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Ruby Rose is now saying on social media that she was fired off BATWOMAN due to her injuries; that production refused to accommodate her need for recovery time after she broke her neck and had surgery to prevent paralysis. She was forced to wear the costume even though it was straining her neck, she was pressured into filming without having fully healed, she was characterized as lazy and irritable for being in pain.

I absolutely believe her. CW and before it, WB -- and TV and film in general -- have a shocking lack of concern for worker safety and unions struggle to keep their workers from dying on the job. SMALLVILLE's production refused to hire drivers for their lead actors; Tom Welling was driving an hour a day to set, working 18 hours, then expected to drive himself home. KJ Apa got in a car accident driving home from the set of RIVERDALE because the studio was too cheap to hire him a driver after a 16 hour day. This studio and these producers clearly have no qualms about pressuring their lead actors into unsafe work and think that their actors will tolerate anything to stay on a show on which they could conceivably retire (if they survive to the end of it).

I hope that Ruby Rose's characterizations of Caroline Dries, Peter Roth, Dougray Scott, Greg Berlanti and Camrus Johnson are due to misconstruing their actions or remarks. Peter Roth is no friend of ours; he fired John Rhys Davies off SLIDERS, although I've heard that Davies drunkenly insulted and verbally abused Roth's wife at a party and Roth may have been justified in not wanting John on any of his shows. Rose says Roth had her investigated to dig up reasons to justify firing her off BATWOMAN.

Rose says Dries wanted BATWOMAN to keep filming through the pandemic with no regard for safety; it's possible Dries merely wanted to film distant and distanced shots. Rose says Berlanti... actually, I'm not sure what she was saying about him. Rose says that Camrus Johnson had no sympathy for her despite her injuries; perhaps he spoke poorly or was reserved. Rose says that Dougray Scott abused female staffers and shouted at them; it's possible she saw him yelling to defend someone. I'm not calling her a liar, but it's only her perspective. We should believe her experiences but be cautious about her characterizations. Out of fairness to them, we shouldn't take her portrayals of these people as the absolute truth, but it's certainly possible that these people are all the sweatshop managers and abusers that Rose portrays them to be, especially after Andrew Kreisberg.

Andrew Kreisberg was fired off all Arrowverse shows for repeated, unrepentant sexual harassment. Berlanti claims that he didn't know Kreisberg was doing this, that no one reported it to him for a long time, that he was shocked when someone finally did, and that he started and complied fully with an investigation and saw to it that Kreisberg was suspended. Then fired. Then blacklisted. Berlanti also promised that he would never allow his employees to think of himself as distant and unreachable again.

Some have claimed Berlanti was fully aware of Kreisberg's behaviour but allowed it until it hit it was reported at which point Berlanti feigned ignorance while starting an official investigation. I hope that's not true.

Warner Bros. says Rose was fired for being unprofessional and crew members have described Rose as domineering, late, unrehearsed and unprepared -- but all that could be true and it would still be wrong to force her to wear a neck straining suit days after surgery or to not give her a leave of absence to recover from her procedure.

Superhero and teen shows since SMALLVILLE have had this attitude that the actors are responsible for their own safety and well-being; that it's not the studio's job to drive them to the set or to look after their health or to advocate for their safety; they would withhold a few thousand dollars rather than get KJ Apa a driver and if KJ Apa should die driving himself home, the studio has presumably insured for this eventuality and would come out slightly ahead. Ruby Rose could be the worst person in the world and it would still be wrong to treat her this way.

With THE DEAD ZONE: Seasons 1 - 3 after Topaz upscaling look absolutely perfect. 10 out of 10. They look like a digital film scan.
It's because Seasons 1 - 3 are grain based images from 16mm film, edited on high definition digital videotape and downscaled for broadcast and DVD and with all the film grain still present and available for an upscale.

However, THE DEAD ZONE's Seasons 4 - 6 after an AI upscale look like an upscaled DVD. It is an amazing upscale and no blu-ray player could do this sort of upscale during playback because all the compression artifacts are gone and the resolution has been increased through smooth pixel blending specific to the image textures to ensure no new artifacts or imperfections. But fine details like pores and grass have a slight blur to them. It's because these seasons are pixel based images from digital cameras, edited digitally, then downscaled for broadcast and DVD.

The DVDs themselves look pretty much the same across all six seasons of this show in terms of video quality and characteristics (grain, sharpness, clarity, detail). There's no weird discrepancy like Season 1 of SLIDERS being denoised and blurry and Season 2 being sharp and grainy. THE DEAD ZONE made some effort to retain its visual identity even though its cameras and filming location changed.

However, THE DEAD ZONE's look certainly shifted with digital cameras, but where SLIDERS benefitted greatly from the digital videotape format, THE DEAD ZONE suffered a little for the transition into a fully digital format. The first three seasons of DEAD ZONE benefitted from film because for film, productions light everything with thought as to how that light will show up through the film chemical process.

In contrast, digital videography captures video 'as-is,' and lighting and colour are often adjusted afterwards. There is less thought put into lighting a scene as it's adjustable in post, there are also artistic limitations. Seasons 1 - 3 were very artful and deliberate in lighting. Johnny Smith's house in THE DEAD ZONE had, in Seasons 1 - 3, a cozy warmth with a sense of amber comfort where every room seemed to be lit like it had a fireplace even if it didn't. From Seasons 4 - 6, Johnny's house just becomes 'dark.' It could be fairly said that THE DEAD ZONE's later seasons' use of digital cameras just make it look cheaper and shabbier much like SLIDERS in Seasons 4 - 5 not really bothering to use colour or its absence for storytelling and just looking beige.

Nothing to do with video quality itself, of course.

YES!

I would like a third dose, but my province is only giving them to people with serious health issues right now.

You know, RussianCabbie, I think you're right that the Artemis medium quality preset might be better suited to the Season 1 episodes. Here's "Fever" via Artemis MQ preset. 

I have to say, this is looking better than the HQ result. The wide and medium shots had serious aliasing issues in the original video files. The HQ preset didn't make that worse, left it alone but inflated the issue of edges of people and objects having phantom outlines around them. The MQ preset smooths that out, adding a touch of blur to those outlines, blending these flaws out of the image. There's a bit of blurriness, but it's for a wide shot.

