Search options (Page 21 of 80)

Well, of course they are doing this. They took a blood oath to review every episode of QUANTUM LEAP. So long as there are new episodes, they have to review them! If the new QUANTUM LEAP lasts 20 years, they will have to review it for 20 years. They made a promise. Cory and Tom wouldn't lie to me!

I think the most topically relevant aspect of SUPERGIRL's fourth season is Ben Lockwood: he's initially a mild-mannered, gentle teacher with a small amount of entitlement. A traumatic event followed by slights and challenges nudges him moment by moment from a kind history professor into a sociopathic murderer whose charm and sincerity are now to radicalize others into becoming murderers at his command.

Ben's value system is that aliens will replace humans and humans have to fight back and that the Earth is only for humans. He presents it with earnest language and emotional appeals. Ben offers a framework of colonial history and how colonialism is simply a kinder word for plunder and theft and it can't be allowed to repeat itself. Ben makes genuinely heartfelt pronouncements of love for humanity means taking a stand against those who aren't human.

Ben's has a highly literate presence. Ben's well-fitted suits and Sam Witwer's chiseled good looks and boyish sincerity make everything he says sound so rational, reasonable, well-considered, delivered with a chain of logic that sounds crisp and crystalline in its pronouncements.

But this is an illusion. Ben may be well-spoken and have a persona of professorial wisdom, but that is simply masking his trauma and broken mind which now instinctively reacts to the 'other' with hatred, loathing, contempt, terror and violence.

Furthermore, it's revealed soon enough: Ben may be smart, but his psychological damage has made him easy prey because his entire career as 'Agent Liberty' has actually been manufactured by Lex Luthor.

Lex wanted someone to fan the flames of human nativism against alien refugees. Lex ordered his henchman to look for "patsies". Lex wanted "a real American, someone charismatic, a radical". Lex wanted somebody traumatized and radicalized while having good looks, an academic background, and a talent for conveying empathy within despicable rhetoric.

Lex wanted someone with the capacity to articulate hate speech in the vocabulary of social justice and history, someone to bring America into a state of war so that Lex could 'stop' it and be hailed as a hero.

Ben's erudite, Ben's educated, Ben presents as intellectual, and none of that is an act, but the persona is ultimately a lie, just sugar to make his bitter hatred easier to swallow.

Of course, the Ben Lockwood character and Sam Witwer's portrayal is based on the real life figure of Ben Shapiro and not anyone we know personally... but the parallels are striking.

Hmm.

It's true that the narrative pace of THE FLASH has slowed to a crawl in recent years. After seeing the Flash spend an entire season failing to defeat one guy with a knife, I too find it hard to believe that THE FLASH needs all 13 episodes to wrap up Barry Allen's story.

Why aren't they just limiting themselves to 11 episodes of Barry fighting a monster of the week? Why aren't they doing the Justice League versus Destro?

I suspect part of the reason is budget. A 20 episode order allows you to do some bottle episodes and let the saved budget go into other episodes to hire more guest stars and have more effects; a 13 episode order gives you less financial room to maneuver.

In addition, there's also time constraints: a 20 episode order means you have a lot more space to schedule the cast of BATWOMAN and LEGENDS and SUPERGIRL and SUPERMAN AND LOIS (Arrowverse edition) and have a wider window to get everyone booked at the same time. A 13 episode order narrows the window significantly.

But. It's absolutely true that there have been entirely too many sequential episodes where Barry is moping around STAR Labs until someone gives him a sappy motivational speech. And I find it really difficult to believe that THE FLASH has to do another 13 and cannot spare 1 - 2 episodes to get the Legends out of jail.

Rewatching SUPERGIRL's fourth season. It's the best season of the show. Frustratingly but perhaps inevitably, SUPERGIRL was *never* able to reach these heights again.

The fourth season has Supergirl at her most tormented and under fire. Melissa Benoist's sunny, cheery personality enlivens Kara's simple, straightforward character, making her an excellent viewpoint character as Supergirl finds herself hunted by the US government and Lex Luthor and feared by every civilian as Ben Lockwood is maneuvered by Luthor into fomenting anti-alien hatred.

