Sliders: New DVD with Correct Episode Order, Fan Upscaling Experiments (Page 2 of 4)

I think the best way to imagine a SLIDERS blu-ray release from Mill Creek is to put your hands over your eyes and let the empty blackness of nothing fill your sight. It's not going to happen. However, AIRWOLF is interesting in that the 1080p transfer really achieves nothing; there just isn't enough detail in the image to make it worthwhile; I suspect SLIDERS would be about the same.

I am concerned to examine Mill Creek's site and see that they are storing 88 episodes on 15 discs. The previous complete DVD set had all the episodes on 22 discs; does this mean Mill Creek is compressing the video even more than the last release? It's possible the disc count is just preliminary, of course, given that Mill Creek's customer service reps couldn't answer a single question about the DVD.

On one level, I think the idea of watching Season 1 in the wrong order for no reason whatsoever is absolutely baffling. On another, I did get a whole novella out of the wrong order, so sure. I wouldn't want SLIDERS to be immortalized this way, though.

I think it's just the production order that puts "Stoker" earlier. There is no reason "Stoker" needs to be seen before "Dinoslide," but there's also no reason see "Stoker" or "Dinoslide" at all. *shudders*

To me, "Stoker" is another exercise in mutilating a once-great science fiction series into an unprofessional abomination of hackwork and stupidity -- and I am dreading rewatching it. I have to, you see, to finish my final SLIDERS script. I'm putting it off for as long as humanly possible, but the script pages where I must describe the rock star vampires accurately comes closer and closer and I am terrified at the prospect of having to sit through this miserable insult to the intelligence that masquerades as a professional product.

I'm also going to have to rewatch "Dragonslide," "The Fire Within," "Paradise Lost," "The Last of Eden," "Sole Survivors," "The Breeder" and "This Slide of Paradise" and I honestly don't even know if I'll come out of this alive.

These days, I find myself looking at Seasons 3 - 5 as a picture of David Peckinpah's addiction reignited after his teenaged son's death made him relapse after two decades of sobriety.

Season 3 is the cocaine high. Everything's mad and random and crazy and driven by one's basest impulses in any direction -- nightclubs and sex and explosions akin to riding the top of a supersonic train or high-excitement motorcycle chases -- but with an ugly, dehumanizing edge if you look closely where people and relationships don't matter, only the thrill of the drug. People who seem to be a buzzkill get dumped in the trash or blown up.

But then the high isn't enough and the addict wants  drugs that go even deeper into the psyche to feed the need for escape -- the miserable monster movies that were "The Breeder" and "Stoker" and "This Slide of Paradise" are a heroin injection, going into depressants that leave one in a state of euphoric bliss. But in truth, anyone sober looking at the heroin addict would see human body that's little more than a corpse that isn't dead yet.

Then we come to Season 4, where it's now all about combining heroin and cocaine into speedballs, resulting in more euphoria that is, however, socially vacant and emotionally dead; there's no real friendships or relationships through heroin and cocaine. The physicality of the bliss these drugs induce has no emotional love or care or fondness or compassion or heart behind it; the body may feel joyous, but the spirit is deadened and empty, much like Jerry O'Connell's performance.

And then we come to Season 5 -- the drugs aren't for pleasure anymore. The constant anesthetic use has created tolerance and painful withdrawal symptoms in their absence; injecting and inhaling has simply become the joyless routine of "The Great Work" and "Java Jive" and the isolating nature of the drugs has left Peckinpah bleak, adrift and alone, going through the motions without even the extremity that made Season 3 a compelling trainwreck. Season 5 is just filling out the time to get through 18 episodes. Then the show died and David Peckinaph had nowhere left to direct his grief aside from his veins. Shattered and alone, he plunged speedball after speedball into himself until his heart gave out. I have nothing but sympathy for the poor man. Peckinpah and SLIDERS on his watch are symptoms of a terrible disease.

I once pondered where bad TV producers go when they die. Temporal Flux says they go to development hell. Most SLIDERS fans say they burn in actual hell. Informant remarked that regardless of whether Peckinpah is in heaven or hell, what he left behind is many terrible hours of television. Those hours speak to how truly sad, lost and alone he must have been.

Anyway. My final SLIDERS script will be a tribute to David Peckinpah and the ideas he introduced into the show.

Woke up minutes ago and felt a manic impulse. Work for some reason has AI video upscaling software that I installed on my home workstation. I leapt out of bed, dived for my PC, and started an upscale on the Mill Creek rip of "As Time Goes By." Perhaps by this time tomorrow night, I'll have the greatest hour of television ever made in glorious 720p. Back to bed.

Well, it's a dramatization. If we're going to nickel and dime it: you told me "The Guardian" was filmed near you -- but the joke about a plaque commemorating  "Arturo-jumping" was a remark you posted on the forum followed by the disclaimer, "Not really," and I thought (internally), "YOU MONSTER!"

**

I don't know why I made a rip of the Mill Creek DVD for upscaling. I also don't know why I used the fastest possible setting on Handbrake which cost some detail for a faster encode. What strange choices in the middle of the night. I should have ripped the Universal DVD set -- which I had to dig out of The Box of Sci-Fi Channel news clippings that the Sci-Fi Channel inexplicably and nonsensically sent to Matt at his request. (Why did they do this? And at their own expense, too! TF snarked that people should ask Sci-Fi for a stapler and maybe they would have gotten one. After I went through it, EP.COM got 16 new articles for the Article Archive out of it.)