I guess I'm upscaling the other seven post-Pilot episodes of SLIDERS again, this time on the MQ preset. What is this, the seventh time? The eighth? I've had to position some ice packs below the laptop stand for extra cooling.

**

I don't hear anything in the commentary about the technical means for filming the Pilot scene with Quinn and Smarter Quinn aside from remarks that they found a body double who looked just like Jerry O'Connell once they put a wig on him. Torme says that Jerry had an uncannily close body double in the recent livestream, too.

I'm guessing that this person is James Bamford, a Vancouver stuntman who's career began in 1994 with VIPER (shot in Calgary) and MANTIS (in Vancouver). Bamford performed as Jerry's body double in "The Unstuck Man," and I'm assuming that he was Jerry's double between the Pilot and Season 5 too before going back to Vancouver to serve as stunt coordinator on numerous shows and then moving into superhero TV directing in 2016.

They did merge alternate sides of the film negative over each other. But it's customary to have a body double play the other side of the scene so that the actor has a scene partner for timing. Jerry would have performed in the shot as Quinn alongside a body double playing Quinn-2. Then Jerry would have performed the same shot as Quinn-2 with a body double for Quinn. These shots would then be composited on top of each other; the sides of the shots with Jerry's Quinn would be kept and the sides with the body double would be covered.

**

I would argue that in "Greatfellas," Cleavant plays Rembrandt and Rembrandt-2 and Clinton is used as a body double. Cleavant plays Rembrandt-2.

Yes, in shots where both Rembrandts are in the same frame, Clinton's face is certainly visible and can be distinguished from Cleavant, but Clinton is always slightly angled or moving (but not obscured). Also, the double shots have Cleavant and Clinton switch roles to try to average out the differences.

At the end, Clinton (playing Rembrandt) and Cleavant (playing Rembrandt-2) are standing together.

Then Clinton/Rembrandt runs out of frame, leaving Cleavant/Rembrandt-2 alone.

We go to a shot of Rembrandt, now played by Cleavant and not Clinton, saluting Rembrandt-2.

Then we cut to Rembrandt-2 and Rembrandt-2 is also played by Cleavant.

Clinton is removed once there's only one Rembrandt in the frame.

This technique was also used in the DEAD ZONE episode "Looking Glass" which featured identical twins played by two identical twins. The plot requires that they be indistinguishable. However, there are small but noticeable differences between the two men. To smooth this over, "Looking Glass" would have the twins switch roles throughout the same scene in almost every other shot; this would average out any differences between the two.

Sorry I keep going back to THE DEAD ZONE, I'm afraid this is going to be happening for awhile. THE DEAD ZONE THE DEAD ZONE THE DEAD ZONE. It's an interesting failure.

**

Regarding the STARGATE SG-1 blu-rays: I have only seen two episodes of the show (the first two, and on the blu-ray). But even from those, it's clear that distributor, Visual Entertainment Inc., didn't do a very good job.

I don't know the show well, but fan reviews remarked that on the box art, the Stargate is incorrectly drawn and that the cast photo uses a character lineup that was only in place for one season out of the 10, indicating that the distributor had clearly never watched the show -- which reflects their upscaling process.

VEI not only failed to improve effectively on SD video, they actively damaged HD video. Seasons 1 - 7 were edited on digital videotape. VEI upscaled them to 1080p, but their process was the equivalent of Topaz LQ, creating a clean image, but one that was also a bit blurrier than it needed to be. It would have looked like the 720p upscales of Seasons 4 - 5 where there was a bit of natural film grain on an HD-acceptable image. But then VEI ran the files through another round of image smoothing. Likely, they did this to avoid all the jagged edges that often show up in upscaled video files, but rather than do it selectively, they did it to every episode, adding another layer of blurriness.

It was probably unfeasible to watch seven seasons of TV to find the specific scenes that didn't upscale well, but then it would have been best left it alone and let some shots be flawed rather than adding further blurriness to all shots.

With Seasons 8 - 10, VEI ran their image smoothing process again -- which was nonsensical. Seasons 8 - 10 were shot on digital cameras; they were already in 1080p. VEI took sharp HD video and made it blurrier. The only reason I can see for this: one of their marketing elements is to declare that their blu-ray products offer a "Super Clean" picture, even if the image does not need to be super cleaned.

VEI also reportedly messed up the surround sound. Sometimes, enabling it on the disc turns it off while disabling it turns it back on, and it's completely random across each episode.

**

Back to SLIDERS: in terms of upscaling, Seasons 2 - 5 would look good if upscaled, but there will always be a certain haziness to medium and wide shots that separates true high definition from HD approximations.

There is one more thing I haven't tried with Season 1 yet. There was a fan upscaler who shared his process awhile ago. (He then went dark and destroyed all his social media posts.) His process: he didn't just use Topaz video upscaling. For numerous shows including XENA and LOIS AND CLARK (but not SLIDERS), he used Topaz Video to extract an upscaled version of each frame of the video masters (which he somehow acquired) and saved each frame as a PNG file.

Then he ran an upscaling process on each PNG file, apparently sharpening them up, refining all the details, and bringing the resolution to as high as 15,000 pixels tall. Then he scaled the PNG files back down to 4K or 1080. Then he reintegrated the PNGs into a video sequence via Premiere Pro and added back the sound.

I have Topaz Gigapixel for upscaling still images. But I'm not sure I would get the same results for SLIDERS as this fan upscaler had actual video masters whereas I have DVDs. In addition, I don't even know if these frames we're seeing can be upscaled because, as he explained his (destroyed) notes, the upscalers use grain and these Season 1 files are very short on grain. I'm also not sure if my external 1TB spinning hard drive and external 120 GB SSD are enough for even one episode of this increasingly over-the-top endeavour.

Anyway. Let's do MQ and see how it goes.

I will actually run "Fever" through the MQ preset and share some screencaps. But until then, here's "Last Days" looking okay. This is the image once the compression artifacts are removed. Aside from that, it's just the DVD image with all its other qualities preserved at 1080p.

