Report: TNG on Blu-ray Coming In 2012

According to a new report, the long-awaited Star Trek: The Next Generation in HD project is starting to gear up at CBS with a possible "Best of" pack of four episodes on Blu-ray coming this year and more to follow in 2012. See below for more on TNG in HD.  

 

Report: TNG in HD coming in 2012 w/ test in 2011

For years CBS has been talking about remastering Star Trek: The Next Generation  in HD like they did for the original Star Trek series. In May our friends at Digital Bits reported that CBS was starting to gear up to give TNG in HD a shot. TrekMovie later confirmed that the talk inside CBS had increased on this project, but that there are technical challenges to this process.  Now Digital Bits reports that sources at Comic Con confirmed that the first effort for TNG in HD will be a test to come out in 2012: 

Multiple sources I spoke with at Comic-Con have also confirmed our report from earlier this year that CBS is hard at work on Star Trek: The Next Generation – Remastered for Blu-ray release starting sometime in 2012. The latest word is that 4 test episodes are currently being worked on for release as a sampler/demo BD disc of the project, and that sampler disc will somehow be available to fans by the end of this year.

It is worth noting that 2012 is the 25th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The remastered project for the Star Trek was released in 2006, just in time for the 40th anniversary.

TrekMovie will continue to monitor this very exciting project and provide updates when possible.

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Just when I was starting to regret buying my Blu-ray player, along comes this news. Awesome!

that would be SO AWESOME!!!

I wonder what 4 episodes were picked??? Best of Both Worlds 1 and 2, and maybe a Q episode or two?

#1

How could you possably regret buying BluRay? LOL.
Awsome nrews though. If they could one day remaster DS9, my life would be complete. I await the return of THE SISKO.

Is there a link to the Digital Bits page where you found this?

I figuring Best of Both Worlds 1 & 2 and maybe either Encounter at Farpoint or All Good Things…

4, because I get all my movies from Netflix and other content from Apple TV these days. I literally have only about eight Blu-ray titles and most of them are Trek-related.

Ok. For blue ray I say do best of both worlds and yesterdays enterprise and cause and effect. That would be a good start. I for one will be there to get the remastered blurays.

Guys, to show off the remastereing, they need to pic 4 eps from season 1 and 2. Those are the eps that require remastering (literally) from origianl film clips and to have their SFX re-drawn. Later seasons are easily a direct film transfer. So don’t get your hopes, up, we’ll be seeing ones like encounter at farpoint, arsenal of freedom and whatnot

Does this mean they’re adding new special effects shots like with TOS, or are they going to try and clean up what’s already there? Inquiring minds wanna know!

Wow, this will be absolutely awesome if it happens! TOS in Blu-ray is amazing. I have TNG on DVD, might have to sell that set in preparation for TNG Remastered!

Can’t wait. I love the Remastered TOS, and love that the BDs have both the original and remastered effects. I hope if this project works out, they’ll do the same.

YES!!!!!!!!

YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Awesome news!!

They should do “The Drumhead”. It was an inexpensive episode to produce and there aren’t even any warp effects outside the windows as the warp drive was off-line for the entire episode. It’s also a great episode that doesn’t need fancy effects to enjoy.

I assume that they are going to have to redo all the special effects for these episodes. If so, this would be a one-time shot to improve and significantly redo the awful Enterprise D design. They should fix the bloated saucer, increase the height of the engines, and make the secondary hull taller. Plus they could not make it look real, instead of that awful “painted model” look.

I bet the okudas are going to be gainfully employed by paramount again to oversee the conversion-my guess is they will have to redo the efx shots just like tos—wonder how expensive it will be–just buying the original 7 seasons cost a lot–fyi i am now watching tng n other trek including trek09 on my nintendo 3ds thanks to the netflix app–its awesome-if u already have netflix its easy to add to it–also the web browser is slightly improved-still wont run flash or videos tho—but great for browsing great sites like trekmovie.com—

Wow, awesome news!

The “Best Of” idea always seemed like best option to me. Considering how much more complicated the process will probably be, it only makes sense to focus on the really great episodes that fans actually want to see.

17. Um, no. The Enterprise-D is fine just the way it is.

Awesome news. Sounds exciting. I’d love to see what they could do with the effects.

I think the Enterprise D is a thing of pure beauty and doesn’t need modification.

@17

Let’s not, shall we? There are still a multitude of fan complaints about how “wrong” the (indistinguishable from the original!) TOS-R Enterprise is; I’d hate to be the one responsible for ACTIVELY CHANGING something so classic. However, having it “look real” is probably very much in the cards. ;)

Let’s enlarge it to 16:9 and redo all SFX, please.

20, 22: agreed. No need to change Enterprise-D, but showing some good detail (in scale detail, not the hyper bumped up detail of the smaller model) and some of the greens and blues of the hull would be nice. I do hope remastered does mean the special effects will be recreated, not some half baked ‘uprez’.

#17

As opposed to the “painted CG model” look?

It will be awesom to see Next Gen on blu ray

@23 “Let’s enlarge it to 16:9 and redo all SFX, please.”

Since the live action was not shot in 16×9, there is now way then can do a 16×9 presentation on Blu-Ray. I suppose the new space-only special effects could be done in 16×9, but that would be distracting as they go back and forth to 3×3 live action.

@25. How about just something that looks somewhat real. I don’t care how they do it, I just know that the presentation of the E on TNG looked lame to me. I want to believe it is a real starship.

Yeah, no 16:9 from 4:3 sources, please; that’s what the “zoom” option on your television is for.

Woop, Woop! Me so happy!!

Thanks CBS!!

FINALLY!!!!