Season 4 was one of the most bloodthirsty, violent seasons of SUPERGIRL. And yet, the show had some hesitation: there's an episode where Lex Luthor, in an absurdly petty act, targets a 10 year old boy with sea to surface missiles in order to make a Supergirl-clone hate America; however, the show reveals that the kid survived because Luthor's henchman, Otis (or rather, the show) was not willing to kill off a child character. It was SUPERGIRL's bleakest season, yet the show insisted on a hint of hope.

Despite the darkness of this era, the friendships between Kara and Lena, the sisterhood between Kara and Alex, the loving energy between Dreamer and Brainy, the charm of Brainy as comic relief -- it all heartened a wounded nation living in an age of Donald Trump.

Why couldn't the show get back here for Season 5 and Season 6? The writing team didn't change. The cast barely changed. And while Seasons 5 - 6 were good enough and had some great episodes, it was never as excellent as Season 4. What happened?

I'll have something to say about it tomorrow.

LEGENDS will unfortunately not get a series finale on THE FLASH.

Well, Earth 211 is a quick read. It's just the synopses of the episodes, not full scripts.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030711182 … efault.asp

I think only an insane person would try to write full scripts for even a mini-season of SLIDERS.

Funny observation about DOCTOR WHO:

I remember watching Series 5 and Series 6 of DOCTOR WHO (2005) where Matt Smith, to my eyes, seemed to age so much between the two seasons. The smooth visage of Matt Smith's Doctor in Series 5 seemed to have become more weathered and lined in Series 6. It was very appropriate because Matt Smith's Doctor in Series 6 is actually several hundred years older than he was in Series 5.

However, I recently watched Matt Smith's debut episode in HD instead of DVD and... Smith's face actually looks pretty much like it will in Series 6. It's just that I watched Series 5 in standard definition which blurred/smoothed facial textures on my old 32 inch TV and I watched Series 6 in HD on a 40 inch television, and in HD, the sharpness shows all the pores and marks and lines in Smith's face.

It's funny. Earth 211 triggers this hungry, gnawing, painful longing in me, this desire for all of these beautiful synopses to be made into whole scripts. Earth 211 is the true SLIDERS. The SLIDERS we have on our world is a collapsed, broken version of the real SLIDERS.

There are stories in E211 from Transmodiar, Recall317, Nigel Mitchell, Jules Reynolds and others. It all makes me want so badly to find Quinn's timer and slide to this beautiful world where SLIDERS thrived and flourished and FOX polished it like a gem and made it the crowning jewel of their network and Universal stood by Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo for six wonderful seasons of wonder, terror, action, humour, inventiveness, imagination, creativity and SLIDERS truly was that series that never, ever ran out of ideas.

As much as I love what I came up with in SLIDERS REBORN and all the splendid contributions that Transmodiar, Nigel, Slider_Quinn21, Jim Ford of SLIDERSCAST and Informant made to turn the real world version of SLIDERS into a story with a restoration of the original sliders and a closing (but not final) adventure and a happy ending, and as much as I love Tracy Torme's "Slide Effects" story, these fanfics were salves and bandages.

A full-fledged version of Earth 211 is what I would really, really, really want.

I wonder if Steven Moffat (DOCTOR WHO) would ever be inclined to pitch a SLIDERS reboot.

Will Marvel's former chairman, the man who nearly drove Kevin Feige to DC, regain control of Marvel and Disney?
https://www.comicsbeat.com/report-ike-p … ney-board/

It's the set dressing for Quinn's sliding machine in the basement lab. The set dressings included the sliding coils and these sliding towers. In my personal head canon, the sliding coils are for harnessing exotic matter to trigger an opening in the gateway and the towers are for isolating a vibrational frequency to secure an exit point. I assume that as an anti-gravity machine, the exotic matter was originally to trigger particle repulsion to achieve lift and the towers were for controlling direction.

Actually, James Gunn says SUPERMAN AND LOIS will make it to at least Season 4.
https://www.cbr.com/james-gunn-superman … e-seasons/

No era can last forever. I'm glad that ARROW and THE FLASH, despite their faults, had a full run. And even if SUPERMAN AND LOIS only makes it to Season 3, it doesn't feel like it was cut short. SUPERMAN AND LOIS will have been a three year Superman event, a long-form Superman trilogy. The STAR WARS trilogy didn't feel incomplete for only being three movies. Not every story needs to last 15 years like SUPERNATURAL.

