

In the interests of finding out by how much, I just checked a 1080p video I'd saved from RU-vid. Peaks at 4.4Mbps, typically hangs around in the 1.5-2Mbps range, though it does drop under 1Mbps at times. If RU-vid is typical, you're not even getting 10% of what you'd get out of a Blu-ray.

@@Roxor128 Absolutely right.

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?

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.

That was two issues

They really could. Which would be smarter. Way more content to stream.

Exactly.

tape was easier to edit. The film was only for the raw footage. This is especially true when you're adding increasingly complex special effects

Dragon's Teeth. Great episode.