In the Pilot and "World Killer," Jerry O'Connell is interacting with a live person. His name is James Bamford, a stunt coordinator and body double. Jerry performed as Quinn in one shot with Bamford playing the other Quinn. Then they'd switch. Then they'd edit the scenes together, having recorded with a motion-controlled, motion-recorded camera so that the camera movements would match on both versions of the shot. Cleavant and Clinton should have filmed the same way, but in "The King is Back," an odd choice was made where Clinton played all of Rembrandt-2's scenes. Production should have had Cleavant film Clinton's scenes as well, and then arranged it in editing so that whenever Rembrandt or Rembrandt-2's face is clearly in profile, it's Cleavant's face and not Clinton's.

(At least I think it's Bamford. He definitely played Quinn in "The Unstuck Man." Today, Bamford is a director on the Vancouver Arrowverse shows.)

I have never been clear on why they used Clinton as Rembrandt-2. I wonder if some early attempt at DeepFake was in mind. However, "Post Traumatic Slide Syndrome" in Season 2 attempts DeepFake with the Professor and his body double and it's so bad it's funny; thankfully, Adam Nimoy made it a very brief shot blurred by motion. In "Greatfellas," Clinton and Cleavant shot each scene twice; switching roles for the second version, and then editing put it together so that Cleavant's face is Rembrandt and Rembrandt-2 and Clinton is always slightly angled away from the camera when his face is in view.

**

Strengths and weaknesses of the Artemis HQ upscale for "Fever":

Finally had time to listen to the Torme/Zicree livestream. I only listened to the audio during a two hour drive; I didn't watch the video, instead extracting an MP3 from it. Tracy Torme's thoughts were fascinating, thoughtful, filled with insight and true vision. I am excited to see what he would do with a SLIDERS revival and trust that his reasons for presumably killing off Wade are well-considered (not that I think he would really kill Wade, he'd just have her presumed dead until Sabrina is willing to appear). And I also trust that his purpose in having the Professor absent from the series is a means to address what Davies may or may not be willing or able on a physical level.

I was not impressed with the hosts themselves and it was for the best that Torme and Zicree effectively took over as hosts. I was very impressed with Zicree's patience, tact, gentleness and kindness in multiple areas.

I found it obnoxious that the hosts claimed that Zicree was an "apologist" for STAR TREK DISCOVERY and PICARD as though no sensible person could enjoy those shows. I was impressed at Zicree gently saying that while he reviewed those shows and gave mixed opinions of them, he had no doubt that the creators behind those shows were talented, devoted and that their tastes or approach to the STAR TREK storytelling engine just didn't mesh with his own and that he would never conflate insulting creators with criticizing their product.

I was further impressed by Zicree describing his work on Season 4, touching on how "some producers" were not interested in reaching high standards of art with television and simply concerned with meeting airdates and cared more about quantity of scripts rather than quality; Zicree kindly noted that he worked on 19 of the Season 4 scripts, but confessed that he refused to return for Season 5 because he didn't want to work for Peckinpah anymore but didn't attack Peckinpah beyond that. He was also very generous in describing Bill Dial's talent and historical knowledge when we know from Temporal Flux that Dial loathed Zicree.

There was a point in the livestream where one of the hosts asked an asinine, incoherent, incomprehensible question. He said that he felt SLIDERS had done something unique that he'd never seen in a show before where a theme in one episode, like trains, would then be present in the next episode so that if the story involved a train in one episode, there would be a train in the next and could Torme talk about it? The host specified that he couldn't actually specify an example of this supposedly unique aspect of the show expect to say it wasn't actually a train.

Torme didn't answer the question, either because he was at a loss or because he had connection issues and mercifully never heard it. Zicree spun into it with the trademark Zicree skill; he was sweet, kind and thoughtful in saying that he wasn't sure about "trains," but that shows often had to make use of the same locations and often the same sets across multiple episodes, adjusting them to be different settings even if they were physically the same settings. He discussed the Chandler Hotel, some of his ambitions for using the set, a search for stock footage, and how locations were always something to struggle with on any show and on any budget. Zicree took a nonsensical question and rather than be confrontational or critical, he turned the conversation towards discussing an practical production that he found interesting and he offered great perspective on the matter.

Tracy remarked that he himself had been considered "difficult" during and after SLIDERS; maybe for any future project, SLIDERS or not, Tracy should partner with Zicree and let Zicree do all the talking.

I was deeply touched by Zicree's conduct and will, going forward, try to be as nice as he was here.

I'd guess 12 per cent, mostly vortex shots, the spider wasps, the flood, the shark, the oil wells in San Francisco, Quinn's billboard face, the shot of the asteroid exploding from the missile and the birth control cola shot. Aside from that, I can't see there being much and the vortex is even more infrequently onscreen in Season 2; they sometimes don't even bother to show the sliders jumping into it one by one and just have the actors run offscreen. There's a peculiar irony to how SLIDERS at its most expensive had the fewest special effects whereas its budget overruns in Seasons 3 - 5 had it attempting as many effects as possible.

What happened?

I once lost $15 on a charging cable for an old netbook that didn't fit. I can't remember why I didn't get a refund; it's possible that eBay's guarantee wasn't what it used to be. It was back in 2008.

I can see how it would be easy to abuse the eBay Money Back Guarantee. I would like to tell you that I don't out of some moral objection, but the truth is that it doesn't make strategic sense.

I could have kept the Tiles and my refund. But it would have been shortsighted because this seller has other products I will want to purchase in the future at well below the retail price. If I'd kept his product and his money, he would likely have pre-emptively blocked me from ever purchasing anything from him again or been driven off the platform for supposedly failing to deliver.

I recently bought a laptop off eBay for pennies on the dollar. It arrived with a damaged E-key hanging loose off the keyboard. I photographed the issue filed for a return; the seller, a distributor of refurbished equipment, asked me to close the return at which point they would provide me with a prepaid shipping label to return their hardware at which point they'd refund me.

It's possible the seller misunderstands how returns work. If the buyer closes the return, they cannot reopen it and they are no longer protected by eBay's guarantee of a full refund should the item fail to match the description, and the return case being open does not in any way prevent the seller from issuing a prepaid shipping label. But it's also possible that the seller is trying to get me to close the return so that they can keep my money and I'm stuck with a laptop that has a broken keyboard.

