UPDATED: Today, in two separate releases, Paramount and CBS have outlined their plans for next week’s Comic Con, where they will be revealing details on upcoming Star Trek Blu-ray and DVD sets. See below for details on Star Trek elements and giveaways at the booth. See below for a promo video from David Gerrold and a look at the Star Trek giveaways.
Get Your Tribble at Comic-Con!
In the video below, David Gerrold explains how you can get a free Tribble at the Paramount booth (Booth #3535) at San Diego Comic Con next weekend. He also announced there will be a special Tribble Gallery added to cbs-bdlive.com where you can upload pictures of yourself and a Tribble in "the most unusual circumstance you can thing of." Even if you don’t go to Comic Con, you can participate, but you will need to get your own tribble (they are available in beige, brown, and grey from Entertainment Earth). Gerrold says he is going to be on the lookout for the best pictures, but it isn’t clear if this is for some contest or just a fun fan community thing.
CBS Home Entertainment and Paramount Home Entertainment are also planning more troubles with Tribbles for Blu-ray debut of Star Trek: The Original Series Season Two. Coming soon via the Season Two portal of CBS-BDLive.com, fans will be able to check out an exclusive interview from David on his inspiration for the Tribbles and his behind-the-scenes insights, in addition to a wealth of even more incredible BD Live bonus features that will offer fans access to materials unavailable anywhere else.
Star Trek Season Two on Blu-ray is expected to be released on September 22nd, but it is not yet available for pre-order and the full details on the set will not be released until Comic Con, along with details on other Star Trek Blu-ray and DVD sets for 2009.
UPDATE: More Details on Comic-Con Star Trek Home Video plans
This afternoon Paramount Home Video has provided us with more details on their plans for Comic-Con and Star Trek. According to the release:
fans can be photographed at the helm of the Enterprise, fraternize with galactic green girls and enter to win a limited edition Captain’s chair to build anticipation for the DVD and Blu-ray debut of Star Trek.
In addition to the Tribble giveaway, they will also have Vulcan-salute foam fingers. You will also be able to play a demo of the the Play Station Network version of the "Star Trek DAC" videogame.
Get yours at Comic Con 2009
The booth will also have special promotions for Monsters vs Aliens and Transformers, and other Paramount Home Video releases.
TrekMovie will be bringing reports on Star Trek announcements from Paramount and CBS at Comic Con next weekend.
Oooooh, tribbles!! Gimmeee!!!
“you can upload pictures of yourself and a Tribble in “the most unusual circumstance you can think of.”
Let the games begin…
Does the Blu-Ray pack include the DS9 and TAS “Tribble” shows as the TOS-R DVD set did?
Gerrold seems younger than i expected. i dont really know how old i expected him to look….but he seems surprisingly young.
Cool, they will probably have a primo like ST-TOS FIGURE, but this time it will be a tribble.
I meant ST-TOS BLU RAY S1 promo. Blame it on the iPhone spell checker.
Gerrold was in his 20’s when he wrote the original Tribbles ep. He is a very kind man, I met him once and he was very gracious. Thanks DG for your great contributions to Trek!
Please note that he didn’t say the photos had to be tasteful, nor did he give any perameters as to how inappropriate or unusual they could be. Oh man, down the rabbit hole we go…….
Can’t wait for the Season 2 blueray. I’m absolutely loving the first set.
OH NO!!!. Do Not feed the Tribbles more then a Crumb. Or you will have 5 then 10 then 50 then 100 then 100,000 and so on. Looks like More trials and tribbleations. Or more tribbles and more trouble.
# 3 No full details of extras until ComicCon next weekend. Day 1 buy for me … :-)
Hmmm… I was just about to give my tribble away…. It’s from Vegas, it’s white, it’s still in it’s original packaging… Hmm…
That’s “ITS” not “IT’S.” (Puh-leeze don’t tell anyone I’m a retired teacher!)