TITANS and DOOM PATROL are cancelled but will receive series finale stories.
https://www.cbr.com/doom-patrol-titans- … bo-max-dc/

I assume SUPERMAN AND LOIS will have to do the same.

During lockdown in 2020, I bought myself an Oculus Go, the cheapest Oculus VR headset. I used it to watch movies and TV in a virtual reality cineplex. It was like watching a movie in IMAX from my living room. Recently, I decided to watch THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER on the VR headset. Except... I just kept not getting around to it for weeks. And months. Finally, on Friday, I had some time and put on the headset.

It sucked. The headset was just too heavy and uncomfortable to enjoy it for more than a few minutes. I was hyperaware of wearing a brick on my face. I put up with it during lockdown. But after two years, I've come to realize that I'd rather not wear a VR headset just to watch a movie and will settle for a 55 inch screen or a 12.4 inch tablet.

Putting the VR headset on sale tomorrow. Might get a few bucks out of it.

I guess, coming from comic books:

There was a period where Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, became a mass-murdering supervillain named Parallax in 1994. He became the enemy of every DC superhero. And by 1995 or so, it became clear that turning the heroic Hal Jordan into a bloodthirsty psycho was going to stick for awhile.

Even then, it was obvious that Hal Jordan would eventually be flying around saving people, fighting supervillains and making green energy constructs again at some point. The status quo for Green Lantern would inevitably reassert itself. It's a bit like SLIDERS: did you ever really believe that Professor Arturo was dead? Didn't you feel on some level that the Azure Gate Bridge professor would be back?

In 1996, the FINAL NIGHT crossover had Hal Jordan sacrifice himself to save planet Earth while offering no real apologies for destroying the Green Lantern Corps and killing all his friends. And it was a bit like Wade 'dying' in "Requiem": did you really believe Wade was gone forever? Or did you feel on some level that Wade's life could somehow exist beyond SLIDERS' fifth season? At some point, Hal Jordan was going to be a hero and a Green Lantern again.

In the 1999 crossover DAY OF JUDGEMENT, Hal Jordan became the Spectre, seeking redemption for his crimes as Parallax. And again, this was declared to be the new status quo. But even then... it was a bit like Quinn being erased. Whether or not SLIDERS could deliver on Quinn's return, Quinn's return seemed inevitable just as Hal Jordan becoming Green Lantern and his crimes being addressed seemed inevitable.

And in the 2004 GREEN LANTERN: REBIRTH, Hal Jordan discovered that his turn to supervillain psychopathy had been due to his mind being infected by a primordial fear entity from the dawn of time called Parallax, warping his perceptions and morality and transforming him into a murderer. The Spectre had been drawn to use Hal as a host in order to burn the fear entity out of his psyche. Hal was able to cast out the Parallax infection (along with the Spectre) and restore his body to life and his Green Lantern ring to power. Hal then confronted a DC Universe crisis, explained the situation to Superman, Batman and the Flash, and began rebuilding the Green Lantern Corps. Also, subsequent stories revealed that Hal hadn't killed any Green Lanterns; they had all survived his attacks but been depowered, and Hal rescued them and redeemed himself again.

It was inevitable. The status quo reasserted itself. And I always knew it would. The same way when, watching SLIDERS: I knew that Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo would find their way back to each other. We never saw it onscreen and the show was cancelled, but on some level, I feel that you, Slider_Quinn21, know that shortly after "The Seer", the original sliders were reunited and the original platform of the show was restored.

I imagine that something similar will happen with Green Arrow because ultimately, the iconography of Oliver Queen is not based in him being the Spectre, the Wrath of God, the Voice of Judgement, the ominous extradimensional identity appearing to hand out plot exposition in a booming voice. The iconography of Oliver Queen is that he is a street level vigilante superhero who uses a bow and and arrow.

But maybe they'll accomplish that by having Barry meet Oliver before he became the Spectre via a time travel story.

I think that AI has its place as an assistant. When writing my fanfics, I had a lot of help: Transmodiar helped me better understand the screenplay format. Nigel Mitchell came up with all the alt-world concepts. Slider_Quinn21 made my last script readable, something I struggled with due to the densely layered plot.

I think it'd be great to use AI to determine if the writing is sufficiently visual, to accumulate scene description details for a human writer to select, to offer dialogue suggestions drawing on machine-learning to review every line of dialogue ever spoken by Jerry, Sabrina, Cleavant and John in any production to create a reference base of their specific vocal mannerisms.