It's also also possible that the seller has every intention of refunding me but will take any chance to get a return closed because eBay has proven to have a hair trigger with refunding buyers so that buyers keep buying.

I could likely manipulate the situation and protest that they are encouraging me to close the return before supplying shipping. Since they claim I need to close the return before they supply shipping, I could stall for three business days at which point eBay would refund me and allow me to keep the laptop (since the seller didn't provide shipping). I'd spend a little of that refund on getting the keyboard replaced at a local repair shop).

But this would be incredibly foolish because this seller has an incredible selection of refurbished hardware at shockingly low prices, a pretty decent reputation for issuing exchanges on damaged goods, and they clearly have additional quantities of the laptop I want.

Also, in both cases, these sellers have my home address and my name and phone number. It's not a great idea to rob people who literally know where you live. When buying things off eBay, I generally stick to items within my country (Canada) and there are a lot of eBay sellers selling refurbished electronics who are situated in or around my city, purchased from offices or retailers trying to get rid of returns.

I've told the refurbished laptop sellers that, since they're located in my city, we can meet at their retail store and do an exchange for an undamaged laptop and if the replacement is in good working order, I'll close the return.

However, I have the feeling that a lot of non-buyer buyers might use this advantage to buy goods, claim they're damaged, stall the return process, then keep the refund and the product. Of course, they might regret that if they ever want to buy anything from that seller in the future or if the seller is within driving distance of their homes or might conceivably have friends with baseball bats who live near them.

(But that Chromebook seller refused to pay for return shipping, she was a hopeless case.)

Last Christmas, I bought some Tiles off eBay. Or at least I thought I had; two weeks after payment, I still hadn't received them. I filed a concern with the seller. The seller told me that the post office had inexplicably returned the package to him and that he would resend it. One week later, I still hadn't received them, sent the seller another message -- and eBay simply refunded me. I didn't ask them to do that. I didn't ask them to do anything; I never asked eBay to get involved, but my message caused the transaction to be red-flagged.

A few days after that, the Tiles did arrive in the mail which I could of course have kept for free, but as I had received the Tiles, I contacted the seller and transferred his money back to him. I left him positive feedback. And I contacted eBay and asked that they remove any warning from his account as his item had arrived.

I feel safe buying anything off eBay because eBay clearly has zero support for sellers and is clearly eager to take any opportunity to refund buyers, but I can see how this system could be abused by buyers.

I would probably just stick to the HQ preset for all of Season 1 off the Universal DVD. The close shots are sharpened on HQ but without any of the waxy, airbrushed qualities I've seen in the LQ setting.

In my original upscales, Artemis Low Quality would smear wide shots, especially wide shots with human faces. The Universal DVDs were covered in compression artifacts, so treating it as low quality video seemed best at the time. I limited the upscale to 720p to minimize flattening out the detail in the image.

However, I think Artemis LQ is really meant for cleaning up video covered in compression blocks, video like late 2000s YouTube video at 360p or digitized consumer grade VHS. The resulting Season 1 upscales on LQ were a step up from the DVDs, but still very blurry in addition to being smeared. Seasons 2 - 3 came out well but a bit airbrushed and suffers a bit because it's 720p and the TV has to upscale it by another 50 per cent. I should have upscaled them with the HQ preset to 1080p.

Here's another question to which we may or may not ever know the answer:

What do the NTSC video masters of Season 1 look like? Is the quality the same as my deblocked, decombed/deinterlaced Universal DVD files? Or are the NTSC video masters better than that?

(They probably aren't worse.)

We know from the German blu-ray: the PAL masters of Season 1 are blurry and the colour is washed out. It looks like the NTSC videotape was copied onto PAL format videotape, stretching the video and converting the NTSC colour to the PAL standard.

A 20 per cent increase in size doesn't create that much blurriness in a digital format; it must be the analog duplication process back in 1995 when Universal was preparing for overseas broadcast.

The PAL masters for Seasons 2 - 5 are crisp and detailed, likely because digital videotape duplication retains fidelity and can withstand a 20 per cent increase in size.

All the post-Pilot S1 episodes on the DVD are fuzzy. I used to think it was overcompression. But the blu-ray has the same problem and to a greater extent. The Pilot on blu-ray is blurry compared to the Universal DVDs, but the rest of the Season 1 episodes are even blurrier. That's the PAL master. So what does that NTSC master look like?

I think it's likely that the NTSC masters of the post-Pilot S1 episodes are at a lower level of sharpness than the Pilot and Seasons 2 - 5. But how much lower?

In other news, I recently put my gaming laptop on a stand and directed a small fan at the underside for additional cooling as I upscale Season 1 of SLIDERS yet again. Is this the fourth time? Fifth? Sixth? Will this ever end?

I guess this is as good as it gets for Season 1 in upscaled 1080p.

It looks nice on a TV at living room distance. Some scenes are unfortunately blocky and jagged. It's an improvement on the DVD; the compression artifacts are gone. And that peculiar watercolour look to the shots is reduced.

I'm not sure what you mean. Noise layers are pretty common in video editing software. The problem is that unless the noise is image-forming, it's useless for AI upscaling. Topaz can tell the difference between grain that forms the image and grain that's just a layer on top of the image.

The 1080p Artemis HQ version of "Summer of Love" is an incremental improvement on the LQ upscale -- but the preset keeps inflating some of the compression artifacts that it doesn't fully remove. I'm going to try the two-pass approach: running the HQ preset without making the video any larger and simply removing the artifacts, then running the HQ preset again to raise the resolution losslessly.

I don't know if Grizzlor has interacted with Torme, but RussianCabbie has had at least one lengthy phone call with Torme and if RussianCabbie finds Torme traumatized by Seasons 1 - 3, I'm inclined to take his word for it.

In terms of unofficial works and participation, I find that Torme has a history of ultimately stepping back from such endeavours and I consider it completely understandable. In 2009, Torme began a repeated cycle of events: he would interact with a specific fan, then disappear. He promised EarthPrime.com, over Facebook, a new SLIDERS screenplay, a series finale for SLIDERS. He wrote about one-quarter of an outline (and with a story idea he'd contemplated in 2000). After a few months, Torme deleted his Facebook account and ceased all communication with EarthPrime.

