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2021-10-25 09:47:43

I found the LQ preset made everything even blurrier than it already was for these episodes whereas HQ left it alone. It isn't better, but it isn't worse. The flaws in the 1080p image were already there in the 480i version.

2021-10-25 04:34:05

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":

2021-10-24 18:43:15

I think it might seem a peculiar proposition: of the 88 episodes of SLIDERS, 80 can be upscaled via plug-and-play, but eight need the original negatives rescanned. A distributor would probably elect to upscale all 88 even if eight would be below the standard of the rest.

**

The STARGATE SG1 blu-ray isn't bad, but that doesn't make it good. The distributors were way, way, way too aggressive with digital noise reduction, making their upscaled video files shockingly hazy, smoothing out most of the fine detail. This process appears to be separate from their upscale process because they applied the same denoise effect to the last three seasons, creating a waxy, detail-diminished look to them as well. Their box advertises this as a "Super Clean" video image, but it would be more accurate to call it "Moderately Blurry."

**

Would you be inclined to look up the instructions and devise a process for DeepFake where we replace Clinton's face with Cleavant's in "The King is Back"? I have the hardware, but I lack the knowledge. We could post clips of all the Clinton scenes here; that wouldn't be the whole episode, just a selection to show proof of concept.

**

I've finished upscaling Season 1 to 1080p via Artemis HQ, including the Pilot. I'm now attempting an upscale of "Into the Mystic" from 576i to 1080p with Artemis HQ, just to see what we'd get.

2021-10-24 18:10:13

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.

2021-10-24 08:26:20

RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:

ireactions wrote:
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.
Interesting. . I was thinking it was a couple minutes of content per 43m episode. We get our vortex shots but most of it is practical. As you said, s3 is where they ramp up that stuff.
12 percent would be about 4 to 5 minutes per episode. You know the material better than I.

Well, without the billboard shots, the swarm, the flood, the shark, the oil wells and the asteroid, I would have put the effects at seven per cent (three minutes per episode). I'm just guessing. We could probably calculate it down to the second. It's only eight episodes after the pilot.

I wonder if at some point, we'll get software that can create computer generated models from the frames of the Season 1 episodes and rebuild the episodes as photorealistic computer animations that mimic the standard definition image but at HD levels. Alternatively, we'd just get better upscaling technology that can sharpen even without the grain.

One effect that I do think we could do as fans although I don't know how yet; I would like to use DeepFake technology on "The King is Back" and replace Clinton's face with Cleavant's.

2021-10-24 07:24:02

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.

2021-10-23 17:30:13

"Prince of Wails" upscaled via Artemis HQ to 1080p is another example of how Handbrake can take off all the interlacing lines and Topaz can lift away all the compression artifacts from the Universal DVD. But once the lines and artifacts are gone, the image underneath doesn't have enough grain for Topaz to improve it. It can increase the size losslessly, but the blurriness at 480i remains intact at 1080p.

2021-10-23 15:04:17

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.)

2021-10-23 14:07:58

This is how "The King is Back" looks after the HQ preset takes the Universal version to 1080p. I guess we have gone from VHS quality to adequate DVD quality.

2021-10-23 09:37:14

ireactions wrote:

Recently bought a Samsung Chromebook 3 for exactly $0. That's right, $0. It was very strange: I ordered a lightly used 32GB model on eBay and received a lightly used 16GB model. When I contacted the seller, she promptly replied, "It said no returns in my ad! You don't like it, too bad! No refund!" eBay promptly took the seller's funds out of her PayPal account and gave me a full refund and told me that as the seller refused to provide return shipping, I should keep the Chromebook and do what I liked with it.

RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:

She definitely handled it poorly but ebay could have at least given her a heads up as not everyone has the funds to lose a sale like that.

ireactions wrote:

I can assure you that I warned her and did so before asking eBay to intervene. I sent her a message quoting passages from eBay's specific policies, including:
"Even if you specify no returns accepted, under the eBay Money Back Guarantee, the buyer can still return an item if it doesn’t match the listing description"
"In some instances, we may not require that an item be returned to the seller"
"For example: if the return request was opened because the item was not as described"
"Or if the seller did not provide a return shipping label"
"This User Agreement, the Mobile Application Terms of Use, and all policies and additional terms posted on and in our sites, applications, tools and services (collectively "Services") set out the terms on which eBay offers you access to and use of our Services."

RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:

Sorry to hear that. Some people are entirely unreasonable. And though it's not common to run into them, you never know what you're gonna get with these sorts of things.

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.

2021-10-22 15:49:02

One show that seemed to suffer a lot of SLIDERS' problems: THE DEAD ZONE. This 2002 - 2007 TV series was an adaptation of a novel by Stephen King that had been previously adapted to film in 1983.

I've always wondered why THE DEAD ZONE, a brilliant, visionary TV show fell apart so badly. Seeing lead actor Anthony Michael Hall in a supporting role in HALLOWEEN KILLS last week made me look back.

Examining THE DEAD ZONE's history now, it seems to come down two specific areas. First, the original showrunner reduced his involvement to almost nothing and wasn't there to maintain his vision due to a mild case of death. And second, the show went from a major(ish) broadcast network in UPN to a cable TV channel (USA Network), and a cable TV network had great difficulty in funding a show created for a much more expensive business model.

Star Trek Staffers
THE DEAD ZONE was brought to TV by two STAR TREK: NEXT GEN and VOYAGER writer-producers: Michael Piller and Joe Menosky. Piller had a reputation for highly detailed characterization, Menosky made a name for himself writing bizarre high concept science fiction. This partnership made DEAD ZONE a bizarre procedural drama-comedy in which schoolteacher Johnny Smith (Anthony Michael Hall) develops tactile psychic abilities where touching any object or person brings visions of the past and the future.

Bold Enterprise
Season 1 debuted on USA Network in June 2002. These first 13 episodes were a lavish visual banquet as Johnny's visions were rendered in stunning special effects sequences: frozen landscapes, morphing, slow motion surroundings with Johnny moving at normal speed, showing Johnny peering backwards and forwards in time and using his knowledge in the present to prevent harm, violence, injury, loss and other horrific events that would almost happen but would be averted by a good-hearted psychic.

THE DEAD ZONE could be a cop show, a romcom, an espionage thriller, a disaster film, a high school drama, a hockey movie -- all filtered through the lens of the psychic. The show was a ratings hit and renewed for a second season of 13 episodes on USA Network that began in January 2003, eagerly capitalizing on the popularity of the first season. The show seemed to be stepping towards a very bright future.

Season 1 had been so successful that USA Network ordered another 13 episodes for Season 2. Judging from Season 2, the budget was the same and likely even a little higher to accommodate the cast salary increases that would have come with a second season. And this January to April 2003 season was so successful that UPN ordered another six episodes for Season 2 to air in the summer from July to August 2003.

A New Captain
At this point, THE DEAD ZONE hit personnel problems. Joe Menosky had moved on. And worse: visionary showrunner Michael Piller was extremely sick.

Piller had been diagnosed with head and neck cancer years ago but kept working on VOYAGER and launching new shows like THE DEAD ZONE and rewriting every DEAD ZONE script before filming. But he was apparently too sick to run the writers' room anymore; the thirteenth episode of Season 2 was his last.

Writer Karl Schaefer, creator of hyper-eccentric shows like EERIE INDIANA and STRANGE LUCK, was brought in as Piller's replacement. It was kept quiet; Piller retained his executive producer credit and was promoting the show, but Schaefer was now in charge of THE DEAD ZONE's writers' room with some consultation from Piller.

Turbulence
The extra six episodes under Schaefer were hit and miss: there were three episodes that delved deeply into the strangeness of Johnny's powers romantically, in terms of espionage, and in visions of the distant future. However, there were also three standalone episodes that were entirely standalone containing no running arcs and no ongoing character elements.

The three on-brand episodes seemed like THE DEAD ZONE as its usual self. But the three standalones seemed like what one would expect for a cable TV show: inexpensive, assuming a casual summer audience that might not be inclined to follow the show too closely and avoiding any elements that would carry into another episode. They were oddly conventional for the creator of EERIE INDIANA.

The First Budget Cut
USA Network ordered a third season of THE DEAD ZONE for summer 2004, but these 13 episodes under Karl Schaefer showed further changes to the series format and production model. While they aired in the summer like Season 1 and the additional six of Season 2, the budget had been cut. The second female lead of the show had been dropped, her character disappearing without explanation. In addition, the lavish special effects for Johnny's visions were absent from five of the episodes, a budget-saving measure that wasn't present in the show's first 26 episodes.

