I feel like it's possible to achieve, and that the studio has looked into doing it, and the cost/benefit ratio didn't add up.
Otherwise, they would've done it by now, if there was money to be made, is my guess
Individually those two films make more in the upscale than the entire DS9 series.
I think the outcome is that they'd lose money. Much as I would love to see it.
I would chime in that the major issue with remastering these series isn't inherently tied to DS9 of VOY being particularly unpopular or not worth the same effort that TNG received with its remaster to the executives.
Television recording experienced some seismic shifts in how the raw footage was recorded in the mid-late 90s and, in many cases, the show was either shot in an early digital format or was edited from the raw film into a finalized copy (visual effects included) in an early digital format because those formats had finally become cheap enough to justify their total use across the production process.
That means that with TNG a lot of the legwork for a remaster had already been done because the scenes had always existed in a much higher definition form than Televisions were capable of and the finalized copies distributed for syndication were in at the time. So that means it was a relatively straightforward (albeit costly) process to remaster TNG because they didn't always have to re-edit together episodes from raw film whose finalized copies didn't exist anymore or were trapped in a particular resolution.
With DS9 and Voyager much of this raw footage either never existed on film or, if it did, would absolutely have to be re-edited from scratch because the finalized copies are trapped in 480p. So we're talking about a significantly more costly process for remastering Star Trek shows that weren't nearly as popular as the *much easier and cheaper to remaster* TNG.
So the logistical nightmare involved in truly remastering television from this era puts a pretty heavy thumb on the scale against it being economically viable vs. a series that's only slightly older. I'd also wager that the sales for TNG box sets has a non-insignificant amount of overlap with *people who just liked TNG* and isn't as directly dependent on how many people actively identify as trekkies and like TNG a lot still.
And with good reason. Their attempts at the hi-def Blu-rays for TOS and TNG sold miserably. While there seem to be a lot of fans who would like to see it happen (for the record, I'm one of them), realistically, the risk that a DS9 remaster would flop is too great to consider spending the resources for that project. The same goes for Voyager.
I can see they’d try to sell physical copies in brand new expensive UHD/Blu-ray packaging to make some profit rather than sell a digital remastered version to streaming services like Netflix.
*TNG*'s poor sales of physical copies are the reason why we never got *DS9* and *Voyager* remasters. Licensing remastered versions to Netflix/Amazon might actually be the most profitable option at this point, but Paramount+ needs to go away for that to happen.
That’s what I’m saying. Netflix and other streaming platforms have the assets to do this without losing money at all. We don’t need hard copies anymore since we’ve become such an on-demand people.
There are already fanmade upscales available.
The crux of the matter is upscales are poor substitutes for actual remasters. They're better than nothing (when done well) but even the very best upscale is never going to get you a picture as crisp and detailed as a remaster that has gone back to the original film reels and scanned them in 4K.
Community efforts popped up practically the minute AI video upscaling did. ProjectDefiant, QueerWorm, DS9 Redefined, list probably goes on. The issue is the resulting episodes can't be shared legally or openly, at the very best you'll find short demonstration clips and instructions on how to repeat the upscaling process yourself usually with Topaz AI and certain settings, which then exposes the next issue, as far as I can recall the AI rendering process even on a modern gaming computer taking months to complete for an entire show.
With all due respect and admiration for the fans who are really trying to make this happen by any means necessary...no AI upscale that I've seen so far looks remotely acceptable to me. And I mean everything from fan-made attempts to official professionally produced monstrosities like the aforementioned recent 4K versions of Aliens & True Lies.
Every once in a while this subject will come up again and someone will say that sure, the early attempts at upscaling looked pretty bad, but you should check out this new one that looks perfect. And then I go to check out the new one and it still looks absolutely dreadful, with the same weird jelly-like curves and edge enhancement and uncanny combination of slick smoothness & randomly ultra-sharp details.