Four years later, in 2013, Torme allowed his number to be purchased/located by a fan whom I shall refer to as "Stephen Jensen" (because the real name is easily searched and identifiable and I don't wish to embarrass anyone). Jensen declared to SLIDERS fans that he was going to get Torme to revive SLIDERS with this phone call. Jensen phoned him and proceeded to blanket Torme in a pitch for a remake of Season 4 in which Wade would be a Kromagg villain and the Colin spy plot and the search for Kromagg Prime and the revelation of the Earth Prime in "Genesis" as a sham would be fulfilled in its entirety. Torme gently explained to Jensen: NBCUniversal holds the rights to SLIDERS, the series creator only owns a small percentage and cannot greenlight a revival.

In addition, Torme said he was unfamiliar with Season 4, didn't know what this search for Kromagg Prime was about, and didn't know the Colin character, nor would he be keen on remaking 1998 episodes in the year 2013. Jensen insisted that a remake of Season 4 would be brilliant and that Torme should do a run of episodes focused on a Kromagg war and produce a remake of "Revelations," blatantly ignoring Torme's explanation that the co-creator alone cannot produce new episodes of SLIDERS.

Torme ended the call by saying that unless Jensen had an agent, Torme could not continue the conversation. Jensen then asked SLIDERS fans to get him an agent to have more phone calls of this nature with Torme, but Torme changed his number.

Can't imagine why.

In 2014, RussianCabbie had his phone call with Torme. RussianCabbie handled it well and listened intensely and did not deluge Torme in fan matters unless they were of actual relevance to Torme. Torme, during this phone call, shared how he lost out on millions of dollars for I AM LEGEND because he'd thrown out his script at an earlier stage of the development process, thinking the movie wouldn't happen, only for his draft to be used as a basis for the eventual movie and with Torme unable to prove his contributions and missing out on payment and credit (aside from being named a co-producer).

RussianCabbie felt that boundaries and politeness did not encourage another phone call and Torme would change his number and become unreachable again.

Why did Torme make repeatedly himself available and then abruptly remove his availability? I don't know for sure, but it's a pattern and I don't find fault with it; it looks to me that SLIDERS will only hold Torme's interest if he is being paid to work on it and that is completely reasonable to me.

I would also speculate that Torme's sudden withdrawals may have also had something to do with the health issues he had around 2016 and up to about 2020. He may have wanted to keep fans out of his personal life and crises; he didn't share these difficulties until describing heart surgery in a 2021 podcast that has gone offline. He lifted that veil on his own terms, but he had and has every right to his privacy.

Why didn't he come through on his EarthPrime project? Tracy Torme is a professional screenwriter and the creator of SLIDERS and it may be inappropriate to expect Torme to write a screenplay for free; yes, he offered, but I don't feel that fans should hold him to that (and we didn't).

If Torme wants to do it and comes through, that's great, but he hasn't before. And really, Torme shouldn't have to engage in labour at his own expense to promote an NBCUniversal property in a fashion that will not see him compensated financially for his time, work and effort while raising the profile of an NBCUniversal copyright that would get them increased exposure and home media sales and streaming figures. If Torme is writing SLIDERS scripts, NBCU needs to pay for them.

In contrast, fans writing fanfic doesn't earn NBCU any money even in a roundabout way.

Realistically, I think it is unlikely you can ever count on getting a screenplay from a professional screenwriter unless you pay them for it; the only free script anyone will ever get out of Torme is I AM LEGEND (and that should never have happened).

For a professional writer, paid screenwriting is always going to come first and fanfic screenwriting and unpaid appearances will likely be a 40th or 50th priority. I think the only way you will really get more SLIDERS stories from Torme is for NBCUniversal to pay him to make them. And if my speculation is true, I think that's fair.

Well, looking at the un-upscaled files direct from DVD and the blu-ray:

The Pilot on the blu-ray is blurrier. And the problem seems to be specific to the Pilot. It looks like for the PAL master of the Pilot, Universal took the NTSC version and simply stretched it from 640x480 to 720x576, meeting the PAL standards but losing image quality.

I'm currently finding it difficult to tell if the other Season 1 episodes suffer from the same problem. They are slightly better on blu-ray than on DVD, but it's possible that the blu-ray versions are only improved because they're not as compressed and have also been stretched from 640x480 to 720x576.

But it's just as possible that the Universal DVD versions have, under that compression, better (but still bad) versions of the Season 1 episodes and those are the files I should have upscaled to HD via the Artemis HQ preset. They looked okay (but not great) on Artemis LQ but the blu-ray SD-files were were smeary and awful after Artemis LQ. Maybe the DVD files are a better starting point for Season 1 with two Artemis HQ passes, one to de-artifact and one to AI upscale.

However, Seasons 2 - 5 blu-ray versions look good and have more film grain than the DVDs, so if they were stretched, the videotape image had sufficient film fidelity to withstand it and not suffer for it.

Well, the issue with the low and medium presets: they remove compression artifacts but add additional pixels to the grain and smooth it out, creating an overly airbrushed, waxy look to the picture. I'm not entirely sure what the results will be if no additional resolution is sought. The idea would be to remove all compression artifacts while leaving a grain-equipped image that Artemis HQ can bring from SD to to 1080p, and it's possible that the results would be better as the algorithm wouldn't be trying to work around compression artifacts on the second pass. But it's possible this would produce the same results as a single pass on the HQ setting.

**

I've been reviewing the upscaled version of the Pilot, this time the SD blu-ray file, AI upscaled via Topaz's Artemis HQ preset to 1080p.

It isn't that different. At times, I thought that the upscaled-from-Turbine version was not as sharp as the upscaled-from-Universal version. But upon closer inspection, the Turbine version is just a little darker than the NTSC versions we've been seeing. The colour is also more blue-green in PAL than the red-green of NTSC.

I think it's probably because PAL is a different colour system from NTSC, but also because the DVD compression will reduce colour range while the blu-ray had no need to compress anything.

The 1080p image doesn't look that different from the Universal version upscaled to 720p and scaled to 1080. It's been a lateral move.

