Screenshot from DS9 - 111 - The Nagus (Laserdisc)
That is suprisingly good quality. I have never really seen a still shot from laserdisc before, can see why it had a following back in the day.
I should note that this image is not really representative of LD technology in it's natural state. I am using a special device (Domesday Duplicator) that captures the raw signal from the laser sensor and dumps it to a disk for software decoding, thereby bypassing all the video circuitry. I also used Gigapixel AI to upscale the image to 4K, which works great, but you could get good results from regular scaling too.
This is the raw output from the decoder:
Well that's cool.
It almost looks like an upscale using the laserdiscs instead of the DVDs might yield a nicer image.
This is being researched and experimented with at this very moment. A couple episodes are currently in the testing phase.
Normally a DVD would win a matchup for PQ, except in rare instances, but there are a lot of problems with the ST DVD releases which evens the playing field.
Paramount jamming 4x45 minute episodes plus extras onto a single layer 4.7gb disc is a major one. This adds in a ton of lossy compression artifacts and degrades the image substantially. By comparison, the LD has 1 episode per disc and there is no compression because its analog (Not without its own downsides though).
Here's a preview of a test render:
My dad was an adopter of LD and we had like the only widescreen on the block so my parents would host movie nights for the neighbors haha. He also was obsessed with ripping rentals of them to his Hi-8 tapes haha. We probably have like every movie in the 90s on LaserDisc or Hi-8
Thank you Nagus!
(Gives him slip of Latnum)
Wow incredible quality! Are you upscaling or is this native LD?
@virtualbri@mastodon.online really needs to see this. I know he liked one of your other laserdisc captures.
This is truly awesome, and the raw, un-upscaled analogue image data seems like a far better point of departure to reconstruct higher resolution DS9.
I hope he can see this post and thread via my tag to his Mastadon ID.
I have to ask whether you have any Voyager on LD as well…
Thanks, I've got an early proof of concept as well, if you guys are interested:
https://mega.nz/file/UCVgDJTY#Rn2dyxHgTg67kg2EwQpehVej7KX3piYc8eHvDa3pMXU
It was deliberately left as unprocessed as possible, so it's more of a demonstration of what's there to work with, not what is possible with full reconstruction, and I have since enlisted the help of someone far more masterful than me to take over in that department so any final results will blow this away. One thing I will say is unfortunately the LDs are still plagued with the same source media issues (and are still in 480i format) that the DVDs are, so it's not a perfect solution, but the digital compression is non-existent, YAY!
As for Voyager LD's I have about 75% of them, they are incredibly rare and only available from Japan.
Given the cost of the archival footage upgrades for the DS9 documentary ‘What we left behind’, it’s really surprising that they didn’t work from the LDs as one of their sources.
Good to know that the Voyager LDs exist even if compiling a complete set may be the challenge.
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