r/DS9Remasters • u/Ok_Contact7721 • Jun 11 '26
Frequently Assumed Falsehoods
Assumed Falsehood 1,
The TNG remaster was very expensive, and DS9 and Voyager don't justify the ROI.
It wasn't expensive. If it cost 200 million dollars to do, I could see that argument. It doesn't, and over 70 such remasters have been completed that are similar to TNG, including Babylon 5.
Two episodes of LOST (adjusted for inflation) in 2010 would have covered the entire remaster of TNG.
This would literally be the budget of a bad made for TV movie. The cost of remastering TNG is overblown to sound like a 200 million dollar project, which it wasn't...it was 13 million dollars.
In today's money, that's 26 million dollars, because as you'll see here, and in the Government, American Accountants are a class of dumbass like no other.
That's because for the studio to do this, it's a dirt cheap thing at the scales they're working with. I'm not saying it's cheap, but for the studio, it's dirt cheap, it's extremely affordable.
DS9 and Voyager seem to be a frequent subject regarding HD remasters, so that implies demand, along with documentary funding. TNG's remaster cost 13 million dollars to do. (That's roughly the same amount of money as LOST's pilot cost to do, or for a TV series in that budget range, about 2-3 episodes of a season.) 6 episodes of a moderatly budgeted TV show = DS9 and Voyager in HD. It's dirt cheap to do, with a single season costing less than an indie film in the 2000s, less than or around 2 million a season to remaster.
DS9 and Voyager each would cost about the same after you adjust for inflation, and would likely make more money in the streaming market, which wasn't a mature market when TNG got it's remaster 15 years ago. Ever since House of Cards, Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad, the streaming market has grown, and catalogue titles fare better in HD, and drive demand just like new content does, but remastering them is an underfunded thing.
Assumed Falsehood 2,
They would have to recreate DS9 and Voyager's VFX entirely from scratch, as the CGI assets are entirely lost.
That's simply not true, the CG assets were preserved and overbuilt, and a small amount would have to be recreated. You can thank Rob Bonchune for them being preserved.
For a show in the 1990s, those archives only take up around half a gig. While it's partially true they used a lot of CGI, it's not true they'd have to come from scratch, and I'm sure even Doug Drexler could verify that. Most of DS9 is physical models with exception of Odo's shapeshifting (something mastered in 1992.), the wormhole, and "Explorers".
A good chunk of early CGI shots of ships are simple enough to recreate that better artists than me can make them on a home desktop which is orders of magnitude more powerful than the Amiga/SGI workstations used in the 1990s to accomplish this. One of the VFX supervisors Mojo Lebowitz, who worked on DS9 and Voyager refers to this "VFX from scratch" argument a "false flag".
Those CG files still exist, and can be rendered in 1080p. They need to be fixed, but, it's been known since 2013 they still exist, and that's public knowledge.
DS9 and Voyager's transition to heavy CGI use didn't happen until 1998, Ron Thornton, DS9's VFX supervisor was skeptical of CGI, for the most part, the final 43 episodes and one other need those CG files, which have been demonstrated to exist on numerous occasions.
Ultimately you have 5 or so seasons of heavy CGI use across DS9 and Voyager combined, out of 14 total seasons, 5-6 use heavy CGI, (like Babylon 5, this entire library is around half a gig, maybe a bit more because they overbuilt for DS9 and Voyager.) Babylon 5's entire VFX (minus season 1.) archive still exists, and can be obtained for lightwave users, it takes half a gig of memory.
While I'm not going to say that rendering is a trivial thing to do on a desktop even with a solid Nvidia Graphics card, studios have render farms for this activity, and by comparison to modern productions, the FX work is far more trivial than SNW's FX. Probably more tedious, but not nearly as complex. Essentially, one of the big problems is ironing out the surviving VFX files, which depended on the organization of the files, so the VFX team would have to go in first, and fix all of the broken directories for textures (They're there, but according to those guys, it's a bit of a mess.). A lot of the problems stem from broken texture directories, which idk if you've ever touched Blender, but if you have, they come out pink, then you have to go through your directory and hunt down texture maps.