I will get a tribble and not take a picture. :P
Heh. That still photo of David only needs a white coat and a stethoscope and a caption about how you too can cure (fill in the blank) in only six weeks with your tribble. :)
Hmm…. buy a tribble online for 10 bucks…. or spend $1000 for a hotel and plane flight to San Diego to get one for free…..
California, here I come!!
Article updated with more info from Paramount
I already have foam spock fingers from Star Trek 2.0, now to add to my collection. :]
Galatic Green Girls….other wise known as Orion Slave Girls??? Oh be still my beating heart. Leave it to Comic-Con to have the GGGs for all to enjoy…… well, in photo form that is.
#3. AJ wrote: Does the Blu-Ray pack include the DS9 and TAS “Tribble” shows as the TOS-R DVD set did?
My exact thoughts. Also will the TAS version be transferred to HD (it should have been edited on film making it a no-brainer), in which case they could change the colors of the Tribbles to fix Hal Sutherland’s color-blindness.
Then the BIG question which is: will “Trial and Tribble-ations” be included and will it be the first of the TNG era episodes to be transferred to HD?
Actually in thinking about this some more, this may not be as big a stretch as for the rest of the series. In order to use the kind of leading-edge technology necessary to integrate their footage with the TOS original film, this episode alone may have been handled differently, meaning, the DS9 dailies might have been transferred to D-5 instead of the usual SD video format they used. An SD dub could then have been made for editing as usual then conformed and composited with effects and TOS footage. It would have been a one-time outsource. Considering the results, it might have gone down this way.
I WILL win that chair.
I’m going to have a full bag from Comic-Con this year:
– Free Tribble
– BSG Season 4 CD from the FSM/SAE Booth (429)
– DST TOS Science Tricorder
– Perhaps a Yellow Shirt from the new Movie from the Rubies Costumes booth.
Looks like a good year for me !!!
“…the most unusual circumstance you can thing of.”
Might that have been think of?
“Galactic Green Girls” ??
Now that Trek is hot again and fully corporate-ized, you can bet that we never hear the term “Orion Slave Girl” ever again.
“…upload pictures of yourself and a Tribble in “the most unusual circumstance you can thing of.” Even if you don’t go to Comic Con, you can participate, but you will need to get your own tribble (they are available in beige, brown, and grey from Entertainment Earth). Gerrold says he is going to be on the lookout for the best pictures, but it isn’t clear if this is for some contest or just a fun fan community thing.”
Did I read that right? What “fun fan community does “unusual” things with tribbles?
I’m confused. David says “Booth 3535”, the text says 2525. Which is it?
I can’t go but my wife is, and I want my Tribble!!
David Gerrold’s ” (The Making of) The Trouble with Tribbles” and “The World of Star Trek” are must-reads for any fan of TOS.
Re: 20
Somehow, I can’t see them editing T&T at HD quality (were there even HD telecines in actual use back in 1996, let alone on a TV budget?) when the whole series was going out at SD, and as far as everyone working on it thought, that was all it would ever go out as.
If the Tribble episodes are included, I’m sure they’ll just be the same SD encodes from the DVD release. After all these are just “extras” as far as this set is concerned.
Just give me all of the seaosn os TNG , DS9 and Enterprise on itunes and I will be avery happy man.
TNG, DS9 and Voyarger were all filmed on video tape so BlueRAy will not Work. I think that Enteprise was filmed in 1080p for the final few seasons.
29 — Bingo, they’ll just be there as SD extras. I’m 99% certain.
hmmm i just realized the similarities between tribbles and mogwai–do not feed them too much or after midnite-and didnt they reproduce even faster than tribbles? My god, one of em even turned into tony randall,how much scarier can they get?
Guess I’ll have to DVR Comic-Con covered by G4TV next week, just so I can keep up on Star Trek.
An even worse terror Mr. Nightshade. They will all be playing the audio of the Odd Couple.
