Star Trek TOS - Remastered in High Definition

Not sure if this is entirely relevant to this forum, but it's a presentational topic in a way!

The news has been around for ages, but finally tomorrow they're syndicating the first episodes of the new re-mastered Star Trek. Re-transferred completely from the original 35mm in HD, the pictures i've seen look astounding. They're also replacing the visual effects/model shots to an extent too. Although i'm not a fan of those, mainly because they look like cheap CGI.

There's a Trailer for it here:

http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/news/article/25055.html

Also a trailer for the first episode to be shown, with the HD transfers:

http://www.startrek.com/startrek/videoview?id=26115&episodeid=68678&count=-1','videopopup','width=350,height=400')

Even with the tiny movie file you can see the difference.

What do we think? Is this necessary? Which channel is likely to pick it up over here?

I wonder if British TV shows, famous ones for examples might have this treatment. I know most old famous shows are shot on VideoTape mostly, so it would be impossible to make properly decent HD transfers, but i'm sure we'll see new transfers of some things! Perhaps Bergerac or The Sweeney, Minder even. Shows made entirely on film. When HD DVD comes out, they've got to make their money somehow. What better way to do it than HD transfers of old cult shows!

what exactly is star trek TOS? I've heard of TNG, and DSN but not TOS

TOS stands for The Original Series.

Only if the broadcaster has money to spend, will you get the new transfers.

After all the work the Dr Who Restoration Team did on the classic 63 to 89 series, Uk Gold never updated their tapes anyway!

How on earth can you make something like that "high def" the original can't of been that good. The repeats on BBC Two recently show their age, almost looking like VHS.

If the source is poor you really can't upmix it. It's like 24, where a picture taken on a mobile phone can be "enhanced" to show a full phone number on a tiny scrap of paper on the corner of the photo, it simply cannot happen. How then can something like star trek be made into high def?

1. It's "can't have", not "can't of". Get some English lessons. Anyone who saw my recent thread will know how much this particular misuse of English pisses me off.

2. Yes you can. It's called going back and remastering the original 35mm film materials. It's not like modern programmes which are edited on video, even the ones that were shot on film.

I'm unsure of the exact maximum resolution, but the 35mm film used on TOS certainly lends itself to high-def transfer.

Took you 6 times to get that right did it?

It's going to be one of the most confusing ironies in the coming few years as large numbers of elderly programmes are transferred to HD when much newer series are left in standard definition, being recorded on videotape.

Thanks to the use of totally obsolete, proprietary JavaScript code, the video pages on StarTrek.com cannot be viewed.

They're using document.all which is specific to IE4+, and document.layers which is specific to Netscape 4.x !

The people responsible at CBS/Paramount should hang their heads in outright shame.

I found turning off my firewall helped. It then worked in Firefox with Norton turned off. But they could of made it with a flash player or something more user friendly.

Are you highlighting this because you think it's correct, or are you just doing it to piss people off? If it's the former, I second the calls for compulsory English lessons.