Regarding the upscaling process -- I got some nice results from AI upscaling the BIRDS OF PREY DVD's TV pilot with the HQ video preset. Most of the compression artifacts are gone and the grain remains -- but blurred out backgrounds still have a certain flickery blockiness to it. And when upscaling on the LQ preset, everything looked great but a bit too smoothed out. I'm wondering if a two pass approach is best: use the medium quality or HQ preset to deblock/de-artifact the video without increasing the resolution at all, and then run this new version through the HQ preset to bring it to 1080p.

None of this is necessary for SLIDERS, however, because the blu-ray's version of the PAL masters have no compression artifacts. That said, I am AI upscaling "Into the Mystic" to 1080p; I'm interested to see how well all that Season 2 grain converts to pixel data.

I'm very, very, very mildly torn on this.

On one level, I think it's ridiculous to think that a TV show made decades ago can ever be made to look 'modern.' I also have a certain low level exasperation with 70s and 80s young adult/middle-grade novelists Lois Duncan and Gordon Korman who would, every few years, revise their novels to replace teletypes with fax machines and outdated musical references with current hits -- all of it completely pointless and futile. Stories set in the 'present' eventually become period pieces; the plots of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and ROMEO AND JULIET would not happen with instant messaging and cell phones. It's fine for art to be a product of its time.

The poster child for futile efforts to keep dated works looking 'modern' is George Lucas and his asinine Special Editions which tried to make STAR WARS look like it was filmed in the 90s but only ever looked like a 70s/80s movie series with 90s effects clumsily pasted on top of the frames. These older films and shows and novels don't need to be forced into relevance for a new audience; they found their audience when they were originally released or they failed to do so.

But all you're suggesting is increasing the colour vibrance. I don't think it's harmful to SLIDERS, but I do feel that the low contrast, low saturation look of Season 1 is effective. Parallel worlds don't look like fantasy environments nor do they look like the overpolished TV commercials that Season 3 of SLIDERS often resembles. It's not a theme park version of reality; Season 1 looks like actual reality. Reality can be drab, lacking in rich colours, unpolished and that makes Season 1 all the more real.

And yet, this is instantly undermined with Season 2 which goes for a high contrast look. The colours aren't artificially amped up like in Season 3, but the increased contrast means more saturation.

Season 2 is my favourite visual look for the series with some real effort in making the image more delineated in terms of light and shadow. This is distinctly less unmodified than Season 1. So yes, Season 1 does look great when you raise the saturation a bit. And it would be great for an HDTV presentation.

This leads to another question that may or may not have an answer: is the gray, washed-out look of Season 1 deliberate? Is this actually what was intended by cinematographers Glen MacPherson and Peter Woeste? Or is the lack of colour a failure of videotape? Did the 35mm film, when transferred to what looks like a 240 lines of resolution tape format, lose colour detail and richness in the process? The fine detail and film grain of the image has clearly been muddied; has the chroma data also been diminished by the videotape format as well?

There is no way Season 1 was meant to look like it's in perpetual soft-focus like it does on the PAL masters. So was it also supposed to look like it was desaturated to gray tones?

If Season 1 had been edited on DV instead of U-Matic or such, would it look like Season 2? Was Season 1 actually supposed to look as high contrast as Season 2?

I don't know.

I'm looking in on some of the frames as the Pilot (SD on blu-ray) upscales via Artemis HQ from 576p to 1080p. (I converted the video from interlaced to progressive already.) After upscaling BIRDS OF PREY from DVD, it became clear that the Artemis HQ preset will lift off blockiness caused by scaling or compression, but it doesn't smooth out artifacts and seeks to resolve grain-based detail into pixel-based detail.

Looking at the PAL Pilot through the Topaz magnifying glass, it's clear that the Pilot, while sharper than the other Season 1 episodes, is not as sharp as the Season 2 - 5 episodes either.

My hypothesis is that the Pilot was also edited on a lower grade of videotape than Seasons 2 - 5, but the format was still better than the post-Pilot S1 episodes. I'm thinking that the Pilot was edited in Betacam SP or some other format with about 340 lines of resolution. That could be why the Pilot looks approximately 20 per cent less sharp than, say, "Into the Mystic."

The post-Pilot S1 episodes seem to have been edited on tape with even fewer lines of resolution, likely U-matic, Betamax or 8mm videotape (250 lines of resolution) which would explain why those episodes look only half as crisp as S2 - S5 episodes. And I would guess that from Season 2 onward, the show was edited in a DV or DV equivalent format with around 540 lines of resolution which is why the film grains are so visible afterwards and why the image quality takes such a drastic upswing.

I was rewatching "As Time Goes By" on the SD blu-ray and I have to say, in my opinion, my upscaled version really does not compare. The SD blu-ray lets you see all the weathering on Dennis MacMillan's face and the texture of Quinn and Daelin's flannel. The upscale was smooth and attractive, but overly airbrushed.

However, I think it was also a mistake to use the Artemis Low Quality setting on the upscale; the Artemis High Quality preset would have cleared away the blockiness of the DVD compression but left the film grain texture and the fine detail largely intact (although it would still seem a slightly more airbrushed). I think the Low Quality setting is best for deblocking severely artifacted video (like on the Mill Creek discs), but the Universal DVDs were not as bad as that.

I don't think there's anything in it for non Marvel fans.

Well, I've run a few Season 2 shots through Topaz' high quality preset and it is recognizing those square-looking bits of data as grain. When upscaling the shot from 720x576 to 1474x1080, that graininess is resolved into pixel-rendered detail.

Topaz seems to be able to distinguish between digital noise /compression artifacts and image forming grains. At all presets, image forming grain is resolved into pixel rendering. At presets for low and medium quality video, digital noise and artifacts are filtered out; at the high quality preset, digital noise and artifacts are ignored.

I think there are probably some differences in personal taste when it comes to aesthetics and priorities here when comparing the blu-ray to DVDs or streaming services.

In my highly personal opinion, the German blu-ray release's SD files are superior to the upscales of the Universal/Mill Creek DVDs. Others have disagreed. Cez (of LEGO SLIDERS) and I have been comparing upscaled DVDs to the SD blu-ray. Cez prefers the upscaled DVD files of Seasons 2 - 5 episodes, he says that they look cleaner and are at a higher resolution; the blu-ray SD files are covered in a grainy texture that looks, to him, like they're fuzzy, rough standard definition files that are trying to punch above their weight on an HDTV.

