We’ve all been waiting with bated breath for the years-in-development documentary, What We Left Behind — Looking Back at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, ever since its fundraising campaign topped $600,000 back in early 2017.

More anxiously perhaps than waiting for just the new interviews or the planned “Season 8 Writers Room” feature is the hopes of seeing newly-remastered footage from the 25-year-old Trek spinoff, something hinted at when producer Ira Steven Behr revealed the production team’s plans back in March 2017.

Now, after a year of hopes, the documentary team confirmed in a new update to contributors that YES, there will be high-definition footage from Deep Space Nine in the forthcoming feature, once it finally makes it through the post-production process, which is still ongoing.

From the campaign this evening:

Why is it taking so long to edit?

Well, for starters, we’ve got over 100 hours of new interviews with cast and crew to go through, plus fan submissions, archival materials, animations, audition tapes, convention footage and over 170 broadcast episodes… endless possibilities! And sure, you SAY you’d be down to see a 4-hour documentary, but really that’s just excessive even for us. Carefully and artfully assembling everything down into a reasonable length film (with a story of its own!) is an even longer process.

Then, factor in the technical elements of licensing all our official footage, finding new archival elements and creating animations, working with CBS to scan film negative for presentation for the first time in HD… the fact that we’re even close to having something to show is, frankly, a bit of a miracle. If we were wormhole aliens, we’re sure all this linear time wouldn’t even be an issue, but alas in this process we’re only human.

The good news for you in all of this is that we’re continuing to find new elements and stories to include as we go along, and we’re committed to making the best stand-alone film we can, however long that takes. (And, suffice to say, we’ve got HOURS of bonus content to release later on down the line!)

Any luck with DS9 in HD?

YES! It’s expensive, it’s time-intensive and lengthening our post process… and it’s gosh-darn beautiful. CBS has been partnering with us on this aspect and we can confirm it will *absolutely* be worth the wait.

To date, of course, the only high-definition look at the space station’s studio model and sets came in the Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 6 Blu-ray release of “Birthright, Part I,” when the crew of the Enterprise-D docks at Deep Space 9.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gR7oewdXp7w

Will episodic clips remastered for the documentary lead to a full-scale Deep Space Nine Blu-ray conversion? Well, that’s still the biggest question — such an undertaking would be an investment of not only years of production time but also millions of dollars of financial backing, a questionable prospect with the state of the home media marketplace in 2018.

That being said, it’s certainly a long-term hope for not just the fan community, but the minds behind the series as well, as Behr commented last year:

IRA STEVEN BEHR: “For many, many years – and decades, it seems – I’ve talked to people about getting DS9 in HD… discussing ways to make it happen. It’s not what I set out to do with the doc, it would be an offshoot of it. If it doesn’t happen, I’m not going to feel like, ‘Oh, damn, that was a level of success we did not reach.’

It’s a total offshoot – has to do with money [and] other things – it’s not so much a matter of the series itself, it’s just the technology of how the film was shot and how the special effects were shot back then, and the changeover. It would be nice.

The TrekCore team is extremely excited at the prospect of seeing more of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in high definition — and we know you are too! — so like our years-long coverage of the Next Generation remastering project, we definitely plan to bring you every new gigaquad of information that comes our way about this ongoing project.

In the meantime, the What We Left Behind team plans to preview some new footage from the documentary — interview footage, and maybe more? — at the upcoming Destination: Star Trek convention in Dortmund, Germany this April 27-29… so if you’re in the area, be sure to check out their panel for what is sure to be a great presentation!

Keep checking back to TrekCore for all the latest on this exciting project!

Order the DS9 Companion

Order the Deep Space Nine DVD Collection

Order the DS9 Documentary