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Blu-ray Review Star Trek: The Next Generation Season One Blu-ray Review (1 Viewer)

Kevin EK

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This is true. I've seen some of them, and actually still have a few of the LCARS stickers. There were some fairly good ones in there.

One thing you'll never see was found on a primary Engineering panel on Voyager. One button read "CONFUSION SUSTAIN", and another read 'ICANTTAKEITANYMORE". The chances of you ever seeing those buttons on screen is infinitesimal.
 

Neil Middlemiss

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As was pointed out above (and mentioned at the Bits), an audio issue is confirmed on 7 of the season's episodes (oddly grouped together). The Center channel is mixed with the left and/or right on the DTS audio. It is most noticeable on The Big Goodbye, and to varying degrees on the others. We'll post more about CBS' response (and hopefully replacement procedures for the couple of discs affected) as soon as we know more.
 

Nelson Au

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It will be interesting to see what happens to the audio on a 5.1 system. I have a new 7.1 capable pre-pro. But I chose to configure it as 5.1. From what I'm told, no material is actually 7.1, the 7.1 is processed. I was further told that most 7.1 blu-ray discs are made from a 5.1 source. I'm sure someone will correct me because that was what I was told. I don't really know how 7.1 works.
At any rate, as soon as my set arrives, I'll put that to the test.
 

Sam Favate

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Popped in disc 1 last night just to have a look, and it looks great. Excited to watch these again - last time was a year or two ago.

Strangely, I did have to update the PS3 firmware to be able to play the disc.
 

bryan4999

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Does anyone feel that some scenes, especially dark scenes, look grainy to the point of being noisy? I have no issue with appropriate film grain, in fact, just watched blu-ray of Butch Cassidy and, projected at 100 inches, I actually felt like I was projecting 35mm because the grain looked so natural, so I don't think it is my set-up.
Still, I am dazzled by the clarity, detail and color. Mrs. Troi's clothes in the episode Haven are gorgeous, especially the one with the intricate pattern of reds and purples. I feel like I could reach out and touch it.
I have noticed the audio issues that others have described. It is oddly inconsistent.
 

Nelson Au

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I just got my set this morning courtesy of Amazon and the USPS. The receipt says it is $59.99. And I see it's being sold for $53.95 at Amazon, a recent price reduction.
I gather I can ask for a price match?
Looking forward to seeing the episodes later today and Miss Troi's dress and checking for the audio issues. Hmmm, Olympics or Star Trek?
 

Tino

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Nelson Au said:
I just got my set this morning courtesy of Amazon and the USPS. The receipt says it is $59.99. And I see it's being sold for $53.95 at Amazon, a recent price reduction.
I gather I can ask for a price match?
Looking forward to seeing the episodes later today and Miss Troi's dress and checking for the audio issues. Hmmm, Olympics or Star Trek?
Hmm...amazon still shows $59.99. Still I believe they only match a reduction if it's on release day. I would call Amazon cs and just ask.
 

Mark-P

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That was probably a 3rd party vendor who temporarily got the top spot until it was sold. Even if it had been Amazon selling it at a reduced price they will not retroactively refund customers who purchased earlier at a higher price. They only guarantee that pre-orders will be billed at the lowest price that was offered during the period you had it on pre-order.
Nelson Au said:
I just got my set this morning courtesy of Amazon and the USPS. The receipt says it is $59.99. And I see it's being sold for $53.95 at Amazon, a recent price reduction.
I gather I can ask for a price match?
Looking forward to seeing the episodes later today and Miss Troi's dress and checking for the audio issues. Hmmm, Olympics or Star Trek?
 

Kevin EK

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Just picked it up yesterday and watched several episodes and the new documentaries.

I didn't watch any of the episodes with the audio glitch - my preference is for the last few eps of the year anyway. So that was a blissful few hours with "Conspiracy", a bit of "The Neutral Zone", "Heart of Glory", "The Arsenal of Freedom" and "Skin of Evil". Great stuff. The new transfers look really good, particularly in terms of the VFX. The ending of "Conspiracy" looked particularly good, although the stop-motion animation looks just as creaky now as it did back in 1988.

The featurette on the restoration work is interesting. They're clearly spending a lot more money on this than I woud have ever thought they would. Although it's also clear that this is not really an Okuda project. The Okudas are there as advisors, but the actual work is being done by what looks like a small team at CBS. Given what they're dealing with, it's pretty clear how a few seconds of footage can go missing - they're playing a very large game of "Needle in a Haystack". The benefits of having the shows fully done in HD must have been costed out to be tremendous over time to justify this investment. This is a lot of work.

