Animaxx

Thanks to some excellent suggestions by member RwAoNrDdOsM I might be able to improve the quality even further a bit.

So over the course of this weekend I will do a workover on the pilot episode and - once finished - will provide anyone who is interested (please PM me) with the episode in 4K or 1080p.
It will probably be available through google drive.

Since I am not exactly sure how long the workover will take, I will keep you guys updated as soon as it is availabe/ready. Check the postings here.

Until then.

First of, thanks for the replies.

I know what you mean Booshman - when I saw the Doc “What You Leave Behind” I was blown away. Only goes to show what is possible and how many people would love to see it happening. The moment I saw it I thought “I would bet my life on there being enough fans who would be willing to contribute with crowdfunding and so on to make that happen”.
But then again, it is difficult with the rights and all.

When it comes to quality, I also understand why people are so “difficult to impress”. You see I am pretty much a SciFi Nerd/Geek who grew up in the 90s and lived with handrecorded VHS tapes, so I am grateful for every bit of improvement, I certainly do not expect fans to deliver HD Studio Remasters, since you can’t put out more than there is to begin with. But with AI it has actually become affordable and delivers good results (depending on the original material).

When it comes to my encodes, I usually do everything lossless until the final encode, when it is compressed for the purpose of saving space (my private collection has a crf factor of 10, which would produce the pilot at about 10 GB at 1080p, so I am looking into doing the compression more effectively without loosing to much improved/perceived quality, for I think it shouldn’t be in excess of over 5GB for a double 90 minute episode and about 2,5 GB for a standard 45 minute episode).

To RwAoNrDdOsM: I’ve send you a pm / opened a private topic and would be glad to hear from you. Since I haven’t tried 4K yet for I thought that would be “overdoing it”, I’m really curious if you can change my mind on that. I would have to option to do it, although it would probably consume more time.

To Artan42: I can’t wait for that either to be honest. But I wanted to do the episodes in order, for seasons 6 and 7 of DS9 had better source material - I remember reading somewhere that the producers switched to digital video recording with those seasons, which is the reason why seasons 1-3 look sometimes “worse” than 4-5 and finally 6-7.
So I wanted to see how much can be done by beginning with “the bad”, so I can deliver realistic results; otherwise people would have probably been disappointed when I would have posted quality shots of Seasons 6 and 7 (yes, I know the clips that are out there, especially Sacrifice of Angels, and god, they do look amazing!) and then went back to the beginning and people would have been like “what, did you break your disc, that looks crappy” when watching the first episodes.

One final note: I always test my encodes with 4 different viewing options, so I can get realistic feedback.

• 1. Watching it on my “old” laptop (Standard Display with 1080p Resolution)
• 2. Watching it on my “new” laptop (4K Resolution with HD-Display)
• 3. Watching it on my parents TV (1080p capable Plasma-Display)
• 4. Watching it on my personal TV (4K Display with Upscale Option on 1080p content)

The final step is watching with my mom (who first made me fall in love with Star Trek and SciFi in general) the old dvd and my improved version to get some feedback on what she thinks.

By the way: I think the rest of my family is about to kill me soon, since they know they will now have to watch Star Trek for at least 7 seasons of DS9 and possibly later on Voyager. So, when you don’t hear anything from me, you know what happened 😉

I also had a crazy thought for the future (yes, I am crazy enough to plan that far ahead): Anyone remember Earth: Final Conflict? It was also a Roddenberry show I loved and I recently bought the NTSC DVDs of those as well - just thinking out loud here …

Last thing: I did consider goole drive, but I have heared it is difficult considering copyright and stuff … so how save would it be? Would mega be an alternative? I have seen some people around here using it.

So, that’s it for now. Sorry for the long post.

With this project I will try to provide the OT-community with an “HD-Upgrade” of the SciFi-Series Star Trek – Deep Space Nine (ST-DS9), which was only ever produced and released at SD-Quality/Resolution on DVD.

Notice: Please be advised that I do not encourage piracy or copyright infringements in any way. I do in fact own all the materials used in this project (DVDs, software, hardware and so on), having bought them and therefore acquired the rights to make copies for personal use. The distribution around this site is a little more of a grey area, but since I do not sell the files or won’t have any gain in a monetary sense from this project, that should be ok.

Still, I would like you to respect two ground rules when participating in the project or getting the files:

(1) Please make sure you at least own the DVDs of Star Trek – Deep Space Nine (or later on Voyager) before taking the files from this project
(2) Please do not share the files from this project on torrenting sites, for that would be very problematic as far as copyright issues are concerned – should I notice these files appearing somewhere around those corners, I will pull the plug on this project immediately

In conclusion: Please respect the work that I as well as the following OT-members (see acknowledgements) have put into this; also do not ruin it for others who might be interested in the project by just uploading them somewhere else.
BE FAIR AND BE KIND!

Acknowledgements
But before I get into further detail, I would like to give a few acknowledgements to fellow OT-members that encouraged me, helped with technical details/insights and showed an incredible amount of patience throughout this project, especially the early trial-and-error-stages.

