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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

I'll definitely watch then, thank you. As a sidenote, I think that the TNG I watched has remastered CGI. I remember remarking how good the CGI looked for the 90s, and realized/heard later than they redid all the CGI. The new CGI was definitely not out of place, if not fairly good, but I'm not entirely sure that what I'm saying is true. Just mentioning it in case you wanted to look into it.

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I saw the originals when they were first broadcast, and have since seen the remasters. The latter definitely improve on the look of the series, but incrementally, and they also suffer from some of the same problem that led the makers of Generations to underlight scenes on, and finally blow up, the Enterprise-D: while TNG's space effects were on par with movies of their time, its sets and props were decidedly not, having been designed with the understanding that SD TV quality would hide a lot of imperfections that would be visible otherwise. Beside that, the pillarboxing necessary to render 4:3 content on a 16:9 display feels really obtrusive these days, or so at least I've come to find it since 16:9 became the standard.

The thing about B5 is that few of its space scenes involve much compositing, since they were all CGI from the start and compositing was hard back then. For that reason, I think a space-effects redo would be unusually feasible for that show, albeit still too expensive for anyone to actually do one.

A harder, if smaller, remastering issue would be that they shot practical effects on video and special effects on film, largely due to that being the cheapest option for both. In standard definition you can't really see the difference, but watching the show today you definitely do.

TMK very little of its effects are strictly new: almost all are digitally re-composited, color-corrected and slightly enhanced high-resolution scans of the original film footage (which used physical models and optical effects), since they were still available. IIRC, planets - as seen from space - are a notable exception (and better for it). It was a major remastering process, with beautiful results. (Although major, remastering cost less (for the whole series) than a single episode of the (IMO) abomination called "Discovery".)

Sadly, such an approach is impossible for the majority parts of the latter series (DS9, VOY) since their effects were mostly CGI, and rendered directly to standard definition video. Further more, many of the 3D models and scenes have been lost, so it would probably require a total effects re-do from scratch (on top of film stock scans), which is "a very costly proposition with questionable (financial) returns".

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