As it stands, any 'writing' from AI is just pulling words from pre-existing content, using thesaurus-algorithms to paraphrase the nouns and verbs and adjectives, rearranging the clauses by assigning importance to any sentences with key words relevant to the query, and presenting a mismash of semi-random content that has been given a bit of polish to somewhat hold it together. An AI episode of SLIDERS would just be inserting the character-names into a STAR TREK or STARGATE screenplay, moving around the language and replacing and paraphrasing names and descriptions.

AI stands for artificial intelligence, but as it stands, it's not really that intelligent. I'd call it assistive iteration; it's not creating, it's just repeating, recombining and repackaging content from different sources, and all those sources were first written by a human. AI is a useful tool to algorithmically review your own writing to determine if your writing is clear, readable, consistent, meets formatting requirements and to gather research, but as a writer, AI basically the Season 3 staff of SLIDERS ripping off popular movies.

If you look on some of the AI-generated plots for SLIDERS on Reddit, the stories are obviously just LEGENDS OF TOMORROW, STARGATE and STAR TREK synopses that have been randomly recombined.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SLIDERS/commen … r_sliders/

I agree with this, but I suspect that the wish is that if Stephen Amell appears, he's wearing a hood and a mask and firing arrows as opposed to standing in a cloak giving grim intonations.

In terms of BATWOMAN: I don't think there's anything to wrap up beyond a brief reference to how the Season 3 soft cliffhanger has been dealt with. I guess they could also establish that Kate Kane (Wallis Day) has located Bruce too.

And for LEGENDS: ideally, the Flash rescues everyone from Time Jail and they live happily ever after.

Henry Cavill's announced return to Superman was unannounced.

Wonder Woman's third film will not proceed with Patty Jenkins.

There will be no Black Adam sequel.

THE BATMAN still has a sequel in development.

It looks like James Gunn is starting over with the DC Universe, and while it's unfortunately to see Cavill's return being cancelled... it might be Gunn's only move.

The foundation of the DC Extended Universe has been shaky since DAWN OF JUSTICE and fairly or unfairly, JUSTICE LEAGUE made the whole thing unworkable: a premier superhero team that won't get another movie, a Batman who had mostly quit, a Superman whose contract was expiring, a Wonder Woman with a baffling sequel movie, a Flash whose actor is psychotic -- with all DCEU movies having to navigate awkwardly through this wreckage with AQUAMAN rewriting the JUSTICE LEAGUE backstory for Aquaman, BIRDS OF PREY avoiding Batman, SHAZAM being unable to show Superman, etc..

Fairly or unfairly, the DCEU had been crippled and was crawling forward. And Gunn ended an untenable and impossible situation. It was sad, but there were no good options left for the DCEU.

I'd appreciate it if such posts came with context.
https://screenrant.com/joker-new-son-za … dc-comics/

I would wager that Torme and Linaweaver's friendship had nothing to do with Linaweaver's writing and everything to do with both of them being Libertarians (as opposed to liberals or Democrats); I would hazard a guess that Tracy Torme has never seen a single page of this novel but was happy for his friend to get some writing work and assumed that barely anyone would read the book. I wouldn't be surprised if Torme never even read the comics despite sending over his old Post-Its and napkins to Acclaim Comics.

A review I wrote of the novelization a little while ago:

In other news, I have been converting SLIDERS REBORN from PDF screenplay format (created in Fade In) to ebook format where the presentation resembles a stageplay rather than a script. The stageplay format simply scales better to phone reading and I think that if SLIDERS REBORN had been more readable on small screen devices back in 2015, it would have had (a few) more readers. While removing line breaks and mass find-and-replace functions help, it's also necessary to go through the document to add quotation marks throughout, remove ALL CAPS descriptions that are unpleasant to read on a smaller screen and clean up various anomalies that come from converting a screenplay into something close to prose.

I have one script left to finish converting.

Also, Jim_Hall of Slidecage is kindly contributing some high res 35mm scans of 1994 - 1995 era cast photos for me to digitally age to use as book covers.

90s nostalgia has begun: https://www.cbr.com/that-90s-show-nostalgia/

Let us once again take a moment to say PROPERTY FROM OVER 22 YEARS AGO is making a comeback, can a SLIDERS revival be far behind?