Episodic Isolation
The format also shifted. Season 1 and 2 had started many arcs: Johnny's gradual discovery of his powers and new applications of his abilities, visions of a distant and apocalyptic future, investigating a deranged politician who became a recurring character and was the catalyst to the future Armageddon that Johnny had foreseen. While Armageddon was only the focus of two episodes in Season 2, Johnny's investigation into the matter was featured prominently throughout Season 2.

Season 3 abandoned this ongoing approach: the Season 3 premiere and finale two parters would focus on Armageddon; the episodes in between would not address it outside of one mention. Ongoing arcs like Johnny's rising fame, his need for a security system to protect him from stalkers, his increasing relevance to US intelligence agencies, his increasing control and widening application of his psychic powers -- all this vanished. The show switched to crimes of the week with little to no personal development for Johnny's character or the Armageddon arc.

The change was jarring and frustrating; Season 2 had kept working at the Armageddon arc; Season 3 refused to acknowledge it for the bulk of its episodes. Season 3 was now structured episodically with standalones -- much like most cable TV shows that aired in the summers.

Crime Prevention Becomes Crime Solving
Season 3 also featured a peculiar shift in the writing. Seasons 1 - 2 had featured Johnny Smith foreseeing some terrible event and trying to prevent it. Season 3 changed to Johnny trying to solve crimes after they had happened.

Numerous writers from Seasons 1 - 2 were still working on the show; it seems evident in retrospect that this preventative approach in plots had come from Michael Piller rewriting his staff's scripts for the first 26 episodes of the show. Piller was no longer able to do so and Schaefer's approach could not maintain Piller's sensibilities nor did USA Network wish him to.

Why was USA Network refusing to fund THE DEAD ZONE at its full budget when it was so successful? And why did they force THE DEAD ZONE into a rigidly standalone format?

Cable vs. Broadcast
Looking at the show now, THE DEAD ZONE was too expensive for a cable channel like USA Network.

Seasons 1 - 2 had stunning special effects, extensive location filming, large numbers of extras -- vastly exceeding the low budget procedurals and dramedies usually on basic cable like USA Network. It was shot on 35mm film except for special effects sequences which were shot digitally. What was such a lavishly produced TV show doing on a cable network?

The answer: THE DEAD ZONE had originally been ordered by UPN, a major broadcaster that went into financial and structural turmoil as it shifted from Paramount Television to CBS in 2002; THE DEAD ZONE was likely approved by the outgoing Paramount team but unwanted by the incoming CBS regime. But it was too late for CBS to get their money back. THE DEAD ZONE had been ordered, funded and 13 episodes had been filmed.

Glass Ceiling
USA Network picked it up. USA Network broadcast the first season of a show that was much more costly than the usual USA Network fare. Ratings were strong at 6 million viewers in Season 1, so USA Network renewed it for a second season at the same financial scale, hoping for even greater ratings and ad revenue.

But THE DEAD ZONE's audience didn't grow in Season 2; it remained in the 5 - 6 million range, hitting the upper limits of how many viewers it could reach on cable. USA Network didn't cancel it, but they slashed its budget for Season 3 and mandated that THE DEAD ZONE be more episodic like their other shows, allowing them to move episode orders around for ads and marketing.

Summer vs. Fall
And creatively, THE DEAD ZONE had been an odd fit for USA Network which generally aired short seasons of original content in the summer, outside the shadow of the fall debuts of major network shows.

USA Network's summer programs were oriented towards casual audiences; audiences who might watch an episode now and then if summer activities weren't in the way. USA Network's pool of potential viewers was smaller than major networks, so they wanted their original shows to require little to no familiarity with previous episodes.

Season 1's ongoing format couldn't be changed because the 13 episodes had already been finished when USA Network picked them up after UPN had discarded them. Season 2 had been funded with the hope that THE DEAD ZONE's unique qualities and unexpected success would grow.

The audience didn't grow for Season 2. For Season 3, USA Network decided to make THE DEAD ZONE more standalone (generic) and with its budget retailored to cable TV (by being cheaper).