In contrast, a Topaz-upscaled DVD file looks clean, clear, and like it belongs on an HDTV. And I understand that.

I think that if you're looking up close at an AI upscaled DVD file, you might like how AI has cleaned up the rough noise of the videotape, smoothed it out, resolved it and added additional pixels to render it with clarity. In contrast, the blu-ray's video quality has a flickering noise texture to it that might be seen as pixelation to some and it's stretched from 576 to anywhere from 1080 to 2100 pixels high, so up close, that may seem like it isn't as clearly defined as the upscale.

However, to me, I prefer that pixelation because when watched at a living room distance, I see detail, texture and minute visual elements and I imagine that the smoother look in other releases is just file compression and the NTSC masters being 20 per cent smaller than the PAL versions. Seen at a sensible separation, that noisy pixelation is strands of hair, pores in skin, perforations in clothing.

Now that I understand that the Topaz HQ preset is designed to resolve grain into pixel detail, I can see that Seasons 2 - 5 would actually benefit greatly from being run through Topaz's HQ algorithm. All that grain in the image that some people dislike, upscaled from 576 to 1080 pixels high, would become pixel-rendered detail whether seen up close or at living room distance.

Personally, I am satisfied with the blu-ray as is. But Universal is capable of taking their PAL masters and performing an AI grain-to-pixel conversion on Seasons 2 - 5 and creating an excellent 1080p version of these seasons that would please Cez and RussianCabbie. The technology is there. The files are available (in PAL).

And Season 1 -- the PAL version looks to me like an okay DVD on the blu-ray and when scaled to an HDTV, it looks like a slightly below average DVD. When AI upscaled for an HDTV, it goes back to looking like an okay DVD at 1080p, no improvement, but also no degradation. It's possible that AI upscaling technology will improve and be able to fix the fuzziness of Season 1. There may be other AI upscaling technology out there now that I haven't personally encountered or heard of.

Sorry to hear blu-ray playback is problematic. I have not experienced anything you describe, but I can see why some of what you describe is happening.

Turbine used PAL masters and is based in Germany, so their blu-ray is PAL. PAL video is played at 25 frames per second, but you may be using an NTSC player and NTSC is 30 frames per second, so your XBox may be playing the disc 20 per cent faster than designed and unable to sync the audio. That's also why the voices are sped up and high pitched.

Are there Xbox display settings to enable PAL framerates?

I'm not sure why my North American blu-ray player didn't have these issues; it was a bargain basement purchase. I'm surprised that it can accommodate PAL discs. My player has no upscaling whatsoever and my TV also doesn't have any upscaling aside from a noise reduction filter (which I've turned off). It is a monitor with poor speakers (plugged into a small PC subwoofer bought for $20 years ago).

I was happy with the Season 2 - 5 video quality, but I'm only watching it on a 55 inch TV (about one-fifth smaller than yours).

My external blu-ray drive was able to read the disc, but I've never tried to play the disc on my computer, just copy the files as MKVs for upscaling experiments for home viewing. The file framerate is 25 frames per second. Also, I've learned that PAL resolution is 720 x 576, that's why it's higher than the 480i files on the North American DVDs.

I finished upscaling "Luck of the Draw" to a 960x1080 file and it looks okay. The Topaz HQ video preset ensures that it went from 576 to 1080 without losing what clarity it had. The SD blu-ray file, when scaled to HDTV, was fuzzier due to the TV and Android TV box stretch.

The thing about stretching the Season 2 - 5 SD blu-ray files to an HDTV scale: the quality of those video files is so good that any added fuzziness is quite low because the files are in such good quality and clarity that losing a little doesn't make much difference. Season 1, however, doesn't have much quality to lose.

With the HQ preset scaling Season 1 episodes to 1080, Topaz has done the stretch so the TV won't have to. Nothing is gained, but nothing is lost. The image isn't better, but watching it on an HDTV won't make it worse. I'm going to do the other S1 episodes too, if only for myself.

**

I think Topaz might have further value as a noise and grain reduction process, but it's currently far too slow to be practical. Going back to CHUCK, a TV series shot on 16mm film: it is a very grainy looking show and every scene is covered in a pattern of static that's very solid and obstructive. Digital noise reduction is loathed by many film connoisseurs because it blurs out the underlying detail as well as the grain itself and many film restorationists urge viewers to enjoy and appreciate all the grain and never try to reduce it.

However, I imagine most of these purists aren't watching 16mm film projects made by relatively low budget TV shows. I don't intend to create new files for CHUCK, but just as an experiment, I ran a few shots from the pilot through Topaz's HQ preset and realized: Topaz's algorithm has created a 'denoised' version of CHUCK that has taken that grain and rebuilt it as pixel detail; the details within it are still present, but the random static over the image is gone.

This could be incredibly beneficial to 16mm restorations where you lose an obnoxious, unhelpful texture but the detail underneath is fully resolved as crisp pixel rendering.

DAWSON'S CREEK is currently available in HD on Netflix and as a 16mm film image, it's very noisy as well, but not to the degree of CHUCK, likely because the scan processing has lightly muted the grainy texture. However, Topaz could take DAWSON'S CREEK and re-render that those grains into pixel clarity.

The issue, unfortunately: my computer would have needed 28 hours to re-render the CHUCK pilot from grain to pixel. In contrast, I ran CHUCK's pilot through a denoise filter in Handbrake which simply applied a filter to lightly reduce the noise. 13 minutes later, CHUCK had a new file for the pilot: the static pattern of the noise was now a slightly diminished cloud, faded out, present but not prominent, and the underlying image had a slight loss of detail due to blurring out the noise; it was maybe 5 per cent less sharp.

I recognize that my computer is a aged gaming laptop (i7, SSD, 32GB of RAM, 4GB VRAM) and that this machine was considered a low grade machine even when I originally bought it. And that professional video editing computers would be so much faster. But I think most video distributors would go for the filter and a small, barely perceptible loss of sharpness since the AI option would take 129 times longer.

Topaz isn't currently practical for grain-to-pixel conversion on a 1080p scan of 16mm film, but maybe someday it'll get there.