The featurettes on the first season are more interesting and more candid than what was on the earlier DVD releases. And yet, they're still only scratching at what happened. It's good to see David Gerrold and Dorothy Fontana interviewed, and it's even better to start to hear their story. Gerrold's discussion of his initial time on the show as being "2-3 of the happiest weeks of my life" was pretty revealing. (Keep in mind that both Gerrold and Fontana actually took action against the series after what happened as things got going.) My favorite moment in the piece is with David Livingston discussing the issue of having Roddenberry's son in the office. The part he's clearly correct about is that Roddenberry chewed his head off for making it into an issue in the first place. The part that's hilarious is Livingston trying to cover this by saying that Roddenberry must have somehow come to understand that Livingston was really just looking out for him by stirring the matter up. Anyone who's ever dealt with anything like this will know that the matter would never have been discussed again unless Livingston was looking for a repeat performance... It was also nice to see the departure of Denise Crosby handled in a more-or-less frank manner.

Based on the way the featurettes end, I expect there will be at least one of these featurettes, probably running about 30 mins, on each season of the show. The Season Two set looks like it has a sit-down with the regular cast (minus Crosby and Muldaur) and perhaps we'll see the longer cut of "Measure of a Man" in SD. I have a feeling there will also be a gag reel with each season.
 

FoxyMulder

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Originally Posted by Kevin EK /t/322473/star-trek-the-next-generation-season-one-blu-ray-review/60#post_3955176
It was also nice to see the departure of Denise Crosby handled in a more-or-less frank manner.

Why did Denise Crosby leave the show. ? Was it her decision. ? I have read it was due to a lack of screen time and she was unhappy about that but what does it say about that on this new boxset. ?
 

Nelson Au

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Thanks guys regarding the Amazon pricing issue. I'll check that out with Amazon. If its not credited because I bought before the price drop, no worries. Just surprised the price shown here on the upper right of this page shows a lower price!
Thanks for the thoughts Kevin. The extras sound great! Yeah, I knew the Okuda's couldn't have been behind this, they were there when the series was being made, so it makes sense to bring them in to look over the project. Just surprised they didn't bring in others who are still around.
Regarding the blooper reel, my understanding is that after the first or second season, they stopped doing them. But there have been gags they kept, I've seen them. So perhaps those will show up. Or perhaps they were too bawdy for the general public.
 

Jason_V

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Originally Posted by FoxyMulder /t/322473/star-trek-the-next-generation-season-one-blu-ray-review/60#post_3955181

Why did Denise Crosby leave the show. ? Was it her decision. ? I have read it was due to a lack of screen time and she was unhappy about that but what does it say about that on this new boxset. ?

I haven't gotten through the extras yet (or any episode outside of The Naked Now), but reports at the time always said she was unhappy with what she was given to do. Basically, a glorified extra saying "Hailing Frequencies closed." Crosby did say, according to my memory, she would have stayed if more scenes like the one with Worf early in Skin of Evil would have been written.
 

Mark-P

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HTF's "How much does it cost" widget always references the lowest price inclusive of marketplace sellers.
Nelson Au said:
Just surprised the price shown here on the upper right of this page shows a lower price!
 

Kevin EK

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Most shows have a gag reel done every year. I think there was one done each year of TNG, but the only ones I've ever seen were out of the first year. (The Brent Spiner impersonation of Jimmy Stewart is still my favorite)

Denise Crosby confirms in this featurette that she was fairly unhappy on the show. The hours were long and the working situation wasn't very pleasant. There was a lot of tension on the set, some of which Patrick Stewart has acknowledged he didn't help when he gathered the cast and told them they weren't acting properly at work. If I remember his comments (which are from other places, like the discussion on the movie Blu-ray set), Crosby was the one who asked him if they couldn't have fun while they were there, and Stewart responded that they weren't there to have fun, etc. Couple that with the bad press the show got during the first year and you have a pretty sour environment. And then you add in that even though the cast each got a focus at different times during the season, and the show was much more of a real ensemble than TOS, Yar's big episode was at the beginning of the season, and it was a bad episode to boot. So it's no surprise that she asked to be let out of her contract. Of course, when the situation wound up getting better in the 3rd season, she was amenable to coming back and making occasional guest appearances. One of those was in what is easily one of the top five eps of the series, "Yesterday's Enterprise" and it was partly focused on her. As a nice capper to this, she also showed up in the Series Finale.