To which the answer is: of course the sliders will come back. There will come a time when we are faced with deadly ultimatums from armadas craving blood and splendor, when we are beset by narcotica-driven madness from false claims of deadly secrets. In our moment of greatest need, Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo will return to save us. I admit, I've been waiting a long time, but it's been 22 years, and I can wait a little longer.

I fundamentally disagree with this on every level. The entire thesis of THE X-FILES seems to be: you can't make a difference. No one can make a difference. Mulder can't do anything about the alien invasion except talk about it. Scully can't seem to get anywhere in her career: no matter how many times she gets fired or quit, she ends up working at the most disdained department in the FBI.

Even the evil characters can't seem to accomplish anything on THE X-FILES. The alien invasion is never coming; the Syndicate is constantly referring to how "the date is set" and "they're coming, they're here, they've been here for a long time, they're only coming back" and then Season 10 went and declared that the alien invasion was never happening at all and all those ominous, mysterious men were wasting their time.

In addition, THE X-FILES also seemed to be unable to grasp the concept of education. Mulder and Scully never seemed to collate and accumulate their details on the monsters or the Syndicate: by Season 11, they were as incapable of stopping monsters as they were in Season 1.

This is the antithesis of a superhero movie. The superhero movie declares: we can all make a difference and anyone can be a hero. Even the most obnoxious or easily dismissed or ordinary can be heroes. Tony Stark is a drunken moron tripping on ego and liquor; when stripped of his wealth and luxuries and forced to survive, he discovers he has what it takes to battle war itself.

Dr. Donald Blake seems to be a crazy person who thinks he's the Norse God of Thunder and here to help people; it turns out he actually is Thor. Steve Rogers is a washout and a reject who can't find shoes small enough to fit the feet on his frail frame; he is determined to battle Nazis and is given a body that is as strong as his decency of character. Everyone has it in them to be a hero; it's just that not everyone looks hard enough or digs deep enough to find it.

And I know what some will say: well, that's a fairy tale. THE X-FILES is far more realistic (because yes, a TV show about aliens made of black oil colonizing the Earth with bees and supersoldiers is truly very grounded), THE X-FILES' cynicism is believable. But cynicism is easy. Despair and depression and giving up are the easiest options for a person and for a storyteller. It is much harder to tell superhero stories than it is to tell X-FILES stories.

One of the hardest parts of writing the TV show SUPERNATURAL, I think: it has to be finding a way for Sam and Dean to find some solution to beat the monsters of the week, to defeat Lucifer, and to, in the final season, take on God Himself. But THE X-FILES takes the easy way out by never having Mulder and Scully triumph.

Writing THE X-FILES is shooting fish in a barrel: raise mysteries and don't resolve them, create monsters and don't find a way to stop them, have two lead characters passively wander through the story and accomplish nothing whatsoever. Superheroes take much more talent.

I cannot stress enough in the name of Quinn's cat, Wade's teddy bear, Rembrandt's shiny suit and Arturo's bow tie that the opinions of ireactions are not the views of Sliders.TV.

Well, here's a comparison for "As Time Goes By: 540i Turbine on the left (stretched) and Topaz upscaling it to 720p on the right. As you can see, Topaz has given "As Time Goes By" quite the boost in visual quality, getting it closer to the original film.

And the 720p version of "Season's Greedings" next to the 720x540 blu-ray version -- well, it's better, but a TV upscaler that did sharpening and smoothing wouldn't look very different. The only real difference is that Topaz AI has refined the detail rather than just upping pixel contrast.

A TV upscaler adds more jagged edges to the grass; Topaz AI actually rebuilds the grass. But from a living room standpoint, Season 3 already looked crisp and clear, and all Topaz AI does it make it look a little crisper and clearer.

540i on the left (stretched to fill the screen) and 720p on the right:

I don't recall doing more with Turbine's Season 2 beyond the second Daelin segment of "As Time Goes By", and I lost my enthusiasm for upscaling SLIDERS because if Season 1 doesn't look good, what's the point of upscaling any other episode? I also didn't work on it enough to figure out if AI upscaling was any better than on-the-fly smoothing and sharpening. However, it looks like Season 2 does upscale really well and benefits from AI upscaling and not just some non-adaptive filters.

