Star Trek: The Next Generation in HD

All of the widescreen possibilities have involved a slight zooming out on the (apparently!) 4:3 master which would then allow for less vertical loss when cropped. Face facts, guys; a 1987-1994 television show is not now and has NEVER been intended to be seen in widescreen, and should not be treated as such.

 

TNG wasn't shot with 16:9 in mind. The excess picture information on the negatives is just that, excess. The image was composed to be shown in 4:3 and should remain so, no matter what the current width:height ratio is today or will be in future.

 

I'm sorry, but you couldn't be more wrong. Every shot was framed for and filmed in a 4:3 aspect ratio. There was no intention of creating widescreen versions at the time.

I don't know who told you that they were "envisioning" a future 16:9 presentation, but you were lied to.

 

I agree but I think for syndication purposes (as I mentioned earlier) the pass for the widescreen is probably for that while they'll (my guess because they did this with the BD for ST:TOS)put out the BD (and DVDs if they remaster them for that as well) in 4:3.

It's pure economics--it's esier to sell a widescreen show for syndication rather than in full screen while. IIRC that's how they did ST:TOS.

 

They weren't. When shooting with 35mm film using 4-perf height, the aspect ratio (with space left for a soundtrack) is 1.37:1, or Academy ratio. That is how ST:TNG was filmed. There is a tiny amount of "unused" information on all four sides of the original film frame, which wasn't picked up on the original film-to-tape telecine. This is how they're squeezing out a little extra side picture. But they're still cropping the top and bottom of the image.

 

Marvin Rush was the primary DP and he is alive and well. As well as the visual FX supervisors Dan Curry and Ron Moore

 

No it was not filmed with widescreen in mind.

 

It's worse than than that. You would have crew members on the edge any number of times for practical reasons. It would have been Frakes making faces to mess with Dorn.

 

Sound like they are putting in a great deal of care into this release.

 

They were quite the opposite of keen on keeping the 16:9 frame usable. Again, the monitor was literally taped to cut the image to match what would be seen on TV. NO regard was given to alternative aspect ratios. You just can't do that much less do that on a single camera drama schedule. There is no such "forward thinking" when you are framing your shot at 1:00 AM on a Friday night.

 

I think it "depends" on their original intentions. If they intended it to ONLY be 4x3 and never cared a bit about widescreen then leave it as 4x3, but some stuff Ive read on other sites, mentions that they possibly did simply crop a wider imagine and make it suitable for TV of "the day". Just saying, id not mind widescreen if they had at least considered it and framed for it, and simply compromised the broadcast version into 4x3.

In other words, are we ENTIRELY SURE, that they made it 4x3 on purpose or was it cropped from a wider image, to simply go along with how all tv shows were made at the time?

It may be that the 4x3 image was not their final result, but simply what they used for TV broadcast, as doing a letterbox image during those days was almost unheard of.

 

There seems to be some confusion about the aspect ratio of "full frame" 35mm. As if full frame 35mm is close to 16:9. It's not. Full frame 35mm is natively 1.37:1. Super35 is natively 1.66:1 on the negative but was not used for television before the late 90's (and even then it's still not common, but not unheard of).

Most shows that shoot with 16:9 framing composition in mind are using only 75% of the frame image, with an unused portion on the top and bottom. This is further cropped again to 4:3 for non-HD broadcast. Or they use 3-perf height 35mm (rarer) or just use HD video cameras that shoot at a film frame-rate (this is the most common choice today).

 

I still think 1.66 would be a nice compromise between 1.37 and 1.75.

 

You find us some nice evidence that they shot the shows 16X9 and cropped them, I'll listen. Let's hear these "other sites".

Until then, I'll view the people who advocate for 16X9 "TNG" as apologists...

 

ehh...I could have misread something.....perhaps.....

 

I suspect there will be plenty of compromises made to get this project finished, without adding around "changing the original aspect ratio" to the list.

 

Small correction: there's about 15% more info on all four sides (more if they happened to use a wider Super35mm gate, which is unlikely). It would be a bad idea to crop the top of the picture, because this will affect headroom; instead, they'll chop off some of the lower third -- "cutting them off at the shins," as I said before. That was what was done for Seinfeld.