Flickers of Life
However, Michael Piller was still involved in the season premieres and finales. For the Season 3 finale, episodes 12 - 13, Piller collaborated with Karl Schaefer on setting up a Season 4 storyline: Johnny Smith's psychic powers were killing him.

Season 3's twelfth episode had Johnny experiencing blackouts and headaches that rendered him unconscious. A doctor revealed: without brain surgery that would likely remove his psychic abilities, Johnny would die. The thirteenth episode was scripted and filmed to have Johnny suffer a gunshot wound to the head; he would survive, but brain surgery would now be impossible, meaning Season 4 would have Johnny trying to prevent his visions of Armageddon before his psychic visions killed him.

Piller drafted a Season 4 series bible to lay out the direction.

Truncation and Retooling
USA Network allowed the Season 3 finale to be filmed but then abruptly interfered; they refused to air the finale. Instead, THE DEAD ZONE's third season ended with only 12 of the 13 episodes broadcast, stalling the intended cliffhanger of Season 3.

The network renewed THE DEAD ZONE again, but with another round of financial changes. First, they ordered 23 episodes to be filmed, but it would be Season 4&5 and with another budget cut. USA Network would air the first 12 episodes in 2005 as Season 4 and the next 11 in 2006 as Season 5, getting two seasons but only paying for one, meaning they would only have to cover one year of cast salary increases instead of two.

This new budget cut also meant Johnny's psychic visions would be rendered with even fewer effects and even more infrequently.

USA Network also ordered creative changes. In 2005, USA Network had decided to focus its original programming on lighthearted, casual viewing rather than serious drama with running arcs. The term for this was "blue skies programming." USA Network dictated that the next 23 episodes of THE DEAD ZONE would match the light tone of all their other shows; they declared that Piller's intended arc for Season 4 -- Johnny racing against his failing body and impending death to prevent Armageddon -- would not be allowed.

USA Network decreed that the unbroadcast Episode 13 of Season 3 would be reshot as the Season 4 premiere -- and that Johnny's fatal medical condition was to be removed from the storyline entirely so that Season 4/5 would have only standalone episodes.

Surrender
Piller acquiesced; he oversaw the re-scripting Episode 13 of Season 3 as the Season 4 premiere. The rescripting was sloppy and clumsy and shockingly beneath Piller's usual standard, likely due to his illness.

The truncated Season 3 had ended with Johnny being diagnosed with a fatal neurological disorder that could only be treated with surgery, constantly collapsing with debilitating headaches and being hit with another headache that knocked him out at the end of the shortened Season 3.

Season 4 opened with Johnny waking up in the hospital, checking himself out, and never referring to his neurological disorder again. Johnny being on the verge of death due to his psychic visions was the (de-facto) Season 3 cliffhanger. He would die without brain surgery. This was completely forgotten and went unaddressed for the remainder of THE DEAD ZONE; the second episode of Season 4 had Johnny solving crimes in perfect physical condition with no explanation.

Strictly Standalone
The failure to address Johnny's illness was a massive, gaping hole in the series' narrative. But USA Network had demanded it. Under their rule, THE DEAD ZONE's fourth and fifth seasons were comprised of standalone episodes. There was no running characterization and no ongoing arcs.

For Season 4&5, there would be two premieres, two finales and two mid-season episodes that would address the Armageddon threat. But there would be no progression to the threat, just a reminder that it was coming at some unspecified future date. The episodes between premiere and finale had no continuity links and could air in any order.

From Creator to Consultant
Perhaps Michael Piller could have found away around USA Network's mandates; they'd likely wanted such changes as early as Season 2. He had found ways to keep the myth-arc subtle in Season 2, to have ongoing characterization across standalone episodes. But Piller had been too sick to run his show in Season 3 and was even sicker for Season 4&5.

Karl Schaefer had left after Season 3 and a new executive producer, Tommy Thompson, supposedly took charge of the writers' room Season 4&5, presumably consulting with Piller. Yet, despite Piller's name being on all the episodes of Seasons 4&5 as executive producer, Piller was barely involved.

Phoning In
According to production diaries shared with fans, Piller was so sick for Season 4&5 that he could no longer travel to the writers' room; he gave his feedback on instant messenger and video calls, and his health required that these consultations be short.