Would that make them worse than terrorist?
The DS9 episode probably wouldn’t hold up under close scrutiny now! I want Star Trek Re-Animated to accompany Star Trek – Remastered. Redo the animation with state of the art technology (there are 79 episodes to sample facial movements from and so on!) ;)
The DS9 ep would be a fun extra and, RD, as far as I know the prints of the animated shows were remastered in HD for the DVD release, so the master should be available for the Blu-ray.
30: Done on 35mm (capable of transfer to HD exactly like the Movies) throughout Seasons 1-3. Filmed Digitally and broadcast in 1080p beginning in Season 4.
I was hoping the Star Trek season 2 on Blu-ray would have an exclusive Scotty figure from Where No Man Has Gone Before. Since season 1 had exclusive Sulu from Where No Man Has Gone Before.
28. Mammalian Verisimilitude wrote:“Somehow, I can’t see them editing T&T at HD quality (were there even HD telecines in actual use back in 1996, let alone on a TV budget?)”
Yes in 1996 they did have the capability to telecinie HD quality and the D-5 hardware capable of 1080p resolution had been around for several years at that time. It was brand new technology which is what made Forrest Gump possible in 1994. All the technology was there.
It is not about changing formats for one episode when the rest of the series was in SD, but because they may have had to to use the technology in order to do the episode at all. The episode was going to cost them more simply to do the cutting-edge digital compositing of the new footage into the old, that would have been outsourced to a company that specialized in that kind of work for cinema, none of which was not within the capabilities of DS9’s usual post production, nor a regular episodic budget. Everything about this episode was non-standard.
My theory is that the outsourced company would have worked on D-5 HD video. That composited footage would have then been conformed on HD with all the rest to maintain consistency of look. Considering their standard vfx (space exteriors, etc.) were typically output for SD, those may have been composited later to the final SD master used for broadcast (in which case they may have to be replaced). This all relies on whether they were afraid the HD footage would not match if it were down-resed to SD and then married to the footage transfered only to SD – meaning it was all transferred to HD from the beginning.
So there is a small chance. O.K., a very small. So I’m expecting SD quality for both.
38. RD
Interesting. I didn’t think they agreed on a final spec for HD until much later than the 1980s. I mean, I know there were HD formats around back then (I saw Vittorio Storarro experimenting with it in a documentary at that time) but wasn’t aware that the 1080p spec was any more prominent than a number of competing specs: indeed, wasn’t the long delay of HD uptake in part down to all the arguments about what what spec would be used globally?
I would’ve thought that the Trek model work was shot on film, the mattes created and the lot dumped down to video for compositing. Certainly, the footage has a horrible video sheen.
#39 Again, we’re not talking about the 1980s. We’re talking about ONE EPISODE in 1996 which is when the ATSC standard was approved, so by DS9 it much closer than you think. The Panasonic D-5 was a common professional uncompressed digital format capable of 1080p (as well as J-1035i format) and was introduced in 1994, clearly with an eye for compatibility with the emerging standards being debated.
My theory is that in order to do the sophisticated CGI compositing between the old footage and new, that like Forrest Gump, they would have been working in some HD format, if not 1080p. Don’t forget CGI was cutting edge technology in 1994 and required HD-level telecine and output at a minimum to recombine with film. To ensure the DS9 film looked consistent between the composited footage and the regular live action, the entire show was transferred to an HD format and conformed (rather than just the sections intended to be merged with the old footage), before ultimately being mastered to SD and composited with the vfx. If so, I suspect the model work was also transferred to HD, but the final vfx created as usual in SD and applied to the SD master (as usual).
Of course, IF the difference in working in HD and down-resing just those sections to SD was negligible, then this episode would have been finished just like all the rest in SD. Otherwise, there exists a conformed master (without space effects), in an HD format (higher resolution than SD if not 1080p), just for this episode.