Well, if you look at the screencaps from earlier, you can compare the faces. You can see all the lines and grooves on Kari Wuhrer's face because the smaller 16mm film is, when reduced to standard definition videotape, only reducing the 16mm film grains to about 53 per cent of their original size (operating on the presumption that 16mm film is only worth scanning at 2K/1080p because any higher resolution yields no further fidelity).

In contrast, Wade's face in the Season 2 screencaps is slightly fuzzier with less pixel contrast. That strikes me as the result of reducing 35mm film grains to about 27 per cent of their original size (assuming 35mm film has a maximum scan resolution of 4K/2100 pixels high). Grain-composed images aren't like pixel-based images because not all grains are the same size. The smaller you make the grains, the less you can see the details in the grains.

In terms of upscaling: Topaz has a tendency to smooth out grain in extrapolating pixels to add into a larger-sized image. I found that increasing the image by 50 per cent (480 pixels high to 720 pixels high) made the image presentable on an HDTV, lifted compression artifacts and made effective use of the grain while leaving a little at the end. However, upscaling the image beyond that (480 pixels to 1080 pixels) removed all the grain completely and without grain, the image looked more like it had been painted than photographed.

I've seen this odd phenomenon with the STARGATE blurays which were 576i master tapes upscaled to 1080p; everything's just too smooth and flattened out (although after watching for a bit, I get used to it).

In my final SLIDERS REBORN script, I remember writing a role in for Montague and thinking, "TF would be so proud of me for this."

I have actually harboured a suspicion for decades that Montague was not exactly what he appeared to be. His presence in Arturo's class is peculiar; he isn't just struggling to grapple with Arturo's mathematical conundrum, he seems intimidated and avoidant. He clearly doesn't want to be there, yet to be in this advanced graduate level study of select students, he would have had to put tremendous effort into getting there.

"Summer of Love" is also peculiar in that Quinn Mallory's disappearance along with Wade, Rembrandt and the Professor is being investigated as a federal case rather than a municipal or state matter. The incident, which would be easily dismissed as a crank hallucination by most law enforcement agencies, has been elevated to a high echelon of investigation.

My suspicion is that Montague was not actually a physics student at all, but an FBI agent planted in the Professor's class who lacked any actual scientific training and was advised to cower in the face of any questions (because he didn't have the ability to answer them and this could maintain his cover).

My suspicion is that in "Summer of Love," the FBI didn't come to investigate Quinn's disappearance, but that they had been watching him all along; they had been investigating the disappearance of Michael Mallory, a renowned physicist and engineer who had vanished after a car crash which the FBI determined had been staged with the medical records forged, the death certificate bought and the actual body missing.

This was further advanced by Tracy Torme himself who informed fans in private conversations: he had planned to reveal that the Michael Mallory was alive with the thought that the sliders would make it home, but find Michael present and think they had the wrong Earth when they didn't.

Why had Michael faked his death? Torme had a number of possibilities but was not commited to any: he might have abandoned his family for selfish reasons, he might have gone into hiding to protect Amanda and Quinn from dark powers wanting his scientific skills for malevolent reasons, powers who might threaten his wife and son. However, Torme never got around to using this idea and other paths presented themselves for Michael Mallory.

In this context, it becomes clear that Montague is a person who has spent his life unable to assert himself, unable to speak for himself, whose utter lack of distinction in every area of life allowed him to acquire a security clearance and work in a clerical position at the FBI as his life was too boring to pose any security risk whatsoever; Montague cannot attract attention from waiters in a restaurant, cannot be forceful in ringing a doorbell, and is the perfect covert agent to position in Quinn Mallory's life as a near-invisible student, observing, waiting, recording and reporting.

But in the course of these tasks, Montague discovers he has a talent; he can find the breaking point in cold cases. He has a gift for stumbling into previously unrevealed information as people forget he's in the room and confess scraps of information that lead to exposing cover-ups and conspiracies. He has a proficiency in occupying a room unnoticed and unseen, absorbing smaller details that otherwise go unnoticed, and identifying motives and methods that would otherwise go unrecovered.

In the years that have passed, Montague has in his meandering through life solved approximately five cold cases a month. The only cold case he cannot solve, the only cold case that haunts him day and night: the disappearances of Quinn and Michael Mallory.

It is 27 years since the Mallory son vanished, years after the Mallory father disappeared. The time has come. His greatest mystery may finally be resolved. Clearly, SLIDERS' revival will be focused on the hero who was standing unseen in plain sight right from the very beginning.

Surely NBCUniversal will commission a new SLIDERS series on the strength of Montague alone. For this is the moment. The moment of Montague.

I've sent Turbine another message asking if they received digital files or tapes. No response (yet?).

I wonder why Season 1 looks so different from Season 2 - 5 onward. One theory of mine was that the film to tape process involved some sort of denoise process (which is common for effects shots, but it seems to have been applied to all scenes all post-Pilot Season 1 episodes).

I'm also wondering if it's a videotape medium situation. SLIDERS' first season was filmed in 1994 - 1995; I wonder if maybe the Pilot was edited on something like Digital Betacam (540 lines of resolution) or Hi8 (420 lines of resolution). And maybe the subsequent episodes were edited on some lower quality videotape format like 8mm tape, U-Matic or Betamax (250 lines of resolution). It would certainly explain the loss of sharpness going from the Pilot to "Summer of Love." The Pilot episode would have been filmed and edited some time before the subsequent episodes and at a higher budget than the rest, possibly on a pricier videotape format.

In 1995, Panasonic introduced the DV format (540 lines of resolution) and I can see that leading to non-Panasonic 540 line video formats to become cheaper to compete. Season 2 began filming in October 1995 and the massive leap in sharpness after "Luck of the Draw" is obvious; "Into the Mystic" is razor sharp. It's possible that a switch to a new videotape format for editing and effects is why the video quality of Season 1 is so below that of Season 2 onward.

There is also another massive leap forward in video quality for Seasons 4 - 5 which are far more detailed than any Season 2 - 3 episodes. That one's easier to explain: the grain is obviously that of 16mm film. It's less than half the size (and resolution) of 35mm film; the image is composed of much larger grains, and those grains survive a film to tape transfer more resiliently than 35mm film.