In production notes and audio commentaries, Piller's direct involvement was only cited in the Season 4 premiere and one Season 5 episode. Of the 23 episodes, only eight seem to contain Piller's touch. Only eight featured Johnny Smith trying to prevent something terrible before it happened; the rest had him crime solving afterwards.

After Season 4 aired, Piller passed away from head and neck cancer.

8/23
For the most part, Season 4&5's 23 episodes confined all emotional development and characterization to the guest-stars while Johnny and his supporting cast would receive little if any character progression at all. And with the Season 4&5 budget cut, Johnny's once lavish visions were now reduced to editing tricks and Johnny describing off-camera visions in dialogue.

Seasons 4&5 were such bland, empty, lifeless procedurals; it was a shock to see how a vividly unique show in Seasons 1 - 2 had become, by Season 4&5, so generic, so conventional, so predictable and so vacant.

Season 3 had somewhat diminished the unique aspects of THE DEAD ZONE; with Seasons 4&5, they were gone completely. Johnny's celebrity status was never referred to. Johnny's visions were no longer immersive, so there was no sense of how they affected his daily life. Johnny's professional life vanished; he was simply a psychic detective. Johnny's ongoing family issues were flattened out for the standalone. Johnny's powers were now an expository device that didn't affect him psychologically and had no impact on his relationships.

Filming First Drafts
It became clear that the original strengths of THE DEAD ZONE's writing had come from Michael Piller rewriting all the scripts in Seasons 1 - 2. And in Piller's absence, USA Network had taken their continuity-equipped, special effects spectacular show, and made it look as episodic and as cheap as their other cable shows.

It's unclear how much Seasons 3 - 5 of THE DEAD ZONE were due to incompetence or uncaring. Certainly, Piller had a gift for handling budgetary issues and mandates from above with cleverness, grace and ingenuity; it's possible that the Season 3 - 5 team had hoped for Piller's guidance only for him to be unable to give it except to a very limited extent.

Leaderless
Throughout Seasons 3 - 5, there was poor script editing leading to ongoing character threads and arcs disappearing. There was a lack of focus on the lead characters and a loss of the show's in-house style. This indicated a serious lack of leadership, suggesting that in Piller's absence, only his administrative functions had been reassigned.

It also suggested that despite Piller being too sick to work on the show anymore, no one had been tasked or empowered to take over Piller's creative role in stewarding, managing and rewriting all scripts. Instead, THE DEAD ZONE's only leader became the network's mandates.

While every show has to deal with the network, it's up to the showrunner to meet these requirements with charm, zeal, cleverness and wit. THE DEAD ZONE's third season seemed to have its actual showrunner, Piller, coming into work only for the premiere and finale. And Season 4&5 seemed to have no showrunner at all.

There was also, at least in the press, a marked unwillingness to even mention Piller's lack of involvement or illness. He was credited as executive producer for Season 3 and Season 4&5 and presented as leading the show. Producers Karl Schaefer and Tommy Thompson had their names and titles confined to the post-opening credits; every episode faded to black and to put Michael Piller's executive producer title first.

Only after Piller died was it revealed that he had been sick for years and that his work on Season 4&5 had been confined to individual episodes and via instant messaging and video calls from home.

Another New Captain
With Season 6, THE DEAD ZONE saw another budget cut for its 2007 season: filming was moved from the already inexpensive Vancouver to the cheaper Montreal. Season 3 had already laid off one regular actor; Season 6 laid off another three. Location filming became near non-existent after the halfway point of the season; entire episodes were filmed indoors on standing sets.

However, the writing took an upswing for the first six episodes. A new showrunner, Scott Shepherd, had been hired. Shepherd was empowered to lead the writers' room. The studio had been trying to hire him since Season 4, apparently, but he'd been unavailable until Season 6. Shepherd had been a staff writer on the FOX show TRU CALLING which featured Eliza Dushku as a woman who could relive the same day twice; Shepherd was an excellent choice to assume Michael Piller's position.

A New-Old Course
Shepherd's talents were instantly obvious; Season 6 opened with respectful exits for the departing cast members and a return to Johnny Smith as a crime preventer rather than a crime solver. The Season 6 premiere also disposed of the Armageddon arc in fashion that, while perfunctory, acknowledged that it had stretched on too long and wouldn't be allowed to flourish on a cable network that wanted standalone episodes.