Special thanks to: RwAoNrDdOsm, 4throck, StarkillerAG, pahuffman, Booshman, Artan42, Baobab Archiver, SilverWook, Jaded Skywalker and FrankB – without all of you this project would not have come forward the way it did and certainly wouldn’t have produced to level of quality we have now.
I’m in your debt.

Furthermore, there is another person/latest OT-member, who I want to mention with my highest regards: Joel Hruska. He did several articles on his own remastering project for DS9 over on extremetech.com, which were/are showcasing his amazing abilites.
After contacting Joel via E-Mail he kindly joined our community and brought my/our efforts forward with Warp Speed.
I bow to your brilliance, Sir.

Introduction – What you’ll need to “work it”
First and foremost, please be aware that this is a passion project in the truest sense – it is not for everyone, since it is time-intense and resource-consuming; perhaps you would even have to spent some cash on additional hardware to accommodate for certain work steps.

Now I am not saying this to put you off, in fact I’d be flattered if my work could be a sort of template for your own efforts. I just wanted you all to know what you’re signing up for going into this.

In short: You mainly need 5 things to make this happen.
First is a fast PC with a good graphics card, then comes a fast SSD/HDD with huge amounts of storage (we are talking well into the TB-range), furthermore there is the required software (some free, some paid-for) and of course the original Star Trek – Deep Space Nine and Voyager DVDs in both PAL and NTSC-format.
And last but not least you’ll need time … loads of it.
Oh yeah, occasionally you could really use a high frustration tolerance.

I made a little list and split it into hard- and software requirements, so you’ll know what to expect.

Let’s start with the Hard(ware) stuff:

• A fast PC (My setup: A Gaming PC running on Windows 10 Pro x64, IntelCore i9-9900K CPU@ 3,60 GHz with 32 GB RAM and internal SDD; additional: I added a cooling stand with 4 coolers for more heat dissipation – my PC automatically regulates how strong/intense the coolers run, depending on CPU/GPU usage and temperature)
• A good graphics card (My setup: GeForce RTX 2060 with latest CUDA-studio drivers)
• External SSD/HDD drives (My setup: A WD-Black D10 Drive (external) with 12 TB storage and active cooling (data transfer up to 250 Mbits) → used for storing the upscaled images from Topaz Video Enhance AI; My setup 2: A Seagate Expansion Desktop Drive (external) with 8 TB (used for storing DVD-source files and elements like audio tracks, sub, chapters, …)
• External DVD drives (My setup: I am actually using 2 different external DVD drives, to accommodate for the different DVD-Regions of the source discs, since changes can only be made 4 times and then your drive is stuck with the setting → NTSC=Region 1, PAL=Region 2)

Let’s continue with the software:

• DVD-Shrink (freeware), which is for ripping/copying DVDs
• Make mkv (freeware), which is for extracting DVDs to mkv.-files with chapters, subs, …
• mkv toolnix (freeware), which is for extracting and merging elements like videostreams, audio tracks, chapters, subs
• Subtitle Edit (freeware), which is for extracting the german subtitles from the make mkv-stream (PAL)
• Subframerate (freeware), which is for adjusting the time-coding of the german subtitles so they match/sync up with the videostream adjustment to 23,976 FPS
• meGui (freeware), which is for adjusting the audio tracks (length, pitch, format)
• StaxRip (freeware), which is for filtering/cleaning up the source files (like Deinterlacing, Denoising, Sharpening, …) before the results are being used in AI-upscale software
• Shotcut (freeware), which is in case you need to cut/adjust the audio tracks to manually sync up while preserving original channels
• Topaz Video Enhance AI (paid-for, 200 bucks once), which is for AI-enhancement and upscaling
• Adobe Premiere Pro (paid-for, about 20 bucks monthly depending on software), which is for putting back AI-enhanced images into a video stream

So, now you know what’s ahead. Good luck.
And now it’s time to really get “in-depth” with things.

Specifics
Since my complete workflow would have been to long to post, I did a complete guide and uploaded the document over on my google drive; you can access/download it through this link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/12E8hLHJYm58CkKPnCvhXBIUbvpZ8vbHs/view?usp=sharing

So, enjoy and hopefully have fun re-viewing/watching.
Also: Stay tuned for updates; after DS9 is done I will be doing Voyager as well.

The current release schedule is one episode per week, hopefully. And while I can’t promise anything, that’s the goal I am working towards.

So let’s all dive into one of the greatest chapters of SciFi once again – this time with “proper” quality!

Live long and prosper,
Animaxx

Would it be possible to get the download links to these movies (german and english version)? I own all the Theatrical BluRays, but your work seems far superior. Thanks a lot

Hello, your work looks amazing. Would it be possible for me to get a link so I could download the Star Trek: The Motion Picture - Director’s Edition HD Recreation V3? It would be interested in a german and an english version. Thanks in advance