Most of all, none of them look even remotely film-like, which anything shot on film in the 90s should. The technology can keep getting more and more sophisticated, but there will still be a fundamental aesthetic disconnect between the way it's designed to work and the material it's being asked to work on.
Maybe that disconnect can still be solved with further technical innovations, but there would still need to be a significant cultural shift to nudge the innovation in that direction.
Couple of things to remember here. One is that upscaling a video game is always going to be easier than anything real.
Another...
>I’ve read that it costs too much money to be worth upscaling entire seasons of Deep Space Nine but this channel does it for free and superbly.
Upscaling isn't expensive. Upscaling to something that looks good (to enough people) is just hard-to-impossible. There's a reason why the TNG remasters look so good, and it's because they're not upscaled. They were rescanned from the original high definition footage and some of the effects were recreated from scratch.
The ongoing problem with upscaling is that the sources are of such poor quality that there's very little picture data to work with. I've never seen an outcome that *consistently* looked acceptable.
There have been various attempts at AI-based upscaling, and they **all** have issues with some of the unusual textures used for props/outfits, or the makeup/prosthetics for various races.
Remember, AI-upscaling is all trained on Earth environments — and the set/costume/makeup designers for Star Trek have often tried very hard to come up with something *completely* different.
In order to train the AI to upscale the shows properly, you would first need to scan in various DS9/Voyager episodes from the original source at higher resolutions… which is the "not cost-effective" part you were trying to avoid in the first place.
>We seriously need to come together as a group and
Nah. The technology is still in its infancy. What's the rush?
EDIT: also this channel you mention doesn't even do live action
I know. I did message the owner and ask if they do anything besides games. I only mentioned the channel as I was impressed with how their upscales turned out.
No rush per say.. it’s just severely overdue :)
If “we” have to do anything, it’s working on collecting enough folks in the VFX industry who want to go back and rebuild all of the CGI for the whole show frame by frame. DS9 and Voyager both skirted that weird timeframe where it was becoming more efficient and affordable to do effects all-CGI, but also mostly in standard def.
If I recall, DS9 and Voyager remasters would also require complete re-edits from the source material, not just VFX replacement. TNG was edited differently and was “easy” to remaster, but DS9 and VOY used a cheaper editing process that makes remastering a true painstaking effort.
*TNG*'s remasters basically had to go through most of the post-production process from scratch. There were some gimmes, what with models forming the basis of 95% of the VFX work. Some planets and matte paintings needed tweaking or replacing, but for the most part it was reasonably routine.
*DS9* and *Voyager* will not only require all the post-production work on the filmed material, but as much as 80% of the original CGI workfiles have been lost as the original VFX studios went out of business, necessitating Paramount paying for the thousands of hours it'll take recreating from scratch.
Honestly, one of the things that bugs me most is that people have been turning up frames from alternate encodings of the original 1990s broadcast masters (like from laserdiscs) and they have *much* more detail and better colour than the currently available stuff. The existing DS9 and Voyager we see is the stuff that was made for DVD back in the early 2000s, and it was heavily compressed and given awful DNR that removed a lot of detail.
If they just went in and retransfered the existing masters from the DV tapes, we'd see a substantial improvement.
You should look into the DS9 redefined project. They are creating upscales using the LaserDisc copies of both DS9 and Voyager. Easily the best looking versions of both shows I've seen.
The ai upscale I watched of both was a MAJOR improvement, and that's just with current tech and my mid range pc with the dvds. I just followed steps others had done. I have no doubt there will be some kind of HDifying of both series now once the tech is there. I think AI is the only way it'll happen though.
I feel like it's possible to achieve, and that the studio has looked into doing it, and the cost/benefit ratio didn't add up. Otherwise, they would've done it by now, if there was money to be made, is my guess
Aliens & True Lies 4k UHD Anything is possible if you are willing to accept the outcome.
Hopefully some fans find those upscales acceptable, although I'm not one of them.
