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Willy @Kypetzl3/17/2023, 4:47 AM

Pendell @pendell

Pendell @pendell3/17/2023, 4:44 AM

probably overly fascinated to discover TNG Season 2 is not QUITE 4:3

at least for the blu-ray, anyways. Handbrake can automatically crop black bars off an image, and with TNG Season 1 this behaved exactly how one would expect, turning a 16:9 1920x1080 image into a 4:3 1440x1080 image. But now, here I am about to begin encoding Season 2, and when I look at the automatic crop, it's determined the image is slightly wider, in exactly the same way, for every episode in the season. I've double-checked, and Handbrake's detection is on-point. All of Season 2 is actually 1456x1080. An extra 8 pixels on either side of the frame. If my calculations are correct, that makes it 4.04:3 instead of 4:3, or in another term, 1.35:1 instead of 1.33:1.

Bizarre. I have to wonder if the people working on the blu-ray simply stretched the image a little, or if their scan actually includes slightly more visual information than previous releases and broadcasts did. I'm also curious to see if this trend continues into Season 3, or if this was a one-time thing.

#star trek #star trek tng #video encoding #aspect ratio

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in reply to @pendell's post:

Millennium @milliesquilly3/17/2023, 6:42 AM

The restoration of season 2 was, from memory, somewhat controversially outsourced to a third party instead of being done in-house at CBS. So I would suspect it of being a one-time thing.

From memory, the CGI planets also look less detailed, and possibly there's a few points where things crop in funny points on edges (e.g. the spaceship layer disappears slightly before the starfield layer for example (which may suggest that it's got slightly more visual information instead of being stretched)).

Pendell @pendell3/17/2023, 7:03 AM

Bizarre! I also noticed there was less visible grain. I had assumed they switched to a finer film stock between seasons, but if what you say is true, it's probably that the third party restoration crew applied more denoising than CBS would have.

Millennium @milliesquilly3/17/2023, 8:37 AM

The original plan was apparently to alternate between inhouse and outsourced each season to reduce costs or get things done faster or some such, but the backlash from season 2 led CBS to bring everything in house and spend way more than they were going to recoup on disc sales which may be why they decided DS9 wasn't cost-effective tbh

Pendell @pendell3/23/2023, 2:08 AM

Well, I think the main reason for deciding DS9/VOY wasn't going to happen was a combination of "not nearly as popular as TNG" and also that all of both those show's effects aren't done with models shot on film that you can rescan in HD and recomposite, but rather all CGI renders done at 480i to videotape. Your only options would be to either upscale the 480 source (not very good), or redo all of the CG (extremely expensive) and either one would upset a large amount of fans.

Millennium @milliesquilly3/23/2023, 3:07 AM

I think DS9 is at least partially models - I think the only shot of the station that's CGI is the final one in the series - but yeah lots of CGI in those fleet battles and such. Apparently the CGI source files do exist and could be rerendered, they did this for some shots in the documentary What We Left Begin (which I extremely recommend by the way)

Pendell @pendell3/23/2023, 3:12 AM

Oh, I didn't realize those shots had been rerendered from the original source, I had heard they were recreated from scratch. :P

My only experience so far has been tinkering with deinterlacing settings on the pilot episode of DS9. Besides the stuff used from TNG, it appeared to be entirely CG to my eyes, and ran at 30fps, as opposed to all the film-shot stuff that ran at 24fps. Maybe that changes later.