There was another part of the featurette that was jaw-dropping - Herman Zimmerman and David Livingston admit that the show was way, way overbudget during the first season. Zimmerman admits that the sets and production design area alone was over on the pilot by aroiund 400K. And that's only in that one department. (Which would be for the building of the Enterprise sets and converting the movie sets for the TV show.) On the other hand, they were able to amort the numbers down and save a lot of money over the course of the season so that they were eventually a lot closer to the pattern. But initially, WOW.

One of the places they clearly saved money, by the way, was by doing the post-production on videotape. And now they're having to go back and spend that money to prepare the show for HD. Irony is always interesting...
 

Nelson Au

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Thanks Mark for clearing up that pricing widget, I only saw that and I thought the price at Amazon dropped being the lower price was right next to the Amazon logo. By going to Amazon, I see it at $59.99. Sorry to raise the ruckus.
The Jimmy Stewart impression was my favorite too! I saw that back in the day on a bootleg at a convention!
I took a peek at the first feature about the creation of the series. Look forward to seeing the rest. It's great they collected all that vintage video and filmed press conferences and interviews.
I looked at Where No One Has Gone Before. I had made MP4's of several episodes from my DVD sets of TNG recently to play on my iPad. I ripped all my favorites. So i was able to synch it up with the blu ray as it played. What surprised me is how pretty good the old DVD's looked during the live action. The colors are off. The blue tunics look more green on the DVDs and colors tend to veer in to the yellow side. But on close-up of Patrick Stewart, the lines and pores on his face are sharp and clear on the blu ray, and are there as well on the DVD version. I was watching on a iPad 3rd generation with the retina screen too. Of course the resolution of the DVD wasn't as good, so the detail wasn't as sharp, but there. The other aspect that surprised me was the optical effects used when the Enterprise ends up at M33. They used the exact same optical effects. They matched up exactly the swirling galaxy and the planets there! I was wondering if they could do it on that episode. I thought that effect might have required recreation with digital effects. The other surprise was when the traveller is phasing, the effect they used as he's phasing out is exactly the same. I would have thought that was an effect done with the video at the time. So the horizontal lines used as he fades is identical. That was a really big surprise.
No surprise was how bad the ships look on the DVD. As the Enterprise flies by, it's full of jaggies on the edges and lots of tiny horizontal lines are seen too on the video. The blu-ray has such nice contrast and the detail on the ship is visible!
Looking forward to seeing more of the features and episodes!
 

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I watched DATALORE and had a couple of questions about Lore's motivation and end game.
What is Lore's motivation for giving The Enterprise and her crew to the Crystalline Entity?
And what are Lore's plans once the entity presumably destroys The Enterprise? Where is Lore planning to go? How is he planning to get off The Enterprise before the entity destroys it?
Even seeing it on the big screen didn't help me answer these questions...
 

FoxyMulder

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Originally Posted by Nelson Au /t/322473/star-trek-the-next-generation-season-one-blu-ray-review/60#post_3955238
The Jimmy Stewart impression was my favorite too! I saw that back in the day on a bootleg at a convention!
I took a peek at the first feature about the creation of the series. Look forward to seeing the rest. It's great they collected all that vintage video and filmed press conferences and interviews.
 

Nelson Au

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I watched The Big Goodbye and Datalore. With my system configured as a 5.1, I also heard the audio problem. The Big Goodbye had the dialogue spread across the front left, center and right. But it wasn't super distracting once you just the episode. So it's easy to miss.
The image was so clear, you can see the brush marks on the painted sets!
 

AndyMcKinney

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Gary Seven said:
Now that we have, and going to have, TNG on Blu-Ray, it wil be interesting to see if various labels can be read on the bridge and elsewhere on the ship.  I remember seeing somewhere (TV, DVD?) that these labels were often jokes and such knowing that the NTSC resolution would never reveal the true nature of these labels.  But since now that has changed, let's see in this, and upcoming sets, whether these can now be spotted.
I wouldn't count on it. On another forum, it has been reported that at least one of these in-jokes (the read-out showing all four of the first seven title actors' names from Doctor Who to be amongst someone's ancestors in "The Neutral Zone") has been replaced by a read-out that is more character-appropriate. I suspect it was changed not to avoid any likely legal action, but perhaps to avoid any potential legal action, or for the reason that these things weren't meant to be seen by the audience and might pull them out of the show...
 

Jason_V

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I watched Code of Honor this morning and noticed, for the first time, the computer monitor which showed the away team on the surface. To the right of the map were the characters names, clear as day. I also noticed a bit of the inside of Picard's uniform is visible on the planet. Funny how I'm still finding new things in the episode 25 years later...
 

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