I did attempt to upscale every Season 1 episode with Turbine at which point I realized Turbine's Season 1 video quality was actually worse than Universal's Season 1.

I'm just doing some experiments out of curiosity. I have the feeling that Topaz won't be able to do much with the Turbine versions of Seasons 3, 4 and 5 since those benefitted from advancements in digital videotape while Season 2 was using digital videotape in its earliest form.

I've put the Turbine files for "As Time Goes By", "Season's Greedings" and "New Gods for Old" in the Topaz queue, set to output at 720p so that we can find out by tomorrow night if Topaz can make these files any better or if the results will be about the same as a TV upscaling SD content with image filters to deblock and sharpen and add contrast.

Well, I wonder, with Season 1: what if the solution is to aim for 480p instead of aiming for 720p or 1080p or 4K?

I have recently been upscaling a 2000s TV show called 15/LOVE which is another shot on film, edited on digital videotape product. The low budget videotape is not really adequate for a 720p upscale and it looks like a slightly below average DVD. I found that when aiming for 480p only and just using Topaz to sharpen up the details and add film grain, it went to excellent DVD quality, but aiming higher than that would have caused too much warping as the AI didn't have enough film grain to enhance. Could high quality DVD level video be achievable with the Season 1 episodes?

I personally don't see the point of making Seasons 2 - 5 look HD if Season 1 is only ever going to be SD; I'd say identify the best that can be done with Season 1 and then ensure Seasons 2 - 5 match that. No one needs to see a pristine rendering of the radioactive worm in Season 3 while only getting a fuzzy rendering of Quinn and Wade's first date.

I tried using the TV's DVD enhancement features on some of the Turbine episodes. "As Time Goes By" looks a lot like the AI-generated 720p version but with less of that peculiar AI waxiness (this was before Topaz added an AI film grain feature). Under my TV's enhancements, "As Time Goes By"'s grainy texture is a bit smoother and the edges are sharpened and the contrast-colour boosting darkens the blacks a bit where the image seemed to struggle to provide shadow detail. The quite-good video quality went to pretty-good, and this is on-the-fly TV filtration.

The Turbine version of "Season's Greedings" also gets a bit of a boost from TV upscaling: I could make out the shape of Jerry O'Connell's facial scar even in medium shots where it was usually faded out. And again, it looks like the AI upscaled version. It went from pretty good to really good.

And looking at the original upscales from 480i to 720p -- the upscale looked good because the DVD file was solid. So all we're really seeing here is that AI upscaling can make good videos look... also good.

That said, the Turbine files are significantly better than the Universal DVD files: they're not as compressed as the Universal version, they have more of the original film texture, so if AI upscaling made the Universal files look as good as Turbine, can AI upscaling do even more with Turbine? Or would it be pretty much the same as the TV upscale?

I played Turbine's "Eye of the Storm" with the enhancement and this Season 5 episode looks so crisp and clear under the TV upscale, almost like a 720p file. The edges are as crisp and sharp as an HD video, but it's missing the higher texture detail of a genuine 720p although there is more than you'd get in a compressed DVD.

Something interesting: when I first upscaled the Mill Creek 480i version of "Eye of the Storm", I was astonished at how the AI managed to add so much clarity to the image that in the scene where Dr. Geiger tries to separate Mallory from Quinn, I could actually see Jerry O'Connell's face now. In the original Sci-Fi Channel airing and in the Mill Creek file, it was extremely difficult to see Jerry's face; you had to study the scene very closely and it wasn't easy to make out.

Seeing Jerry's face clearly in the upscale made this scene in "Eye of the Storm" much more emotional than the original broadcast version and DVD; when you can see Quinn's face and when Rembrandt refuses to sacrifice Mallory to retrieve Quinn, there is a palpable sense of sacrifice that was missing without Jerry's face being visible. And I was amazed that Topaz AI could pull Jerry's face out of the fuzzy image.

However, I rewatched the scene in "Eye of the Storm" without the TV enhancements -- and Jerry O'Connell's face is actually quite clearly present in this unupscaled, unsharpened, unenhanced Turbine file. It was always there, but videotape downscaling for broadcast and DVD compression muddied the special effect too much. Which means that the AI upscaling work was actually needless; the PAL master had Jerry's face with no enhancement at all.

