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DavidBrooker t1_jadm8b0 wrote

Reply to comment by TheFriendlyArtificer in Nvidia’s latest GPU drivers can upscale old blurry YouTube videos by prehistoric_knight

The 35mm reels are in a salt mine somewhere just waiting... Waiting...

It's too bad they basically abandoned model work by the end of DS9. Makes the whole process a lot more expensive, for something that was already of dubious financial value.

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Superjuden t1_jaduo6b wrote

All of the CGI stuff is saved as well, they can render it at 4K@240hz tomorrow if they felt like it. But scanning about a million feet of 35mm film and then editing in the CGI and cutting everything correctly is a process that'll take years. If they knew how poor the TNG sales would be they would have never done it and DS9 nowhere near as popular.

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DavidBrooker t1_jadvgqn wrote

While the CGI may be saved, it would be distracting if they just re-rendered it and inserted it into otherwise remastered video. If you're going to go through the effort of remastering, you'd never accept that. The base assets are simply not at a comparable quality.

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Superjuden t1_jadvrq8 wrote

They did the same with the CGI in TNG.

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DavidBrooker t1_jadws4y wrote

Even if that were true (which I don't believe was the case), that actually gets to my original point: that TNG suffered less from this issue due to its greater use of physical models, whereas the bulk of later-season DS9 exterior shots were CG. TNG simply had a greater proportion of practical effects - shot on film - than CGI effects than DS9, and DS9 more than Voyager. For example, the only appearance of a CGI model for the Enterprise D (edit: on TV) was in DS9 - the model never appeared in TNG, and every exterior shot of the Enterprise in that series was a physical model. Meanwhile, in DS9, by the later seasons most of the Defiant's exterior shots were CGI (and those that weren't were mostly stock footage from prior seasons).

The TNG remaster made significant use of new CGI, or substantially updated CGI, where the base assets had to be updated. They were often not starting from scratch, but in no sense just re-rendering. Moreover, many assets were created brand new from scratch because the base assets were considered unacceptable (wide shots of planets, for example, are the most common, as well as some whole characters like the crystalline entity).

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