I never thought this day would come.
See, back in the heady early days of the high definition era, I enjoyed showing off my knowledge by telling my friends that we would see “Star Trek” in HD but we’d never see “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Why? Because the former was filmed, edited and assembled entirely on film, and film is a high definition medium. But the latter was filmed… then edited, composited, and mastered on standard def videotape.
What I didn’t bargain on — and who would have? — is that Paramount has decided that there’s enough potential revenue in HD now to give it a go. And this means an unprecedented, complete recreation of seven years and 178 episodes, from the ground up.
In order to create an HD version, they’ve got to go all the way back to a point where all the elements are in high def — that means back to the original film masters, before the episodes were edited together and before the effects and music were added. It means cleaning up that film, re-compositing all the effects shots, re-dubbing in multichannel sound, recreating titles and captions. In short, they’re producing the series all over again except for the actual filming part.
That’s a huge leap of faith from Paramount that they can sell a lot of Blu-Ray discs.
