I gave it fair chance and watched the first three seasons. There were a few bright spots here and there, but I never connected with the characters or felt like the writing was up to par. I still hope they pull off a good final season, but I’m not planning to watch it any time soon.
Kinda late to the conversation, I know, but I agree with you. To me, all it’s missing obviously is the story and some polish. I could think of a few QOL stuff I’d like to see added before it officially launches, but to me this feels pretty complete as is. Amazing that it’s only in Alpha.
That’s how I think it is, I can’t think of any other features I would need. As for actual recipes/items (beyond main quest somersloop and such) I don’t know what else I could need. Each factory is easily 500+ hours to fully run through everything. There are some bugs, but compared to when I started with Update 3 it’s pretty dang stable. The only stability issues I have are on dedicated server, and even then they’re mostly “Just log out and rejoin” and it’s fixed.
LaserDisc stores the video signal in an entirely analog format on the disc, similar to a vinyl record but using lasers. In theory, under good conditions, the input signal is almost entirely reproduceable on playback (minus some degradation in the form of noise and dropouts).
The end viewing result should be something very close to the master tape that was used to make the LD discs, which in this case should be the same tapes used to broadcast the show on TV.
DVD uses the same resolution and video format as LD but digitized, so it’s pretty evenly matched and DVD has better numbers on paper, but where it fails is its use of lossy compression (MPEG2) to fit all that data onto a disc which visibly degrades the image quality quite a bit. This issue is compounded because they chose to jam multiple episodes onto a single 4.7gb disc plus various extras and bullshit resulting in even lower video quality.
If only Paramount would get off it’s ass and make a BluRay release…
Yes I wish they would remaster DS9 as the documentary proved possible. But Paramount won’t sink any money in to it. I was hoping they would for Paramount+ like what HBO did with some classics for HBO Max. But alas, no
A full HD remaster from the film reels would be amazing, but even just re-digitizing the master tapes would give an improvement. That wouldn’t cost more than a team full of interns and some computers.
Indeed and equally perplexing considering how hot Star Trek is right now. You’d think they’d want it in high quality for the next 20 years of streaming/digital/tv rights etc
Way better than what you can stream (so are the DVDs though), if you watch these discs directly on a retro Trinitron CRT or Plasma TV (I use a Plasma TV) with a good 3d comb filter, they look absolutely perfect, no exaggeration.
But, due to analog signal inputs being afterthought in modern LCD TVs, If you plug the player directly into a modern LCD TV it’s going to look like noisy, muddy, poop, unless you have an expensive video processor ($$$$). Which is why I don’t suggest anyone go down this rabbit hole, except for hardcore retro enthusiasts.
There’s also the problem of the final 2 seasons being missing due to LaserDisc production being stopped.
That’s so Impossible cool! Would love to be able to watch these all again but on laserdisc though I think even thinking about is out of my wallets reach.
Nice. But I suppose the quality also depends on the source material that got pressed on those disks?! I mean the credits are CGI and had been digitally created in a certain resolution and then been converted. But I really don’t know what kind of cameras and CGI tech they used for TV productions in the 90s. Might have been magnetic tape that isn’t the highest quality unlike something that had originally been recorded on analog film.
Edit: Wikipedia says Voyager is the first series with CGI effects for exterior shots of the spaceships. And the effects are rendered in “standard television resolution”. So they should be in 480p (or ‘i’)? But that seems to align well with Laserdisc which also contain standard NTSC or PAL video signals.
They are 480i. But the difference may be that DS9 and Voyager were shot and stored on tape. The laserdisc was sourced from those tapes much earlier so it’s probably a higher quality transfer than the DVDs which came later. Looking on memory alpha the first laser disc releases were about a decade before they made it to DVD. The image quality may be better on laserdisc.
Thanks, that explains a lot. Yeah, unfortunately some initial masters and releases are sub-par. Guess it’s the same for DVDs as it is for some music album releases. And I mean for TV shows from a certain era there’s not much to be done. Glad the VHS or DVD wasn’t the only release. I watched some DVD a year ago an let’s say I wasn’t impressed. It’s not up to today’s standards of high definition TVs and to me it’s neither a valuable collector’s item.
IIRC from the “What we left behind” documentary, they were shot on film. They even had a few minutes of HD material scanned from the film reels. It’s the CGI that was baked only into the tape version that makes it so difficult to do a HD remaster. And why they went back to the tapes when producing the DVD release.
IIRC, VOY and DS9 were stored for long term on videotape, with the original footage deleted from the disks, while TOS and TNG were still (kept on) reels. Remastering film is a lot easier than upscaling low quality videotape, especially since that is also vulnerable to EM and much more to heat than modern film. I think the Laserdiscs were created from the original footage, so you have some proper gold here. You might be able to create even better upscaling with this than CaptRobau: …blogspot.com/…/how-did-i-upscale-star-trek-ds9-f…
I think they were all on reels. The DS9 doc a couple of years back (after than blog post) had 4k hdr widescreen rescans of select scenes for the campaign bonus on kickstarter. Truly amazing. They also had the CGI files to rerender some scenes like Sacrifice of Angels battles.
It goes something like this, capture to disk -> decode rf file to video and audio streams with ld-decode -> deinterlace and remove noise with Hybrid/Vapoursynth -> load into Topaz to boost res to 1620x1080 with proteus AI -> final editing, tweaking, and repairs with Premiere -> final encode to HEVC with Hybrid.
Note: For uploading to YT I doubled the resolution again to juice more bitrate out of their encoder. This doesn’t really improve the quality for normal files, so 1080p will probably be the max for regular files. If you try to go beyond that with topaz it starts ‘creating’ things to fill the pixels with and it looks artificial…
I was so mesmerized by the Voyager intro I got sucked back into the warm nostalgia of my childhood. My eyes instinctively looked to the corner of the screen to read the episode title. And end of video. 😢
If you can get those on the internet you will be preserving access for the vast majority who would otherwise be stuck with the crappy streaming versions.
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