Hey all
Shamefully I had never even heard of Star Fleet / X-Bomber until a few weeks ago when I saw it mentioned by someone on Twitter. I’m puzzled as to why I never watched it growing up as I’d have been 11 or 12 when it was originally shown in the UK, and it would have been right up my street. Anyway, I’m here now and am obsessed!
I’ve recently been getting hold of as many shows on DVD from my childhood as possible, and trying to enhance them for viewing on today’s large screen TVs just for my own purposes. After watching the first episode of Star Fleet on YouTube I did a bit of investigation here and on the SFXB forums, and ordered both the UK and French DVD box sets. My intention is to use a combination of both to produce a 720p version of the series (in English) with the best image quality possible.
I’ve started by working on the intro and end credit sequences. I’ve pieced together the relevant clips from the French DVDs (plus the pilot episode for the last shot) to completely recreate the UK sequences. I’ve also replaced the logo at the start with a sharper version and have replaced the fonts - the fonts aren’t perfect but they’re as close as I could get.
I’ll use the French DVDs again for the main part of the episodes, filling in with segments from the UK release where required. For the ‘next episode’ bits at the end, again I’ll piece these together using the appropriate clips from the next episode on the French DVDs (I’m glad they’re only short!).
I only have the audio from the UK set so will use that unless someone can provide me with anything better.
Once each episode has been compiled I’ll run it through Topaz AI Video Enhance to bring it up to 720p and remove some of the grain. I’ve been really pleased with how Topaz has handled other shows so I’m hoping it’ll do a good job here too. I’ll also see how it looks in 1080p. There are numerous AI algorithms so I’ll test it on various settings.
I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes here as I know Bladez636 has been working on his own project for a long time, but if anyone wants to see the results I’ll happily share them here. The end results may not be as good as Bladez636’s version, but I figure it’ll at least be better than what we have currently.
To give you an example of what’s to come, I’ve uploaded an example of the intro to YouTube (https://youtu.be/MKaxGA3OUt8), which for some reason seems a little dark - if you want the original file to view it properly just let me know. Any feedback (positive or negative) will be gratefully received.
I’m hoping that once I’m happy with the intro and credits, I ought to be able to roll out a couple of episodes each week.