Shepherd was able to meet USA Network's demands for episodic adventures while still incorporating ongoing character development. He steered the show back to stories with compelling applications of Johnny's psychic abilities. While he didn't have Piller's gift for characterization or Joe Menosky's inventiveness, Shepherd understood the direction and aimed towards the same goals as the originators of the show.

Out of Gas
But halfway through the season, the show went off the rails again from a production standpoint. With the seventh episode of the year, Johnny's visions were suddenly limited to editing tricks, filming was confined to as few locations as possible with no extras, location filming went from limited to non-existent and every episode became a bottle episode. The season finale was filmed almost entirely on the standing sets.

It looked like the initial six episodes had depleted the budget and left the show with almost nothing; scripts now had to struggle to write stories for a psychic without showing his psychic visions except in the limited fashion possible or to avoid requiring any onscreen visions at all. Despite valiant efforts from the writers, the lack of budget created an onscreen visual tedium.

But with the budget so low and the ratings fairly solid, the DEAD ZONE team expected a seventh season and ended their sixth year with a cliffhanger.

Dead Zone Dies
USA Network cancelled THE DEAD ZONE after the sixth season. Their brief explanation was that the show was too expensive to renew.

This meant: despite USA Network laying off four actors, moving to a filming location cheaper than Vancouver, reducing the effects budget to nearly nothing and having the show filming almost all of its last six installments as bottle episodes, THE DEAD ZONE was still too expensive for cable TV.

Why did USA Network struggle with THE DEAD ZONE's budget so much?

It was probably due to cast contracts that were signed when THE DEAD ZONE was budgeted to air on UPN. The cast salaries were likely set at a pay rate for a high UPN budget instead of a lower cable budget. These increases wouldn't have been very negotiable for the lifespan of the series; USA Network was paying surviving THE DEAD ZONE cast members more every year while trying to make THE DEAD ZONE's episodes for less.

Laying off a cast member for Season 3 and three cast members for Season 6 had allowed USA Network to keep cutting the budget for cable while still renewing the show. But after Season 6, the ad revenue was not increasing and the show was down to two original leads. There was nothing left to cut.

Fit and Finish
THE DEAD ZONE is perhaps an example of how: for a TV show to be successful and sustainable, it must be matched correctly to its broadcaster. THE DEAD ZONE was a major network show with a major network budget that proved difficult to sustain when it ended up airing on cable TV.

THE DEAD ZONE is also, perhaps, an example of how a showrunner needs to steward his staff. Michael Piller was a brilliant screenwriter and he ran his show beautifully. However, once he wasn't running it any more, the quality crashed; his approach had been to rewrite every staff script with his own sensibilities; he didn't train his subordinates to appreciate the strengths of the show and to maintain them in his absence and for three seasons, the show had no leader.

To be fair, Piller was ill even when working on Seasons 1 and 2 and may not have had the health to be a teacher, but there was also Joe Menosky who has been producing STAR TREK: DISCOVERY and THE ORVILLE as of late. A showrunner must tutor their staff so that the staff understand how to keep the show going.

It's a deep shame that THE DEAD ZONE really only has two good seasons and a scattered handful of gems across its 80 episode run. The TV show was the second adaptation of the property.

Maybe there will someday be a third.

2021-10-22 06:09:02

RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:

I ask because it would seem like if one were to make the perfect restoration (absent of anything but dvds), that, theoretically (i only mean theoretically), would S1 (not pilot) be best on LQ for close shots, maybe MQ for medium shots and HQ for wide shots (and maybe medium)?

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.

2021-10-21 17:23:26

RussianCabbie talked to Torme and thinks Torme had post traumatic slide syndrome. JWSlider3 refutes this and also talked to Torme.

I'm going to split the difference and say that Torme was not eager to revisit an obnoxious, annoying, rage-inducing period of his life in 2014 but is significantly more enthused as of 2020.

2021-10-21 17:21:08

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?

2021-10-21 05:16:03

I'm sad that I couldn't get "Summer of Love" to "Luck of the Draw" looking at least as good as the upscaled-from-Universal Pilot. However, the Universal DVD image looks considerably less terrible once decombed and deinterlaced (no more scanlines marring the image) and once it's been mostly de-artifacted (no more blocks and compression noise).