What this means: all of the previous upscaling work was just removing the DVD compression, the artifacts and loss of detail. In this case, AI upscaling is a bit pointless; the studio can just go back to the original master tapes. And upscaling the non-Pilot Season 1 episodes has also been unfortunately pointless: those episodes are extremely muddy due to their existence on low resolution analog videotape.

Can Topaz do anything with the Turbine files? All Topaz did before was remove compression, but the Turbine files aren't compressed.

I'm also, I admit, not super keen on producing 1080p files out of the Turbine version because even though the Pilot and Seasons 2 - 5 could come out looking great, Episodes 2- 9 of Season 1 would still be a mess. I don't really want to produce an AI-HD version of "Requiem" while "Last Days" remains a subpar 480i file.

I think it might be possible to get those Season 1 episodes looking like better 480p versions of the existing 480p files by having Topaz AI sharpen them and add grain but leave them at 480p... in which case I'd probably feel better just leaving all the other episodes at 480p too. "The Breeder" should not be sharper than "Eggheads". That is morally wrong.

I spent a lot of time upscaling SLIDERS using Topaz AI, but after I got the Turbine blu-ray release from Germany which used high quality PAL files for Seasons 2 - 5, I lost interest in upscaling the show. The PAL files for Seasons 2 - 5, when scaled to 1080p size by an AndroidTV box or a blu-ray player, had the same sharpness and clarity the same as the upscaled files that used the Universal DVDs. In addition, the PAL files had a lot of film grain whereas the AI upscaled video files had a certain waxy lack of texture, especially in long shots. AI upscaling became a waste of time, spending 8 - 10 hours per episode to create an approximation of what Turbine had released.

Since then, Topaz has upgraded its program to add film grain to video files to offset the waxy look. I now find myself wondering if the Turbine files would benefit from AI upscaling. The thing is that AI upscaling an SD video doesn't necessarily get it to HD; with most SLIDERS video files, it just reduced the blurriness and fuzzy edges and blocky quality created by stretching the picture. Yes, the AI can mine the film grain of Seasons 2 - 5 to make it look crisper and sharper... but when you sit at living room distance, a high quality (and grainy) videotape image stretched from SD to HD may not seem that different from the AI-rebuilt pixels.

Also, I'm not sure how consistent the effect would be across seasons. Season 2 on Turbine looks good, but there's a certain vague fuzziness to the edges. It's fine and even good, but it does speak to how SLIDERS was shot on film but edited on lower resolution videotape. The digital videotape in 1996 was a new product that while an improvement on the blurry analog videotape of Season 1, was still losing sharpness and detail. Season 3 is sharp, the fuzziness is gone.

Digital videotape could preserve more of the film image now. And Seasons 4 - 5 are SLIDERS at its sharpest; the switch to 16mm film meant the detail was stored in larger film grains that were more present in 540 line videotape. When scaled to 1080p, the Turbine versions of S4 and S5 look like a (medium quality) 720p file.

I doubt Topaz upscaling could do much for Seasons 4 - 5 to improve them. Topaz might add a little sharpness to Season 3. Topaz could probably remove that Season 2 fuzziness and get it looking, well, as good as the unenhanced Season 3. I don't think it would really be a huge leap, but I also don't know that for a fact because I haven't tried yet.

Generally, upscales have been best when the standard definition file still has a downscaled version of the original film grain. The Pilot looks great when upscaled to 1080p: Topaz has lifted off the DVD compression and rendered the film grain into pixel detail. But the analog videotapes of the rest of Season 1 lost the film grain. Seasons 4 - 5 from the Mill Creek set were very grainy; Topaz could lift off the DVD compression as well. But the Turbine set isn't compressed, so what is there for Topaz to do with those files?

There's also the question of what resolution to output them at. I am not very happy with any of my Season 1 upscales aside from the Pilot; the fuzziness of analog videotape keeps defeating Topaz. I suspect the best bet is to reupscale Season 1 to 480p with high grain to offset the blurry tape look -- and not add any more pixels to rebuild it since the AI doesn't have enough to work with.

I guess I could reupscale one episode of Season 2, one episode of Season 3 and one episode of Season 4 and from the Turbine set and see if it's an improvement. Probably output it at 1080p. I suppose after that, I might redo my Season 1 upscales for Episodes 2 - 9, but not go higher than 480p this time. Those files have no more to give.