Original Trek To Receive New CG Effects for HDTV and DVD

[Ian]

wtf.. is George Lucas working over there or something?

http://www.trektoday.com/news/280806_04.shtml

The original Star Trek is being remastered for future high defintion television syndication as well as eventual release on HD-DVD with new high-definition CG effects.

The Digital Bits reported the story in its Rumor Mill column, which reported previously that CBS Video, which now owns the Star Trek DVDs, was planning to retransfer the original series from film to HD-DVD. All of the Star Trek feature films will be rereleased for HD release as well.

Bill Hunt noted that he learned from industry sources that CBS is redoing many of the original series special effects using new CG techniques. "Specifically, they're re-doing all of the spaceship shots," he wrote. "This to me is a very exciting idea...in principle. As anyone who saw the Mirror Universe episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise will tell you, the old TOS ships look awfully damn good in new CG."

[Morpheus]

Not really new news for me. I remember reading something a few years ago about some company that wanted to take the original Star Trek series and redo all of the special effects. They stated that they had chosen the "Doomsday Machine" episode and were redoing that as a test. If it went well and Paramount liked it, they could go ahead and do the rest of the series. This is someone else doing it though.

It would be interesting to see. As the reviewer mentioned, the 2-part Star Trek: Enterprise episode set in the Mirror, Mirror universe was awesome. They recreated the old sets (and a few new ones) as well as the costumes and props (the communicator and type 2 phaser). This went beyond what they did with the Deep Space Nine episode "Trials and Tribulations" (I think that was what it was called).

I would hate it if they reframed the video from 4x3 to 16x9. Of course the biggest draw back would by cost. I just spent all that money buying all of the movies (The Collector's edtions) as well as all the season box sets for all of the Trek shows (I haven't watched any of it yet) and now they're coming out with new editions, so you have to buy everything all over again.

The only 2 Star Trek videos left that haven't been released are the Star Trek: The Animated series (2 seasons) (which I'm not going to get) and the original pilot, "The Cage" with Jeffery Hunter (which I want). With 2006 being Star Trek's 40th anniversary, I was hoping they would release The Cage as one of the Collector's editions like the rest of the movies.

I really hate it that Paramount is ripping off the consumers. Each of the Star Trek season box sets were twice as expensive as other tv shows box sets. Instead of $55 to $60 CAD as everyone else was charging for a season box set (some were lower at about $40 - $45 CAD), Paramount was charging $119 CAD! Then after all the Trek shows were released, Paramount tried to milk Star Trek fans for more money by releasing "theme box sets", such as a Kirk set, a Picard set, a borg set, and I think the last one was a "time travel" set. (Of course Fox is also doing this with the X-Files).