#10 I kind of agree with you there Count, season one really doesn’t stand the test of time from a visual perspective and I’d be very interested and seeing then with remastered fx. However’ season one was weaker it terms of story as well and this is something they can’t fix. Don’t get me wrong, it’s no TOS season 3 (and I bought that!) but they are going to be hard pushed to find 4 episodes that are going to entice the post Abrams generation to by the box sets. I say they should release 2 of the two part episodes and show them as feature length. This way those of us who will definitely be buying all 7 seasons will have a reason to double dip*.

* this seems the wrong phrase here given all the various formats of this show many of us have already forked out for!

Glad to hear it- it wont be any easier to do for the 30th Anniversary.
I’m guessing they found the original film elements from the original effects processed on video & will just recomposite rather than do any CG modelling.

Any chance of Star Trek Enterprise on Blu-ray for its 10th Anniversary? Since there’s less that needs doing to it, and in the case of Seasons 3 & 4, nothing at all.

It won’t be Farpoint or Best of Both Worlds. That’s bad marketing for future sets. They would never have used The Doomsday Machine as their first forray into the market. They went with Balance of Terror.

What I’m saying is they won’t play their best cards first. They’ll pick a good episode which will bring in the less enthusiastic fans and a fan favourite and do something terrific with it.

I ´m wondering how they plan to re-do TNG. As far as I understood it, it´s really complicated because all of the live-action has been done on film, but all the SFX shots, even if someone stands in front of the view screen, have been done on Video tape with it´s much smaller resolution. So there´s a lot of work to do…

Heaven and paradise is coming closer for me I’ve been waiting for this sooooooooo long!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :) :) :) :) :) :) YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

I’m still waiting for TOS Seasons 2 & 3 on HD DVD…

@27 “Since the live action was not shot in 16×9, there is now way then can do a 16×9 presentation on Blu-Ray.”

Sure there is. It’s called cropping. Manga Entertainment did it with Ninja Scroll, as did Funimation with Dragon Ball Z. Should it be done with The Next Generation? No. That’d be silly.

I figure Best of Both Worlds is an obvious choice, since it is probably equal in demand to Trek’s Doomsday Machine. Maybe they will do another effects heavy episode like Booby Trap

As awesome as this news is, how are they going to upgrade the quality of the episodes? They were all edited on videotape and we all know how bad the quality is on those things, thanks to DVD and Blu-Ray. The reason why TOS was able to be completely remastered was because the shows were all edited with the film stock itself so they were able to go back and get the original negative and remaster it from the source material.

Now, I don’t know if Paramount/CBS still has all the originally shot film reels from TNG lying around somewhere, but that’d be the only way to get a quality looking picture. You cannot, I repeat CANNOT get a HD picture from a videotaped image.

And yes, they’d have to redo ALL the VFX for the show as well. If they’re going to do that and release all 7 seasons in such fashion, I’d say that’d be the greatest thing EVER to be released onto Blu-Ray since it’s inception. LOL.

Does this mean they’re going to re-do the special effects (or that they have to re-do the special effects) or are they just going to release effectively a blu-ray port? If the former, this is excellent news. I’ve been re-watching TNG, recently, and the effects are rather dated. I hope the four test episodes are top episodes, like Best of Both Worlds (1 and 2), Yesterday’s Enterprise, The Inner Light, etc.

My vote is for a Time Anomaly set:

“Time Squared” (S2)
“Yesterday’s Enterprise” (S3)
“Cause and Effect” (S5)
“Timescape” (S6)

This would also nicely show off the 3 different Director’s of Photography over the course of the show from ’89-’93 (Edward R. Brown, Marvin V. Rush, and Jonathan West).

From what I have read, they would need to basically run an episode through post production. Reassemble them from film elements and add all the effects, not just the space shots, but the view screens, phaser beams, transporter, etc. It needs more work than Trek did since it is all done on video, where Trek was on 35mm film.

Excellent news. This is the one series I have on DVD that looks like it can use it the most. DS9, Voyager and Enterprise all look good on DVD, but TNG has a grainly, less crisp look on DVD. HD should really help clean it up. I hope they redo the special effects, at least from season 1 to 3. I still cringe when I see the roaming starfields behind the ship and planets. Who’s idea was that anyway? I was fine with the design of the ship, but I agree somewhat with MJ that it could use some cleaning up.

I’m surprised Enterprise has not been released on Blu-ray. It was already in HD in season 3 and 4 and close to in 1 and 2.

For reasons alluded to by others here, it is best to remain skeptical until the goods are out. The people getting excited now might not realize the fundamental problem. This topic has already been discussed and explored on technical boards for a while (when HD became a commercial topic), and even people at CBS/Paramount had hinted that it wasn’t going to happen–because it couldn’t happen.

Well, the source material has not magically changed since, so what gives?

If you are confused, I recommend that you read through the comments carefully and educate yourself. And then just wait and see.

Personally, I’m expecting something less than stellar.

This makes perfect sense. Theres no doubt in my mind that Star Trek: The Next Generation will become recognised as a classic just as the original Star Trek has become.

I can’t wait :D

The only way you will get a 16×9 look that is even close to proper is if TNG were filmed like Seinfeld apparently was:

http://forum.dvdtalk.com/tv-talk/549298-seinfeld-syndication-presented-hd-format-2.html

Scroll down a bit and you’ll see an overlay of the 4×3 and 16×9 presentations. Since this is Seinfeld, not some cinematic masterpiece, it works.

hardly makes the $$ spent on each individual season DVD set seem worth it, eh? How will I explain buying all these over again to the Mrs.??? The TOS blu rays were enough of a debacle!

I liked TNG but its funny how the computer effects are starting to look dated compared to todays laptops. Even the TNG Padd’s look ancient compared to today’s tablets. Windows 7 and 8 looks more advanced then the LCARS system.