Yippee!!

Mike Okuda is Supervising!

 

I've returned!!

Some awesome guy already made a visual comparison of the shot of the Enterprise from that trailer:

http://picasaweb.google.com/102542760950977079734/TNGHD

He points out that its the same shot, but recomposited from the original model that was shot on film. It's incredible work, what any good special edition should be: fix the composites and leave the rest alone. It's a shame they didn't have the original elements for TOS. The CGI is fun, just not MODELS.

What blows my mind is that they are going back to the original negatives, and re-editing the entire series from scratch. Every shot, every take, every effects shot, redone from the original negative. All of post-production for that series is being redone on modern equipment. I'm not a huge TNG fan, but I'm definitely interested in this.

TV's Frink said:

That guy is nowhere near as awesome as Mr. [REDACTED].

[REDACTED] YOU, [REDACTED]*!

Sadly I doubt if Babylon 5 will ever get the same treatment.

Every single special effect would have to be redone which is why even the DVDs look choppy.

Bingowings said:

Sadly I doubt if Babylon 5 will ever get the same treatment.

Every single special effect would have to be redone which is why even the DVDs look choppy.

The Firefly Blu-ray set has 1080p live action and 480p special effects shots. For a 14 episode series, I'd think they could redo them using the more detailed model they built for the movie for pretty cheap.

OK, can someone please kindly detail to me how a composite shot works? They can't exactly just re-render these, can they? And what will they do with the computer effects? Were those rendered in 480p or put in the film? Just confused is all. Thanks to anybody who can help.

That said, I used to watch TNG in middle school when it was on G4 in-between their block marathons of Cops (which for the record I never watched.) I loved it, and still do. Just not enough to warrant buying the blus - I can't get invested in a show that long that ultimately doesn't really go anywhere*.

pittrek said:

Bingowings said:

Sadly I doubt if Babylon 5 will ever get the same treatment.

Every single special effect would have to be redone which is why even the DVDs look choppy.

Babylon 5 deserves it. The DVDs look f*ing BAD

I agree.

The live action was filmed in widescreen but it had to be cropped because the special effects were so integrated into the series (it was an early example of the sort of virtual set use that pretty commonplace now).

So it's not as simple as just redoing the space scenes.

I doubt if Warner Bros would bother to fund such a project which would mean the show would possibly vanish from view over time.

Its only a teaser of 3 episodes on blu ray as taken from the o-neg according to that trailer.

I guess the whole thing being done would depend on sales or if they can get a  syndicated  tv deal for a zillion stations to show it.

I mean not many people are going to pony up money for encounter at farpoint and those other 2 episodes.  Its not like this is the best of both worlds or yesterday's enterprise.

If i recall the original series was only afforded by the HD-DVD people funding it.

bkev said:

I can't get invested in a show that long that ultimately doesn't really go anywhere*.

I thought they went lots of places during the show ;)

Seriously, though, I think Star Trek is a terrific character-driven show.  I love TNG for its character arcs, especially with regards to Data and Picard.  I don't particularly care that there's no grand story arc--I'm all about the inner journeys.

...

not to mention that shows that attempt to have a grand, plot-driven story typically fail miserably in my experience.  X Files and Lost are a couple examples that immediately come to mind.

Press release says Season 1 is coming next year. They're in it for the long haul. This is just a sample so you know they can do it and get excited (its working).

bkev said:

OK, can someone please kindly detail to me how a composite shot works? They can't exactly just re-render these, can they? And what will they do with the computer effects? Were those rendered in 480p or put in the film? Just confused is all. Thanks to anybody who can help.

The models were filmed against a blue screen in multiple passes, just like they did in Star Wars. In fact, ILM worked on the pilot! All of those passes are in film canisters in that warehouse in the teaser. They are scanning the film, lining them up, and laying them on top of each other digitally. Any primitive CG effects would have to be redone from scratch.

Warbler said:

I hope they do what they did for TOS,  put both the original and their new version on the blu ray. 

I'd like to think that they will. But DVD is actually better than the original composites could ever look, so it may be a case of "you already have the original effects in the highest resolution possible". That wasn't the case for the TOS DVDs since they were composited on film.

I just realized that NONE of the effects are going to be on there. Hand phasers are going to have to be redone, disintegration effects, explosions, Q changing clothes in a snap...

TRANSPORTERS! My god, the transporter effects are going to have to be redone!

pittrek said:

doubleofive said:

I just realized that NONE of the effects are going to be on there. Hand phasers are going to have to be redone, disintegration effects, explosions, Q changing clothes in a snap...

TRANSPORTERS! My god, the transporter effects are going to have to be redone!

Hm... are you sure about that ? I know it might sound like a stupid question but I don't know in which "physical form" are these effects stored.

They're going to back to the O-Neg for the live action footage, that would be the on-set film with no effects. Even if the transporter effects were filmed, they'd have to be recomposited. Either way, its a lot of work.

Bingowings said:

Sadly I doubt if Babylon 5 will ever get the same treatment.

Every single special effect would have to be redone which is why even the DVDs look choppy.

While I would love to see Babylon 5 get the same treatment too the problem is cost. It was much more effects heavy than Star Trek. They had the foresight of shooting in 16:9, but when it came to the special effects it were done in NTSC SD. So all the special effects would have to be redone from scratch. I don't think that's an expense WB wants to incur.

Also, I don't think they are doing the full series yet. They are doing just a handful of episodes to see how well it sells. And I don't think I'd buy the series. I'm quite happy streaming them from Netflix at the moment.