Star Trek: The Next Generation - Poor video quality

NeilF

NeilF

NeilF

Soldato
Joined
15 Nov 2003
Posts
14,473
Location
Marlow
Why does the video/image quality look so bad? I mean it was an incredibly expensive series to make, so why not film it in decent resolution?

It just looks like it was film solely to go on the US' lower resolution TV format, and that's it?!
 
Wait for the 'Coming soon' Blu-Ray versions and see if its still the same!...

Though if I recall Gene did like using his 'Soft Focus' lenses a hell of a lot!!.. :)
 
Seasons 1 & 2 are poor screen quality wise - think it was due to using cheaper cameras. Skin tones and lighting seem quite dull / washy. Using the vivid option in Cyberlink fixes this for me a bit. Another consideration could be bad DVD transfer / encoding.

Picture improves from Season 3 onwards (better cameras)...along with the episodes.

Notice it more when upscaling - although I sit a little close to my monitor so it does look bad.

Gene's use of soft focus is more obvious in TOS (I have remastered Blu-Ray) - cue close up of female beauty...

If TNG comes to Blu-Ray and the picture is better I may cry as I've already own the whole lot on DVD (quite cheap boxsets)
 
I have TNG on DVD (1-7) and i play them through my HD-DVD player and in some areas the picture quality is quite bad, but i haven't really noticed it on my 37" TV.

If they do go to Blu-Ray, i will buy them in a heartbeat.

Star Trek ***~!
 
if you look at early episodes of Friends, for example, the quality is equally poor. I asked an actor friend about this before and he said it was just the standard format in the states at the time, with better quality film being prohibitively expensive.

The comparative difference between the quality of our TV at the time, which looked better, is a result of NTSC's framerate being that bit higher than ours (PAL) so required more film than the equivalent recording and so lower quality film was used to offset the cost.*

*this could all be total lies, but it was what he told me

B@
 
They were all mastered on video tape as far as I'm aware, they weren't done on film or anything like that so you can't rescan the masters. There's no point in shows like this coming to Blu-Ray. They'd be better if they used 480p or whatever and put every episode on a couple of discs :)

I believe shows like the X-Files were also done this way unfortunately.
 
They were filmed on proper film but the editing and effects shots are video only. So it is technically possible to put them on BluRay and maybe even widescreen, major issue is going to be the fact every episode will need to be completely re-edited and all the effects shots redone, from the Enterprise flyby to Picards earl grey materialising. It's the same for TNG, DS9, and Voyager. Only Enterprise was intended to be in widescreen HD.

There was a story from a couple of years ago of the people who did TOS remastering trying it out on a TNG episode to see what the quality and costs would be - http://trekmovie.com/2007/07/27/cbs-testing-remastering-tng/ not heard anything since.

Personally I'd love to get a remastered HD version of DS9, maybe one day.
 
PR. said:
They were filmed on proper film but the editing and effects shots are video only. So it is technically possible to put them on BluRay and maybe even widescreen, major issue is going to be the fact every episode will need to be completely re-edited and all the effects shots redone, from the Enterprise flyby to Picards earl grey materialising. It's the same for TNG, DS9, and Voyager. Only Enterprise was intended to be in widescreen HD.

There was a story from a couple of years ago of the people who did TOS remastering trying it out on a TNG episode to see what the quality and costs would be - http://trekmovie.com/2007/07/27/cbs-testing-remastering-tng/ not heard anything since.

Personally I'd love to get a remastered HD version of DS9, maybe one day.
Click to expand...


Pretty much, everything in the 80's, 90's and early 2000's was edited on video, it was cheaper and quicker than film....and of course back then, HD was unheard of.
 
PR. said:
They were filmed on proper film but the editing and effects shots are video only. So it is technically possible to put them on BluRay and maybe even widescreen, major issue is going to be the fact every episode will need to be completely re-edited and all the effects shots redone, from the Enterprise flyby to Picards earl grey materialising. It's the same for TNG, DS9, and Voyager. Only Enterprise was intended to be in widescreen HD.

There was a story from a couple of years ago of the people who did TOS remastering trying it out on a TNG episode to see what the quality and costs would be - http://trekmovie.com/2007/07/27/cbs-testing-remastering-tng/ not heard anything since.

Personally I'd love to get a remastered HD version of DS9, maybe one day.
Click to expand...

Cheers for clearing that up :) I think that's why we won't see them because of the costs involved in doing it.
 
probedb said:
I believe shows like the X-Files were also done this way unfortunately.
Click to expand...


Yep, the earlier seasons looked awful. Just really, really bad. I got the box set last year and actually found the earlier stuff hard to watch because of the quality and the 4:3 ratio. But, things did pick up once it made the jump to widescreen. The picture did get better as i went through the dvd's.
 
Yep, the earlier seasons looked awful. Just really, really bad. I got the box set last year and actually found the earlier stuff hard to watch because of the quality and the 4:3 ratio. But, things did pick up once it made the jump to widescreen. The picture did get better as i went through the dvd's.
Click to expand...
Buffy tVS is exactly the same, once it hits widescreen it improves in leaps and bounds
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom