Thanks for the advice. I have also noticed the upscaler still not being “consistent enough” - it can’t hold on to fine details, sometimes even in the close-ups. Still the best I could come up with so far.
I’ve not watched it yet but I have a feeling that seasons 1-3 are going to be harder to upscale than 4-7 because the source videos are lower quality on the 1-3 DVDs. I think they used higher quality tape to edit from season 4 on as there is a noticeable increase of quality from season 4 onwards.
Unfortunately that’s true. Watching the DVDs, you can see noticeable quality differences as follows: Seasons 1 & 2 are visually just bad (some more than others), season 3 is better, but still not good, a markable improvement is season 4 (image is sharper, more grain is present and details are clearer) and from season 5 onwoards it’s good DVD-quality.
I think the reason is that (if I remember correctly) they used tapes for seasons 1-2 and went digital around the time season 3 came along, switching over completely in season 4.
It’s similar with Voyager, the first digital models were used during season 3 (the first completely digitally rendered Voyager model was used in the episode “Unity” I believe).
I’m pretty sure they were all edited on tape, or at least the final edits were committed to a tape and even after the increase of image quality post season 4. I think the quality of tape they were recorded to had just improved.
I’ve had a look through the pilot and it’s a really great effort but I think that it’s kind of a lost cause for these early seasons to try and upscale them. Everything comes across as too smooth and in wide shots you can see that the AI algorithm is trying to draw faces on the characters. One thing that might help it a little, I know that Topaz has the option to add grain to the image. A small coating of grain might cover up these more obvious AI upscaling artifacts. I’m not saying give up, I’m just saying that the early seasons are probably not going to cope well with the upscale to 1080p. I’d be really interested to see what “The Way of the Warrior” were to come out like using the exact same method. I would bet that it comes out a lot better because the quality of the source is much higher.