On the HQ preset, the Topaz upscale has sharpened the close-ups. Medium shots are lightly sharpened. And wide shots and blurry shots are left alone, although scaling them has introduced some mild artifacting as you can see in the screenshots above. Those flaws were in the SD version and have been inflated, there's still some fuzziness, but Topaz at least hasn't made it worse in bringing it to 1080p.

I wondered if it'd be best to simply deblock and deartifact the video and leave it at 480p. But it's best to bring it to 1080p so that an HDTV TV won't have to do any further stretching and won't introduce more detail loss or artifacts.

(This is assuming that 4K TVs will recognize 1080p content and reduce their resolution accordingly.)

2021-10-20 20:27:10

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.

2021-10-20 20:03:33

Oh, sorry. I guess I didn't understand that from the video.

Sadly, the two-pass approach to upscaling isn't working with Topaz; it just creates a peculiar watercolour effect across the image. It looks like upscaling the NTSC versions in HQ losslessly/gainlessly is the way forward. I've put the rest of Season 1 in the queue.

2021-10-20 19:47:09

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.

2021-10-20 19:26:23

Torme is nice to fans. I'd agree with that.

However, I haven't seen Torme give away his writing for free -- nor would I ask him to, nor would I hold him to his past promises to do so. I don't expect plumbers to fix my pipes unpaid; I don't expect technicians to repair my fridge for a thank you. If Torme's pilot pitch is rejected, I wouldn't expect him to put his pilot script on the internet. It'd be nice of him to do so, it'd be welcome -- but I wouldn't find fault with him preferring to keep it to himself, conceivably to repurpose the ideas in some other project he can sell, etc..

2021-10-20 12:39:44

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.

2021-10-19 22:24:59

Well, the Artemis HQ setting is designed to not try to change the video aside from making it a larger size without introducing any new flaws. As a result, it does some de-artifacting (to offset creating any new artifacts) and some denoising (to offset inflating the existing noise), but it doesn't sharpen like the LQ and MQ settings.

This might be best for the Season 1 episodes because those LQ and MQ sharpening functions are based on extrapolating detail from grain. Season 1 lacks sufficient grain to extrapolate.

I think the problem with Season 1 on both DVD and blu-ray: they are blurrier than later episodes because they were edited on analog videotape; the on a 340 lines of resolution format; the subsequent episodes on a 250 lines format. Season 2 - 5 episodes are sharper because they were edited on digital videotape with 540 lines of resolution.

It also looks like the PAL masters were created by taking the NTSC versions and stretching them from 640x480 (NTSC) to 720x576 (PAL) for all five seasons of SLIDERS. The digital videotape format of Seasons 2 - 5 came out of this looking great in PAL and blu-ray; the digital format proved resilient enough to survive a 20 per cent stretch. I've compared "As Time Goes By" on Universal DVD and Turbine blu-ray and the Universal DVD version looks well-defined if compressed while the Turbine version has a good amount of filmic detail beyond DVD quality (and diminished by videotape but still present).

However, the analog videotape format of Season 1 has suffered severely. The Pilot was already not as sharp as Season 2 - 5 episodes in NTSC; the stretch to PAL blurred it. And the next eight episodes of SLIDERS: the PAL masters were blurred by being stored on analog videotape.

I don't believe this is Turbine's doing; the problems is in the PAL master tapes.

Season 1 on the blu-ray might appear better at first because it isn't covered in compression artifacts and blockiness like the DVDs. But the blu-ray image's lack of compression still presents an image that is blurrier than the Universal DVD. If you can look under the compression issues of the Universal DVD (or deblock it), Season 1 has a more defined image, it's just badly obscured by compression noise and blockiness and poor interlacing.

The Season 1 episodes, whether Universal or Turbine, are in lousy condition and can't be upscaled as well as Seasons 2 - 5 and certainly not in the same way as Seasons 2 - 5. The Artemis LQ preset on the S2 - S5 DVDs created a lovely 720p image via compression removal and grain-to-pixel conversion. The detail was well-rendered (if hidden by compression) on the S2 - S3 DVDs; the detail-forming grain was available on the S4 - S5 DVDs.

But Season 1 episodes on DVD, despite being less blurry than on blu-ray, are still severely denoised. The video files lack the grain needed for AI upscaling to re-render the files to a better level of picture quality. The best that can be done is to use the HQ preset to remove the compression artifacts and do a lossless scale to 1080p, offering few improvements but creating no new flaws.