Anyway. Upscaling "As Time Goes By." The Mill Creek set was even more compressed than the Universal DVD set, and the image is fuzzy, which gave the AI video enhancement very little to work with over the course of a 11 hour upscaling process. The result was a 720p high definition file that looked... like a decent standard definition version of the episode.

Onscreen text like credits were now smooth and clean instead of smeared. Signs like "Vancouver Ice Cold Storage" at the start of the episode were now crisply legible. In moderately-lit scenes, faces had more skin texture. In brightly lit scenes, everyone's overexposed faces remained overexposed and without detail and there was a faint waxiness to the image where the blocky, pixelated quality was now smoothed out and certainly an improvement.

It looks presentable on my 55 inch HDTV whereas the original DVD from Mill Creek was a mess of jagged edges and squares that vaguely resembled an episode of SLIDERS. If Mill Creek had fit the 88 episodes on 24 discs instead of 15, it'd probably look a bit like this upscale. The results are definitely better than the Universal DVD version of "As Time Goes By."

The Universal DVD set itself is maybe 20 per cent sharper than the Mill Creek discs -- but is badly marred by interlacing lines, likely because the original master tapes are interleaved video, and when Universal converted them into digital formats for DVD, they neglected to deinterlace and decomb their video before mass producing the discs (except for the Pilot episode, for some reason).

They seem to deinterlaced their digital assets before handing their materials to Mill Creek.

Anyway, I'm running an upscale on the Universal version of "As Time Goes By" which should offer the AI more to latch onto, so we'll see if that's a leap forward or just a lateral move. I'll report back tomorrow night.

Finished the upscale of "As Time Goes By," first decombing the Universal DVD, then upscaling it to 720p.

It looks like a really, really good DVD. A bit waxy still, but surprisingly more skin texture and detail than I expected -- Jerry O'Connell's scar does render nicely (although you're still not going to see the hairs in his nostrils or the stubble on his chin).

Eight point five out of ten for DVD.  I'm happy watching this on a 55 inch HDTV. This is the DVD release that Mill Creek and Universal should have made.

(Five-point-two-five out of ten for blu-ray.)

"The Guardian" looks good with my process: MakeMKV to rip the DVD (as Handbrake can't seem to read the Universal DVD). Then open the file in Handbrake, set the quality output to Production Standard and switch on the video deinterlacing to remove the horizontal lines across the image. Then upscale in Topaz with Artemis-LQ and a custom resolution of 960x720. The resulting file is 2GB. For storage, I'll probably need to shrink the files to 700MB or so (and lose a little video quality)

Here are the boxing scenes. Also, here's the "As Time Goes By" Daelin-2 sequence on GoFile to download the MP4 instead of streaming it off Google Drive:
https://mega.nz/folder/5E1WnZxJ#Zgg_4d2jHZTolIin-iSevw

Next in the queue: I'll be upscaling "Time and Again World" tonight (because I want to see the bridge scenes in FakeD). Then I'll do "Into the Mystic" (because I want to see all the beautiful shots of the sliders in the Sorcerer's home) and "The King is Back" (because I want to see Rembrandt's concert in FakeD). Then "Gillian of the Spirits" (for Quinn saying good-bye to his friends) and "Prince of Wails" (because I love Robin Hood) and then "Obsession" and the Pilot.

After that, I'll do "Double Cross" and "The Prince of Slides, "Season's Greedings" and "Murder Most Foul."

I'll move to the Mill Creek set for some Season 4 - 5 episodes: "Virtual Slide," "World Killer" and "The Alternateville Horror," "Slide By Wire" and "Way Out West," "Applied Physics," "New Gods for Old, "A Current Affair" and "The Return of Maggie Beckett."

I think that covers all the episodes I really want to see again on my HDTV, so I'll fill in the rest of Seasons 1 - 2 that I missed before and then have Seasons 1 - 2 and a few select episodes after that in FakeD.

I wish there were some way for me to share the full results with everyone, but my legal department has advised me not to open that door.

Here is the Constitution handoff and slideout from "Time and Again World" in HD. Note the limitations of AI upscaling: wide shots are fuzzy because there isn't detail to enhance, the bridge against the dark sky is crushed into blackness. But medium shots and closeups of actor's faces -- that's where the AI works its magic best.

https://mega.nz/folder/5E1WnZxJ#Zgg_4d2jHZTolIin-iSevw

Here's "Into the Mystic"'s scene of Quinn unmasking the Sorcerer and the sliders' homecoming. I ripped it from the fully upscaled episode using Handbrake, the sample re-encoded in their HQ720 preset. https://gofile.io/d/yuKsqB

Well. Let's not go nuts. The stairs on Quinn's house are clearing giving the AI a lot of trouble in the upscale. The Sorcerer scenes suffer badly when there are high levels of light that blow out the character's faces in the highlights.

It is probably fixable and I know Transmodiar will have thoughts, but I'm going to refer back to what Transmodiar said when I told him how terribly my first draft outline of SLIDERS REBORN had turned out -- let's just aim to get matters from terrible to adequate.