To be pedantic: note also that TV aspect ratio has been 1.33 for decades. But in reality, the difference between 1.37 and 1.33 is so fractionally tiny as to be insignificant. I generally try to zoom out a skosh more (skosh is a technical term) to provide as much image area as possible, especially with an older TV show or film, provided the resulting composition is still balanced and makes sense.

Note also that for a 16x9 re-composed image, they would probably do a "tilt and scan," digitally tilting up and down when necessary to capture all the important details. That way, if something does happen on the floor, we can tilt down and get that info, then go back to normal framing.

The whole point to this is: we're rapidly getting to a time where younger audiences will turn away from 4x3 images on large screen monitors, because this will make the shows look older. From a purely dollars-and-cents point of view, this is going to create a chasm similar to the problem of old B&W movies and younger audiences. I think there's a way to do 16x9 well and a way to do it badly. Granted, it's a compromise, but I think Paramount is going to have to do it in order to stay competitive and inject new life into the show.

BTW, I think most of the other shows eventually switched to 3-perf 35mm, meaning they were already shot in 16x9 (though only 4x3 may have been initially transferred or broadcast). The Enterprise show was of course shot in HD video, so that's not a problem.

Note also that all the redone VFX for the original Star Trek were redone in 16x9. I know, only because I've seen the master tapes (and was kind of shocked when those effects shots popped up).

 

Yes, I am ENTIRELY sure of it.

 

Do you really thing scads of teens are gonna rush out to buy Blu-rays of "TNG" whatever the AR may be?

It's ridiculous to act like it's okay for a studio to muck with the original presentation of something just so it'll look more "modern" and kids will watch it... :thumbsdn:

 

Wonder what the budget will be to do this. Total guess here, but I'm thinking at least $10 million dollars a season....

 

No. This would be more of a syndication problem. Modern audiences will be inclined to turn past small 4x3 pictures in the center of their big 16x9 monitors, because the pictures will look dated.

The show will appear "newer" if it's 16x9. Good or bad, I think this is the reality of modern times.

My new rough guess is $500K per show, including redone VFX. This is chickenfeed in the grand scheme of things, and that would include an archival master (full ap), a 4x3 2K master, and a 16x9 2K master. From those, you could downconvert to anything.

 

There were seven seasons of "ST-TNG"...your budget is way too optimistic as that would amount to $70 million when the original episodes were way less expensive to produce to begin with!!!

 

I just hope the remade special effects aren't as bad as they were on TOS-R. All the new spaceship textures looked like plastic. Though their landscape mattes are nice. And all the cloudless planets they added were terrible. Planets without atmospheres...

But years have gone by. Skills have improved. Hopefully the new effects will include highly textured spaceship surfaces.

And I hope if they remade the opening credits, they fixed the way that the stars seen through the rings of Saturn (in the season one version) did not move properly compared to the rest of the frame...

 

Yeah, I think Vidiot is right on this. If they don't go widescreen it won't be as commercially viable.

And $500,000 average per episode sounds like a good guess to me. Some with fewer fx might be only a quarter of a mil, but other really complicated ones might be $750,000.

So, for a 26 episode season that's c.$13 million. Which is a lot in one sense, but in another sense it's a bargain. It's less than probably the first five episodes of a new hour long drama would cost, and for TNG there is a sure fire guaranteed market that will pay a premium for it. With a list of c. $130, even with half of that going to the retailers, you can guess that the gross profit will be something like $50 per season for blu-ray. They'll probably sell at least 200,000 sets per season to die hard fans. I mean there are still tens of millions of TNG fans, but conservatively only 200,000 will actually be able and willing to drop the money right at the get go for these. But that's still $10 million in profit. They'll probably make an equal amount from the "remastered" DVDs and new broadcast money. So $20 million in revenue in the next couple of years seems assured. Seems like a profitable and low risk project as these things go.

Compared to gambling the c. $50 m even a modest movie costs these days, $13 m per season seems like a shrewd investment...

 

The only future-proofing they did was to shoot on film.

I wonder if it may be likely that Encounter at Farpoint may have been shot with the consideration that it might be released theatrically overseas? After all, they knew that other science fiction tv show pilots had been released as feature films even though they'd been intended to be on American television -- Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, both.

Although the script for Encounter at Farpoint was pretty weak, so maybe not. "Come see the amazing space jellyfish!" not the most movie-esque story.