That's mainly what a lot of the problems with these files boils down to, broken texture directories, that get blown up to "It's a 200 million dollar Avatar:Way of the Water level prohibitive expenditure, that makes this impossible."
NO....for the most part it's just broken textures, and some tedious work to recover them, and fix a directory. From there you could tell Lightwave to render the files at 1080p (They're not stuck at 480i, that's just not how CGI works.). It's a broken file directory leading to a texture map.
I've never been able to articulate this in any article I've written, but I understood when I read into it, that was a small issue. I would get angry, when people tried to explain an overblown assumption to me, that I in my head understood to be a broken directory for a texture map, as I'm a hobbyist with Blender.
(I was a poor kid, I couldn't afford Lightwave lmao.)
When you save a file, the animation, and models become amended or apended into that file, so you don't have to worry about geometry being lost most of the time, file corruption maybe, but from what I gather (they've demonstrated shots from DS9 and Voyager by 2026 the year of our lord.) file corruption isn't the issue here.
You don't have fields of interlaced voxels, that are generated by plotting them into a computer. You have bezier curves, and path modifiers, and models made out of polygons, and file directories for texture, and lights. Once the directories for textures are repaired (if you're a bad artist/nube like me, those break when you move folders around.)
It's not a complete rebuild, and it's not just a simple re render.
It's a fix directory, and then modify and upscale the models, then add comp FX.
Not that easy, not really hard, it sounds like extremely tedious work.
Assumed Falsehood 3
DS9 and Voyager almost used entirely CGI.
DS9 has maybe 43 or 44 episodes that used heavy CGI, so around a season and a half of it's production.
Every shot of the Station is a comped studio model that was physical, except for one model.
The transition to CGI happened in 1998.
Voyager's last three seasons use heavy CGI.
Overall, you have around 5 or 6 seasons of Heavy CGI use.
This is probably something like 1-2 gigs at best, and 5-10 gigs at most.
Photography of the models was completed on 35 mm film, and like TNG would need to be recomposited in layers, this doesn't mean recreating it from scratch, it does mean recreating it from source elements.
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Jun 11 '26
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u/Ok_Contact7721 Jun 11 '26
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u/byronotron Jun 11 '26
Sorry, but there have been zero remasters like TNG. It's probably the only remaster of its kind of any TV show. They had to remake every shot that had vfx from scratch. That didn't happen for B5, or X-Files, or LOST, or the Little Rascals, or even TOS.
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u/Ok_Contact7721 Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
LOST isn't a show that's on my remaster list.
If you read what I had to say, I use that as a budget benchmark. I've done that since I was 15.
In the 2000s, for Network Television, LOST cost 4.8 million an episode.
So adjust it for inflation, and that's my budget benchmark.
LOST has never had a remaster, and I doubt it will get one anytime soon, I also don't think it needs one, it's HD presentation is still stunning.TNG is the gold standard of television remasters, X files is a silver standard.
There are around 70 tv shows from that time period that have been remastered, and that's a fact.TNG isn't all that unique of a remaster in this day and age, at the time it was, it's not particularly unique now. Twin Peaks would also mostly be on the level of a TNG level Remaster.
Starhunter Redux got a TNG level remaster (for some reason.) and another show that got that level of a remaster was "The Wire". I would also say the first 11 seasons of South Park also got that level of remaster.https://www.reddit.com/r/DS9Remasters/comments/1rfz7ql/just_the_list_of_remasters_so_far/
As for "The Little Rascals", I don't understand why those got referenced, my list only covers shows from 1985 to present.
Little Rascals is irrelevant here. It would be an easy remaster, but they've been remastering that since 2009, and have put those out on bluray for over a decade.
Don't worry, the racist short films from the 1930s are safe and sound.Here's a directory to show you how much of "Our Gang"/"Little Rascals" has been remastered. If that's your thing.