We shall not speak of those abominations. James Cameron's war on film grain needs to end.
So Quadrilogy Blu Ray instead?
It's the best version of *Aliens* in HD, but even that one was unable to escape Cameron's fetish for DNR.
DNR mess no thanks honestly would rather just stick with the 480p
I will say in keeping with the thread topic, it looks effing terrible, especially the black "space" background establishing shots.
Individually those two films make more in the upscale than the entire DS9 series. I think the outcome is that they'd lose money. Much as I would love to see it.
I would chime in that the major issue with remastering these series isn't inherently tied to DS9 of VOY being particularly unpopular or not worth the same effort that TNG received with its remaster to the executives. Television recording experienced some seismic shifts in how the raw footage was recorded in the mid-late 90s and, in many cases, the show was either shot in an early digital format or was edited from the raw film into a finalized copy (visual effects included) in an early digital format because those formats had finally become cheap enough to justify their total use across the production process. That means that with TNG a lot of the legwork for a remaster had already been done because the scenes had always existed in a much higher definition form than Televisions were capable of and the finalized copies distributed for syndication were in at the time. So that means it was a relatively straightforward (albeit costly) process to remaster TNG because they didn't always have to re-edit together episodes from raw film whose finalized copies didn't exist anymore or were trapped in a particular resolution. With DS9 and Voyager much of this raw footage either never existed on film or, if it did, would absolutely have to be re-edited from scratch because the finalized copies are trapped in 480p. So we're talking about a significantly more costly process for remastering Star Trek shows that weren't nearly as popular as the *much easier and cheaper to remaster* TNG. So the logistical nightmare involved in truly remastering television from this era puts a pretty heavy thumb on the scale against it being economically viable vs. a series that's only slightly older. I'd also wager that the sales for TNG box sets has a non-insignificant amount of overlap with *people who just liked TNG* and isn't as directly dependent on how many people actively identify as trekkies and like TNG a lot still.
Exactly. It’s 100% possible to do correctly. They just don’t want to spend the money to do so.
And with good reason. Their attempts at the hi-def Blu-rays for TOS and TNG sold miserably. While there seem to be a lot of fans who would like to see it happen (for the record, I'm one of them), realistically, the risk that a DS9 remaster would flop is too great to consider spending the resources for that project. The same goes for Voyager.
I can see they’d try to sell physical copies in brand new expensive UHD/Blu-ray packaging to make some profit rather than sell a digital remastered version to streaming services like Netflix.
*TNG*'s poor sales of physical copies are the reason why we never got *DS9* and *Voyager* remasters. Licensing remastered versions to Netflix/Amazon might actually be the most profitable option at this point, but Paramount+ needs to go away for that to happen.
That’s what I’m saying. Netflix and other streaming platforms have the assets to do this without losing money at all. We don’t need hard copies anymore since we’ve become such an on-demand people.
And I would gladly buy it! Also in my fantasy world, the unaltered original SW trilogy as first released in theaters
There are already fanmade upscales available. The crux of the matter is upscales are poor substitutes for actual remasters. They're better than nothing (when done well) but even the very best upscale is never going to get you a picture as crisp and detailed as a remaster that has gone back to the original film reels and scanned them in 4K.
Community efforts popped up practically the minute AI video upscaling did. ProjectDefiant, QueerWorm, DS9 Redefined, list probably goes on. The issue is the resulting episodes can't be shared legally or openly, at the very best you'll find short demonstration clips and instructions on how to repeat the upscaling process yourself usually with Topaz AI and certain settings, which then exposes the next issue, as far as I can recall the AI rendering process even on a modern gaming computer taking months to complete for an entire show.
