TOS-R in Widescreen?

[trevanian]

Captain Robert April said:
Well, in case someone brings it up again, here's why they went with new FX instead of remastering the original footage: The original effects, even in standard def, look like crap. They were fine on a 60's era set, but today's sets are higher resolution than those old sets, and a lot of stuff that wasn't visible then show up clear as a bell now, like the garbage mattes around the ships, for instance. Crank the resolution up to high def, and it'll become a laughing stock.

So for a HD remastering, all new effects sequences aren't just a new set of bells and whistles, they're the only thing that would make the entire project even feasible.

And like someone pointed about upthread, the original effects elements probably don't exist anymore, so either way, you're stuck with starting over.

Actually a couple years back they mentioned that the original fx elements were available at Paramount. Maybe they were in the same vault where they found all the music tracks, back in the 80s.

I think the rest of your post is ludicrous. I've seen TOS projected at conventions and the idea that the stuff wouldn't hold up on a modern set is nuts. 16mm film is higher rez than HD, and 35mm is tons higher.

If you recomped the original elements digitally, you'd lose the matte line issue and yet you'd still have the high-contrast bold look of most TOS ship shots, something sadly lacking in most CG tos-r I've come across, and you'd also have the sense of mass in the fly into camera shots, which again hasn't work in the cg stuff, since it looks like you're flying into hanna-barbera land.

You'd probably get more of a 'miniature looks fake' sense on the really close-in original Ent shots (the shots you see later in the series, esp in ELAAN OF TROYIUS as I recall) if transferred to HD, but that feeling is there anyway on regular dvds. But it is a fake that at least has a feeling of being physical, which is my biggest objection to MOST ship cg, since that seems lacking.

And tweaking the fx while leaving the interior sets alone as they were creates even more of a schism; you have a 60s interior with the plywood in schizophrenic juxtaposition with synthetic ship exteriors that don't look like they were created in the same generation, so they don't jive.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Remember the original video release of the Star Wars movies? How they looked kinda dumpy? So much so that Lucas did a rerelease of them "the way they looked in the theatre"? Essentially, they darkened the print, because even with the relatively recent "Return of the Jedi", on a television, the garbage mattes around all those ships in those massive combat scenes, in the first video release, showed up so clearly it was embarassing, whereas projected on the movie screen, they're invisible. Even with the rerelease, those garbage mattes are a problem, but now they're not so glaring.

Same thing with the old Star Trek episodes. Project 'em up on a movie screen, they look fine, but flash 'em on a CRT, and things start showing up that weren' visible before, because of the nature of the respective beasts, namely the way the images are illuminated on a video screen versus a movie screen. Generally, a tv image is illuminated much more brightly than a movie image projected on a screen (especially when you take into account the matter of scale).

Factor in the difference between a tv set made in '65 and on made in '95, specifically brightness and resolution, and it should become even more evident what's going on here. It'll even become obvious why nobody worried about that tombstone in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" reading "JAMES R. KIRK", because nobody could read it all that clearly in the first place.

As for whether or not the original effects elements are still around, keep in mind that back in those days, the blue was removed chemically, so unless there's a copy of the ship footage with the bluescreen still intact, those shots may very well be unusable.