Correction. The more I think about it, the more I think these are the likely scenarios (most to least likely):
1) Combined TOS & DS9 footage only in HD, everything else in SD
2) TOS era scenes in HD, DS9 in SD, Ext. & vfx in SD
3) All live action in HD, Ext. & vfx in SD
4) All film in HD, vfx in SD
5) Entire project finished on HD
If any of the project was finished in HD, the most realistic scenario I would hope for is at least all of the TOS era scenes were conformed in HD before being combined with the DS9 SD scenes. This means it could have a Wizard of Oz sort of effect where entering the 23rd century emerges one into HD. Like the TOS project, all that would be required is new CGI graphics, most of which have already been created for the original.
The only reason I have any hope this might be the case is that it took so long to release the Second season on Blu-ray. Personally, I would have tried to release all three seasons before Christmas, so the delay seems somewhat odd to me. Then again, I’m sure we would have heard something about this leaked out.
you know what would have been a cool thing to have included stictly as an extra feature on tos original series the deep space nine trouble with tribbles cross over epsiode.
#41.,
Here’s what David Gerrold told the BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/st/interviews/gerrold/page3.shtml
“They used the same make-up from thirty years ago, the same lenses, the same lights, the same lighting, even the same film stock, so that when you go back to that it looks identical and it matches perfectly to the original Star Trek footage.
Then they did a new master of the original Star Trek footage to get an absolutely pristine copy and it looked perfect. It looked so good that the studio decided to remaster all of the seventy-nine episodes for the DVDs. All in all I think it was one of Paramount’s best ideas.” – David Gerrold
43 thanks for posting that,
43 — Well they may have used the same film stock, etc. to film it initially, but it still doesn’t answer how they edited it for air. I have a feeling it was done in their normal workflow, which would have been on professional grade video tape (480i).
#45. You may well be correct with respect to the final vfx and non-CGI elements, but I seriously doubt they were able to use interlaced video of any kind in order to composite the old footage with the new so effectively. So at least part of it was done outside their normal workflow. What I take from that article is that this single episode exceeded their usual episodic pattern budget in a number of ways. They brought in different people and processes all the way around to accomplish those things which were not part of their usual workflow. This included paying a double cast covering all of the TOS cast member’s appearances and likenesses. If any of the TNG era episodes exist in a higher resolution format, even in part, then this is it.
But I am fully expecting an SD transfer for the so-called extras.
Either way, if CBS were going to move ahead with re-mastering some of these era episodes, and we know they have been doing tests, I would think this would be one of them. Then again, I wouldn’t expect them to give such an effort away for free as an “extra” either.
#44. You are welcome.
#45, & #46.
Here’s what the director of Photography had to say:
http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/community/chat/archive/transcript/1403.html
“We shoot on 35mm film … Eastman 5298, ASA 500. The film is developed and immediately transfered to digital Beta tape. The rest of post-production is done on tape. The negative is never cut and is stored. It’s edited on an AVID and then the on-line master tape is on Digital Beta.” – Jonathan West (Director of Photography), ST:DS9
#47 – yes that is the “normal” work-flow. What I’m talking about is what may have been necessary to produce one episode with extensive cutting-edge CGI at the time. Unfortunately he did not speak to how Trials & Tribble-ations was handled despite it being mentioned in the interview. What my theory suggests is merely substituting higher def D-5 for Digital Beta for the one episode, otherwise the process is identical.
What interests me in that article were his comments on HD in 1998:
JW: I did some extensive research before doing my project. I compared 16mm blowups to 35mm, with digital high-def transfers to 35mm. And I was overwhelmed with the quality of the high-def images, when projected in the theatre on film. I couldn’t tell the difference. They were actually sharper and had less grain than the 16 blowups. If cost is a factor, Sony is doing some wonderful work with transfers from Beta SP and DigiBeta to film. I’ve even seen Mini-DV cam transferred to film, with surprisingly good results.