For the first time in my upscale journey, I stopped for a bit on Voyager and finally ordered the NTSC DS9 to have a play with that one.
I had read often about how bad the early episodes are in quality, but nothing quite prepared me for how bad the CGI is in the first episode. Additionally, it looks like the scan to digital was much worse early on and somehow, the level of detail retention in up scaling is significantly harder to achieve over the newer episodes.
It feels like I went back to the drawing board - all new scripts, testing, exporting, comparisons and various failed experiments.
I know a few of you are far more interested in DS9, so some examples so far:
This is the opening credits (Season 1). These are a nightmare and I do not know how many variations I went through trying to balance clarity over artificial looks:
This is an extract clip where I had the same problem - retainment of detail, additional clarity but without delving into the plasticity look common with the denoising:
A few things I noticed so far:
- There is no variable framerates in Season 1 so far (15x episodes done). I was anticipating a lot of issues with this based on what I had read, but I am assuming this must have been a later addition to the CGI. There is no 29.97 CGI Content in any of these episodes. At least that makes handling teh framerates simple for these early episodes.
- The CGI is almost impossible to make look very good. Which is interesting as a lot of the later CGI can be upscaled with some good quality.
- Proteus V4 may assist in quality enhancements here once its refined. Some experimentation produced some really good results.