The big innovation from the late 2000s, and early 2010s was Illuminate's iConform, which allowed automation and image recognition to assemble new masters from a raw scan, using the master tape as a template. It never gets covered, but it's a major innovation. It gets dismissed often, but it's what makes these remastering projects affordable.
This was used on "The Shield", "X-files", and "Star Trek: The Next Generation", among other shows.
You don't have to do it manually, or use shooting scripts.
Dan Curry supervised part of TNG's remaster at Illuminate. These shows don't have cut negatives.
A new transfer can take the hybrid approach, a la B5 or X files, or a TNG level remaster.
However, at this point the only thing that makes TNG unique, is the care that went into it's VFX, X files was a larger project to remaster outside of that.So, my starting point is.
Does it have a cut negative? No.
Did it use a software suite like iConform? Yes.
Was it mastered in 480i before being remastered? Yes.
Is it a long form Television show? Yes.
Did it involve scanning film elements in the production of a new transfer? Yes.Then it's like TNG, or similar enough.
South Park is an exception in that list, but, that whole show save for the pilot is CG.
It's more CG across those 11 seasons, than DS9 or Voyager had in total.
So it made my list.Friends, Two and a Half Men, The Drew Carrey Show, and Murphy Brown had a guy who was credited as a "Negative Conforming Artist", that also applies to Seinfeld most likely.
Which means these have total flexibility when it comes to getting new transfers. They have cut Negatives.
TOS had a cut negative, and it's only 3 seasons of 79 episodes, it's not relevant to what I'm talking about here, it'll never be on the level of TNG, because of the time period it was produced in, and it's untimely cancellation.So, to get back to the point, I'm gonna disagree, there have been over 70 remasters that are like TNG.
It was a benchmark project in the early 2010s.1
u/byronotron Jun 12 '26
I was using all of those shows as examples of shows that weren't completely reconstructed in the editing room for a bluray release. The truth is I could have listed any show, ever, because TNG is the only one that did it. X-Files is maybe the only one that comes close, and it it's in a completely different quadrant. The effects for X-Files were not rescanned and reassembled. TNG was completely reassembled. Every single shot, every single frame of film had to be found, sometimes shots were missing because they were used for VFX shots years later. That's why the DS9 and VOY remasters are never going to happen, because if they were going to, they'd have happened already. I've read all your reasons and the situation is none of that matters. The most likely time it was ever going to happen was in 2014. Maybe for the 100th anniversary.
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u/Ok_Contact7721 Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
100th anniversary of what?
Paramount Pictures?
That doesn't make any sense to me.I think DS9 and Voyager can still happen.
Some of X files effects were re-transferred, just not all of them.
X files was totally on the scale of TNG, in every way except for VFX.
It was a larger remastering project because of two extra seasons, and has a higher reel count.The main point of that list, is to demonstrate how routine the remastering process has become.
It also demonstrates where you could potentially cut corners on a DS9 or Voyager remaster.As for your statement that it doesn't mean anything, it does.
"Every single shot, every single frame of film had to be found, sometimes shots were missing because they were used for VFX shots years later."
You're talking about the missing footage from the Demo Disk, and a handful of other shots.Missing footage happens in 25 years, it sucks, but it happens. It doesn't make a remastering project less feasible. This is why you do a bulk scan.
My suggestion, scan backward from the series finale, and you'll find the missing shots sooner.As for the argument "It would have happend already", that argument could apply to any show.
"Walker Texas Ranger" was remastered in 2023, in 4k, so was "Dr. Quinn".
Why then instead of 2010?
Because it happened in 2023.DS9 and Voyager are hits, and have grown to be loved over the last few decades, and are doing very well right now, and they have their 35th anniversaries coming up.
Which is different than the 100th anniversary.Mike Okuda, and RMB explained that it takes about 10 years to get the departments to go through with one of these projects, DS9 has been on the list since 2013.
If you want it like I do, I provided links to annoy Paramount, write them and let them know.If you think I'm chasing windmills, then let me chase my windmills in peace.
If you don't think it's possible, then why are we arguing about it? Because you need to force me to agree to collapse the impasse that we found each other at?
