CBS rebuilt every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation from its original film. But disappointing sales left Deep Space Nine and Voyager in standard definition.
Star Trek turned 60 on September 8, and Paramount marked the date with restored 4K screenings of classic films in more than 750 US theaters. One of the franchise’s best restorations, though, Star Trek: The Next Generation, is older, and was made for a much smaller screen. We were reminded of it when revisiting old episodes to mark the sad death of Sir Patrick Stewart last week.
CBS announced its Blu-ray remaster of The Next Generation, starring Sir Patrick as Captain Picard, in September 2011, on the show’s 24th anniversary. Over a decade later, it remains one of the benchmarks for restoring a television series that was shot on film but finished on video.
We covered this a decade ago in a piece written for Star Trek’s 50th anniversary. The show was shot on 35mm film with Panavision cameras and lenses, but its edits and effects were done on standard-definition videotape, which held back the quality of the broadcast version. The restoration went back to the original film and audio elements, scanned them, and rebuilt each episode as originally broadcast. The result was a 1080p picture with DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 sound.
Every episode had to be reconstructed from the original film, with the broadcast video edits as a guide. That meant finding and scanning each take, plus every effects element layered on top of it, from the model passes to the lights and the star field.
Problem one is the vfx. Both shows moved to CGI partway through, with the elements spread across several effects houses and some possibly lost entirely. And those that remained would be SD shots, meaning that the majority of the vfx would have to be rebuilt from scratch.
Problem two is that the disc sales of the TNG remasters did not match projections, which he put down to the high price of the early seasons at close to $120 a set and the shift to streaming. And if those economics were a problem in 2017, you can bet they’re even less attractive now. Skydance, which owns Paramount and with it the current rights to Star Trek, completed its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery on October 6 and carries roughly $80 billion in debt.
A decade on, the picture has barely moved. The Original Series films were remastered in 4K in 2021 and 2022, and the four Next Generation films followed in April 2023. Neither DS9 nor Voyager yet has an official HD release at the time of writing. Paramount’s 60th anniversary Original Series Blu-ray set contains no new 4K remaster of the episodes.
Fans have not waited. Billy Reichard’s AI-upscaled clips of Voyager and DS9 drew wide coverage when they were first released six years ago. His new ones are even better as the latest clip of Star Trek Voyager S02E18 Death Wish shows.
And the 2018 documentary What We Left Behind remastered 30 minutes of DS9 from the original negatives with CBS Digital, in an attempt to make the case for the whole show. Even if Paramount is skint, you would think that a combination of a long-tail Trek fanbase reachable easily via a global streaming service and the improvement in AI tools, especially when it comes to upscaling even those tricky vfx shots, might change the equations the accounts department is looking at.
We touched on the DS9 and Voyager issue in a 2020 article titled prosaically This is why you might never see your favourite TV shows remastered, and one of the comments gave us possibly the most elegant solution to the problem we’ve come across.
“Actually, remastering Deep Space Nine would be a simple process. Just put it into the transporter buffer, have the main computer reconfigure all the clips as necessary, and then beam the processed video directly to Ops,” wrote commenter Ferris Akel III. Sounds like a plan.