Why Deep Space Nine and Voyager May Never Get the HD Remaster They Deserve   ◆

Even though I’m not a huge Star Trek fan, I loved Deep Space Nine and mostly enjoyed Voyager. This interview with Robert Meyer Burnett, who was deeply involved in The Next Generation and Enterprise Blu-Ray sets
reads like a detective novel, and caused me much stress.

Unlike TNG, which shot both all of their live-action and all of their model photography on 35mm film, which made scanning the original elements possible, both DS9 and Voyager made extensive use of CGI for their visual effects, especially in the later seasons. Those visual effects were rendered in standard NTSC resolution, with a maximum of 525 scan lines of resolution per second, split between two interlaced video fields of 262.5 scan lines running at 60 fields per second. So, the original resolution remains far, far below what audiences used to today’s HD, and now UHD resolutions, are accustomed to. These VFX could be upscaled 5x, but they’d have no detail. The Starship Defiant would look like a fuzzy, grey blob.

The bottom line, kids: work at the highest resolution you can, for as long as you can. And keep your originals.