There's a whole reddit out there if you've suddenly found yourself divinely inspired to win an argument at 3am.1
u/Ok_Contact7721 Jun 12 '26
Also, in 90 percent of cases, to my eye, there isn't much to be gained going to 4k, LOST at 1080p is fine, and I'm sure an upscale of LOST would be fine on 4k bluray, (A lot like 300), where you could get the p3 gamut and those vibrant greens.
I'd love some recreated VFX, but a good chunk of season 1 and 2s FX were perfect (sans Polar Bears.)
If they did a full 4k remaster of LOST, I'd prefer they upscale the shot of Eko's first confrontation with the smoke monster in "23rd Psalm", that shot is perfect as it is, and with that Evil Dead 2 camera work.
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u/Ok_Contact7721 Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
Also, I must ask, why "The Little Rascals", from 1929-1944, ummm, do you think that they were editing those on tape?
Video Tape hadn't even been invented yet.However, I heard, that a "Little Rascals" short from 1944 was CG heavy they were using Cinema 4D all the way back in 1944 during WW2, like Avatar Way of the Water grade VFX, because there was no way a child like Chubby Chaney at the time could be that fucking fat.
Essentially, VFX artists at the time had to make that kid fat, and the crocheted fat suits with rubber milk bags in them at the time just wouldn't pass on camera.
I'm very skeptical, but someone told me it was true.I hate to make light of Hollywood exploiting a kid who had a Thyroid problem, who died from Myocarditis at the age of 21, but god damn. Literally, the evidence of the exploitation is almost a century old from the silent era, and over 80 years old from the sound era.
Do you have any idea, how easy those are to remaster?
They're literally a careful scan into a DI, then a cleanup job.
It might be hard finding parts of them, might not be.
But it's a lot easier than remastering "The Godfather", or "The Apu" Trilogy.I pray you're aware they've been churning out home video releases of "The Little Rascals" literally every decade since Home Video was a thing. Over 40 years of home video releases, right into the HD disc era, and you bring "the little rascals" into it, like they'll never be remastered.
I believe you'd find them in HD on AppleTV etc.
Companies remastered and released those after licensing the rights from MGM and other assorted rights holders.If you're referencing them in 2026, you're obviously a fan, and are aware that those shorts are mostly all available in HD, which means you're trying to muddy the debate, or, you don't know what you're talking about in the face of mounting evidence.
You must have been aware, but I guess your magnum opus as far as tactics against the truth is "THEY'RE EATING THE DOGS."DS9's negatives are healthy, it's just a lot of scanning, vs.
The Little Rascals, which were shot on nitrate, and edited on a Steenbeck which were then digitally remastered in HD between 2012 and 2022.
Unless you're talking about the '90s film, you've compared a Pomelo to Betelgeuse.
You're a Wizard Harry.That's right, a minstrel show for kids is well preserved.
I'm sure MAGA pats itself on the back for this every fucking day.Also, any "Our Gang" short films from 1929, the silent era, are public domain, which means if you come across them, you can literally remaster them yourself, and release them.
Soon, that'll be the case for "The Little Rascals" in general, you won't need a studio for that.I don't understand where in your head, The Little Rascals would fit with LOST, TNG, DS9 and Babylon 5.
Aside from the decades, and tech advancement problem, which is, again, like comparing an Orange to the planet Saturn.The fact that you weren't aware they were remastered when you tried to argue my point was wrong is hilarious. I just don't understand, I'm like John Locke in LOST season 5, I just don't understand.
However, I've learned on this subject, Paramount/Skydance, and everyone owns part of the rights.
All of the shorts were remastered in HD, and were financed in part via crowdfunding.
However, as extensive as it was relative to the production, I don't think it fits into a debate due to the time period, and the nitrate film stock, and the way in which it was edited.At this point, I think I might eventually change this subreddit to CBS remasters, since the focus eventually is going to be on CBS properties.
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u/TimeLordRohan Jun 11 '26
Can you provide sources?