Many Star Trek fans have been anticipationg the release of the Original Series on high-definition DVD’s, with Season 1 already having seen a release. Well, according to Format War Central Season 2’s release has fallen victim to Toshiba’s pulling of support from the HD-DVD format. Toshiba had been paying for Paramount’s encoding of the episodes, under the condition that Paramount use Toshiba’s proprietary AVC encoder. According to a source, Toshiba has quit work on transferring the show to HD-DVD.
Owners of the Season 1 HD-DVD release now own an orphaned title. Paramount, which released Blu-Ray titles until August, 2007, has yet to announce whether they will return to the Blu-Ray camp. If they do release the Star Trek episodes on Blu-Ray, expect delays, as the episodes will need to be re-encoded, likely with internal financing from Paramount.
I heard about this on a Trek board. As someone who can just about afford the DVD box sets, its a big “meh” for me at least, shame for the completists though.
TOS generally looks like ass and couldn’t possibly benefit from HD anyway, unless they redo all the effects and digitally smooth out all of Shatner’s zits and whatnot. And then what do you have? Not Star Trek. But some digitally re-processed, hermetically sealed cheez-whiz of a show. And TOS is plenty cheesy already.
Now, if they decided to release DS9 on Blu-Ray, I am so there.
I saw TOS’ The Menageria re-mastered for HD in the theater a few months ago, and I have to say it looked fantastic. Not my favorite ST series, but friedo, you’d be surprised at how much improved it looked. Plus, they re-did a lot of the f/x - it looked like all the space scenes were redone in CG. The interior scenes had better focus and brigher color. It really looked incredible.
And I know it puts me firmly in the curmudgeon camp, but if I wanted updated special effects I’d watch a modern show. I think that while digitally fixing up old tapes to restore them to ‘new’ quality is a great thing to do, ‘redoing’ old shows and movies is one of the worst things to happen to the medium since reality TV. I don’t need my old programs to look like they were done in the 21st century.
Since the original series was filmed on ye-olde-skool fylme (wiki: “All live action footage was scanned in high definition from its first generation 35 mm film elements”) I could see a huge benefit for HD remastering.
I wouldn’t mind updated effects, as long as the DVDs also bundled the original versions as well.
Since this thread has turned into a survey rather than a discussion, I’ll add my vote to Skammer’s. The Menagerie was glorious in the theater and I was determined to buy the new box set when it came out - until I saw the price. :eek: I am a diehard fan and saw TOS when it was first run on TV. The updating they did was subtle and very sensitive to the original series. I regret that the project has now been cancelled.
From the one episode of the remastered series that I’ve seen, the new SFX takes nothing away from the show. Not strictly true actually, one or two lines are snipped in places, but the spirit remains.
But when you say the project has been cancelled, do you mean the HD releases or the remastering, AFAIK that continues.
The remastering continues. That’s not threatened by Toshiba’s drop of support for HD-DVD. They were only bankrolling Paramount’s transfer of the remastered episodes to HD-DVD discs as part of Paramount’s agreement with them to distribute HD-DVD exclusively. Paramount’s agreement with Toshiba, which started in August 2007, is only in effect for eighteen months, and Paramount probably has an escape clause in their contract in the case of HD-DVD’s non viability. They still distribute releases of Steven Spielberg-produced films on Blu-Ray, and I’m sure they’ll make a further commitment to Blu-Ray soon. It’s likely the remastered episodes will see a full Blu-Ray release.
As for lines being snipped from episodes, that’s only for the television broadcasts, so the episodes will fit within an hour, including commercials. The episodes will not be cut on the home video releases.