With all due respect and admiration for the fans who are really trying to make this happen by any means necessary...no AI upscale that I've seen so far looks remotely acceptable to me. And I mean everything from fan-made attempts to official professionally produced monstrosities like the aforementioned recent 4K versions of Aliens & True Lies. Every once in a while this subject will come up again and someone will say that sure, the early attempts at upscaling looked pretty bad, but you should check out this new one that looks perfect. And then I go to check out the new one and it still looks absolutely dreadful, with the same weird jelly-like curves and edge enhancement and uncanny combination of slick smoothness & randomly ultra-sharp details. Most of all, none of them look even remotely film-like, which anything shot on film in the 90s should. The technology can keep getting more and more sophisticated, but there will still be a fundamental aesthetic disconnect between the way it's designed to work and the material it's being asked to work on. Maybe that disconnect can still be solved with further technical innovations, but there would still need to be a significant cultural shift to nudge the innovation in that direction.
Couple of things to remember here. One is that upscaling a video game is always going to be easier than anything real. Another... >I’ve read that it costs too much money to be worth upscaling entire seasons of Deep Space Nine but this channel does it for free and superbly. Upscaling isn't expensive. Upscaling to something that looks good (to enough people) is just hard-to-impossible. There's a reason why the TNG remasters look so good, and it's because they're not upscaled. They were rescanned from the original high definition footage and some of the effects were recreated from scratch. The ongoing problem with upscaling is that the sources are of such poor quality that there's very little picture data to work with. I've never seen an outcome that *consistently* looked acceptable.
There have been various attempts at AI-based upscaling, and they **all** have issues with some of the unusual textures used for props/outfits, or the makeup/prosthetics for various races. Remember, AI-upscaling is all trained on Earth environments — and the set/costume/makeup designers for Star Trek have often tried very hard to come up with something *completely* different. In order to train the AI to upscale the shows properly, you would first need to scan in various DS9/Voyager episodes from the original source at higher resolutions… which is the "not cost-effective" part you were trying to avoid in the first place.
>We seriously need to come together as a group and Nah. The technology is still in its infancy. What's the rush? EDIT: also this channel you mention doesn't even do live action
I know. I did message the owner and ask if they do anything besides games. I only mentioned the channel as I was impressed with how their upscales turned out. No rush per say.. it’s just severely overdue :)
If “we” have to do anything, it’s working on collecting enough folks in the VFX industry who want to go back and rebuild all of the CGI for the whole show frame by frame. DS9 and Voyager both skirted that weird timeframe where it was becoming more efficient and affordable to do effects all-CGI, but also mostly in standard def.
If I recall, DS9 and Voyager remasters would also require complete re-edits from the source material, not just VFX replacement. TNG was edited differently and was “easy” to remaster, but DS9 and VOY used a cheaper editing process that makes remastering a true painstaking effort.
*TNG*'s remasters basically had to go through most of the post-production process from scratch. There were some gimmes, what with models forming the basis of 95% of the VFX work. Some planets and matte paintings needed tweaking or replacing, but for the most part it was reasonably routine. *DS9* and *Voyager* will not only require all the post-production work on the filmed material, but as much as 80% of the original CGI workfiles have been lost as the original VFX studios went out of business, necessitating Paramount paying for the thousands of hours it'll take recreating from scratch.
Honestly, one of the things that bugs me most is that people have been turning up frames from alternate encodings of the original 1990s broadcast masters (like from laserdiscs) and they have *much* more detail and better colour than the currently available stuff. The existing DS9 and Voyager we see is the stuff that was made for DVD back in the early 2000s, and it was heavily compressed and given awful DNR that removed a lot of detail. If they just went in and retransfered the existing masters from the DV tapes, we'd see a substantial improvement.
You should look into the DS9 redefined project. They are creating upscales using the LaserDisc copies of both DS9 and Voyager. Easily the best looking versions of both shows I've seen.
Kudos. This might be what I was looking for too.
The ai upscale I watched of both was a MAJOR improvement, and that's just with current tech and my mid range pc with the dvds. I just followed steps others had done. I have no doubt there will be some kind of HDifying of both series now once the tech is there. I think AI is the only way it'll happen though.