<
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/02/ai-upscaled-star-trek-deep-space-9-ds9/>
"For years, dedicated
Star Trek fans have been using AI in an attempt to make
a version of the acclaimed series
Deep Space 9 that looks decent on modern
TVs. It sounds a bit ridiculous, but I was surprised to find that it’s actually
quite good — certainly good enough that media companies ought to pay attention
(instead of just sending me copyright strikes).
I was inspired earlier this year to watch the show, a fan favorite that I
occasionally saw on TV when it aired but never really thought twice about.
After seeing
Star Trek: The Next Generation’s revelatory remaster, I felt I
ought to revisit its less galaxy-trotting, more ensemble-focused sibling.
Perhaps, I thought, it was in the middle of an extensive remastering process as
well. Nope!
Sadly, I was to find out that, although the
TNG remaster was a huge triumph
technically, the timing coincided with the rise of streaming services, meaning
the expensive Blu-ray set sold poorly. The process cost more than $10 million,
and if it didn’t pay off for the franchise’s most reliably popular series,
there’s no way the powers that be do it again for
DS9, well-loved but far
less bankable.
What this means is that if you want to watch
DS9 (or
Voyager for that
matter), you have to watch it more or less at the quality in which it was
broadcast back in the ’90s. Like
TNG, it was shot on film but converted to
video tape at approximately 480p resolution. And although the DVDs provided
better image quality than the broadcasts (due to things like pulldown and color
depth) they were still, ultimately, limited by the format in which the show was
finished.
For
TNG, they went back to the original negatives and basically re-edited the
entire show, redoing effects and compositing, involving great cost and effort.
Perhaps that may happen in the 25th century for
DS9, but at present there are
no plans, and even if they announced it tomorrow, years would pass before it
came out.
So: As a would-be
DS9 watcher, spoiled by the gorgeous
TNG rescan, and who
dislikes the idea of a shabby NTSC broadcast image being shown on my lovely 4K
screen, where does that leave me? As it turns out: not alone."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
