Where to start? LOL

Words like “simple” and “easy” are really not appropriate here. Not that you are wrong, per se, but this is a huge understatement about the true complexities involved. Trek ain’t Sienfeld.

There are two problems with re-mastering TNG, DS9 & VOY, the rest is mostly irrelevant:

1) Money
2) EDL conform logs

First the money. No matter how simple or how fast Trek can be remastered, given the number of elements involved and the additional video fx which must be recreated, makes Trek the biggest remastering projects of them all and with that the most expensive. There are a lot of rumors out there, but I know for a fact that as of about a year ago CBS has been shopping the project to various major hollywood post houses for bids. But that’s it. Yes, there is a test episode, but that’s it – a budgeted feasibility exercise in order to get a true estimate of the cost per episode, which may or may not have been completed for commercial release. At this time, I do not believe CBS has committed any funds to start the project – and that is the key, will they spring for it or not? Eventually yes. But, both Tribble episodes would be outside of the scope of any initial re-mastering projects. If they were to take these on specifically for the BD release of Season 2, I would think they would not be saved as a surprise, but rather a purchasing incentive (like the Best Buy Delta shields), since the only reason to spend the money on them is to make money.

Second the re-editing. Cost aside, while it is a straight-forward process to re-telecine the 35mm dailies and re-composite the video elements, re-conforming the master from the original film elements is quite a bit more problematic. Whether this becomes a simple paint-by-numbers effort of labor, or a much more complex and time-consuming laborious frame matching exercise, depends solely on whether the EDLs were as detailed as I hope they are. Some have claimed that the original dailies were transfered to Beta SP without overscan edgecode from the film, or even keeping logs of edgecode timecode frame starts reference. If that’s true, then they have a real problem on their hands as each edit must be painstakingly matched to the FRAME in order to lock to audio synch, without even a rough timecode location to start from. This is the greatest unknown to the process and considering some things Ron Moore has said about how fast and loose they were in the early days (like different frame rate transfers), its even hard to speculate. The later episodes were likely handled with more care and most likely they will be the first to be remastered. As far as I know, no one has commented on this.

Lastly, even if detailed EDLs are available, there is still more to post with Trek than Seinfeld besides picture. It has been pointed out the as good as the original vfx footage might be, it won’t stand up to the CGI of the TOS remaster. The question of new CGI vs. telecine and re-compositing will be addressed and considering they will have to create new CGI to replace the video vfx layer, they will likely replace all the vfx which of course will add time to the project. More than likely each episode would require a full 5.1 surround re-mix as well. So taken as a whole, there is nothing simple or easy about this project.

As much as I would wish for HD Tribbles episodes, I think it is unlikely we will see anything but SD on this version.

#27 Jon B, All 7 discs evidently have Blu-ray only features. The fact that there is a separate BD for the extras is only evidence that the SD content wouldn’t fit on the discs with the episodes, or they wanted all of them on one disc AND wanted it to have some special BD accessible features as well. Unless as #26 Mammalian Verisimilitude, points out the much more sophisticated CGI compositing of old footage with new was performed on high res (if not HD) conformed masters, then it is unlikely there will be any HD extras from the TNG ear on this release.

TNG era re-masters are coming, just probably not with this release. In fact, as more and more TV moves to HD tape instead of film, those telecine machines are going to be sitting around with a lot of free time on their hands and the cost to restore these old series is going to drop considerably.

That doesn’t allow for the phaser shots/etc in T&T.

Moreover, dropping Sisko, Dax, O’Brien, Worf, Odo and Bashir into the TOS shots involved more than simple compositing…

I just saw something the other day that says that EVERYTHING shot for star trek in the 80’s and 90’s was shot on 35mm film, yes even the model work., transporter BG, etc… They also said that when they composited everything together on tape, they saved the film’s time code. This means that getting HD copies of the episodes is as simple as re-scanning the original negatives and then re-compositing, and re-editing. I’ve seen a demonstration of compositing in action. Its very fast. Also re-editing with saved time codes is also easy. I heard that they remastered sinefield’s 10 seasons using this technique in less than a year, and that they already have at least one episode of TNG in HD.

Indeed, I think that we can all solemnly agree that this packaging art is a…
(all together, now) DISASTER!!!!! ;-)

J/K