It’s been a few months since the last update from production on What We Left Behind, the retrospective documentary looking back at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and today we get to go behind the scenes for a small look to the ongoing high-definition processing of the film.
Series producer Ira Behr, who has been leading the way on this documentary project for several years, shows us in this new video update a familiar sight to anyone who followed our coverage of the Star Trek: The Next Generation remastering project in 2012: boxes and boxes of raw 35mm film, straight from Paramount’s deep-storage vaults.
The team at CBS Digital, who also rescanned and processed five of the seven Next Generation seasons for Blu-ray, is working through a selection of almost 400 boxes of Deep Space Nine episodic footage to remaster select scenes to 1080p HD for inclusion in the documentary.
Here’s some more detail, from Ira Behr and the documentary team:
That’s right. We’re nearly through the heavy research-and-scanning stage of our remaster, and with just a few (hundred) more film rolls ahead of us, we’re hard at work replacing the 20+ minutes of new HD sequences — spanning ALL SEVEN seasons of the original run of Deep Space Nine!
We could spend a whole update simply raving about the look and feel of the new film transfer… but until you see it yourself, words just can’t do it justice.
And you WILL see it. Sooner than you may think.
As for when the actual documentary will be finalized, well, stay tuned, as the documentary team is strongly hinting that the project is getting closer and closer to its final form — and that while there’s no official release date to announce today, more news is yet to come before the end of March.
The restoration process alone is a HUGE undertaking — after all your support in funding this expensive endeavor, it has taken months of work from the CBS Digital team to coordinate, research, find, ship, scan and deliver the original film negatives for us, and more time from our team to clean up, color, and polish the resulting images (and even re-create a handful of effects!).
While we’re still waiting on final elements to arrive and distribution details to lock firmly into place, we don’t want to promise any deadlines we can’t meet with the film not yet entirely complete.
However, that doesn’t mean we don’t have a plan in place that puts you, our most important supporters and DS9 Ambassadors, right at the forefront. We’ve got BIG news in the works and expect you’ll be hearing much more from us later this month.
You can be sure that we’ll bring you all the news as it breaks here at TrekCore — and as soon as there is full-HD footage available for public release, we’ll also keep you covered with our famous SD-to-HD comparison videos.
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