Star Trek

I think they were all on reels. The DS9 doc a couple of years back (after than blog post) had 4k hdr widescreen rescans of select scenes for the campaign bonus on kickstarter. Truly amazing. They also had the CGI files to rerender some scenes like Sacrifice of Angels battles.

I might do one full episode as a test, I have another big project I need to finish first before I start another long term project.

Good news is, sound quality on LD is excellent, 2ch 16 bit 44100hz PCM with Dolby Surround.

Yes sir, instead of pits and lands being 1's and 0's on the disc, they are variable length and distance apart which allows for an analog RF signal to be stored on the disc.

Yep, like a record, but with freakin lasers!

They are 480i. But the difference may be that DS9 and Voyager were ~~shot and~~ stored on tape. The laserdisc was sourced from those tapes much earlier so it's probably a higher quality transfer than the DVDs which came later. Looking on memory alpha the first laser disc releases were about a decade before they made it to DVD. The image quality may be better on laserdisc.

LaserDisc stores the video signal in an entirely analog format on the disc, similar to a vinyl record but using lasers. In theory, under good conditions, the input signal is almost entirely reproduceable on playback (minus some degradation in the form of noise and dropouts).

The end viewing result should be something very close to the master tape that was used to make the LD discs, which in this case should be the same tapes used to broadcast the show on TV.

DVD uses the same resolution and video format as LD but digitized, so it's pretty evenly matched and DVD has better numbers on paper, but where it fails is its use of lossy compression (MPEG2) to fit all that data onto a disc which visibly degrades the image quality quite a bit. This issue is compounded because they chose to jam multiple episodes onto a single 4.7gb disc plus various extras and bullshit resulting in even lower video quality.

If only Paramount would get off it's ass and make a BluRay release...

It goes something like this, capture to disk -> decode rf file to video and audio streams with ld-decode -> deinterlace and remove noise with Hybrid/Vapoursynth -> load into Topaz to boost res to 1620x1080 with proteus AI -> final editing, tweaking, and repairs with Premiere -> final encode to HEVC with Hybrid.

Note: For uploading to YT I doubled the resolution again to juice more bitrate out of their encoder. This doesn't really improve the quality for normal files, so 1080p will probably be the max for regular files. If you try to go beyond that with topaz it starts 'creating' things to fill the pixels with and it looks artificial..

Way better than what you can stream (so are the DVDs though), if you watch these discs directly on a retro Trinitron CRT or Plasma TV (I use a Plasma TV) with a good 3d comb filter, they look absolutely perfect, no exaggeration.

But, due to analog signal inputs being afterthought in modern LCD TVs, If you plug the player directly into a modern LCD TV it's going to look like noisy, muddy, poop, unless you have an expensive video processor ($$$$). Which is why I don't suggest anyone go down this rabbit hole, except for hardcore retro enthusiasts.

There's also the problem of the final 2 seasons being missing due to LaserDisc production being stopped.