It won't look as good as the Season 2 - 5 upscales or PAL masters, but it will certainly look better. I don't know how much better (yet). I'm also not sure if it both can be done effectively in a single pass or if two passes are needed, but I'll start with a single pass for the DVD version of "Summer of Love."

2021-10-19 21:17:31

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.

2021-10-19 19:51:42

Actually, I was mistaken. Watching the upscaled Pilots in motion, I didn't see much difference, but when taking screenshots, it's become clear: the upscaled SD blu-ray is fuzzier than the upscaled Universal version.

I'm not sure if it's because the SD file is fuzzier or if it's because the algorithm I used this time, Artemis HQ, isn't trying to extract and augment detail as much as Artemis LQ, or if it's because I went to 1080p this time instead of 720p.

Artemis HQ is the right choice for the grainy Season 2 - 5 blu-ray episodes, refining existing detail into pixels, but it might be wrong for the Pilot file; maybe AI sharpening is desirable.

2021-10-19 19:24:11

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.

2021-10-19 18:20:36

I think that as fans, we have accomplished anything and everything that could possibly be achieved with SLIDERS via unofficial fan works. We don't have fan films, but we have fan scripts and fan novellas which, given our numbers, is very impressive.

At this point, if SLIDERS can't come back officially through Tracy, we don't need to do anything more. We don't own this property and we can only steward it to an extent and we have reached that upper limit and surpassed it by now.

It's really up to Tracy and NBCU at this moment in 2021; our patronage has taken this TV show from 1995 as far as we can without actually having a TV show.

2021-10-19 17:18:12

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.

2021-10-18 17:52:11

Well, I would describe myself as a 'purist' of sorts in that I like film grain. And I sought out HD versions of the STAR WARS series without any of the 90s CG revisions.

However, having reviewed the SLIDERS PAL masters obsessively and intensively, I am no longer certain that the washed out look of Season 1 is in any way 'pure,' in any way faithful to the intention of the directors, cinematographers, lighting technicians, editors and storyboard artists (unless their intention was to create a fuzzy, out of focus, blurry storytelling product in a visual medium). I would support increasing the saturation to make it more suitable to HDTV presentation.

If we could just find some way to sharpen up these masters...

2021-10-18 15:47:53

RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:

I've been revisiting the upscale samples a bit this weekend, and actually figured something out I hadn't before. When I connect my pc to my tv, I used the tv's PC mode instead of standard for the picture quality. It did something that made the colors pop more... might be a gamma change thing. I've already got some changes to the image in vlc player I had told you about before.
The changes with PC mode made everything look gorgeous and lively and made the show feel newer and more modern.

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.

2021-10-18 07:35:32

omnimercurial wrote:

So he is the literal definition of a "Gray Man", the best type of spy that goes unremarked and blends in.

Interesting! I used to read THE HARDY BOYS CASEFILES when I was a kid and a recurring character was The Gray Man, a short, balding, nondescript man who seemed to vanish into crowds as an indistinct and near-anonymous figure. He was an agent of a clandestine government agency known only as "The Network," and he appeared to the Hardy Boys either to warn them off a case that involved national security (only for them to get involved anyway) or to assign them to a case of national importance (because when the US government's first in espionage operatives was naturally two teenaged boys).

In fact, the description in the books of The Gray Man / Mr. Gray / Edward Gray / Arthur Gray is strangely close to Montague.

Is Montague not only a Gray Man? Is he The Gray Man?

We shall soon find out.

2021-10-18 07:16:56

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.

2021-10-17 21:28:15

Why do you have so many TVs!?! :-D

The 2004 release was made for CRT televisions. The Mill Creek release was not really made with any thought to how it would be viewed; it was just to have bargain bin product to sell. I sometimes wonder if modern HDTVs should offer a diode/scanlines filter for older content.

It's curious. On the whole, I find that the blu-ray's SD episodes for S2 - S5 look better than my upscales. However... the pilot is an odd case. My upscale looks better than the blu-ray version; the blu-ray version is a bit fuzzier and less defined than my upscale (made from the Universal DVD). The pilot is the only upscaled episode I still have on my hard drive.

Comparing the Universal DVD's pilot to the blu-ray version of the pilot side by side -- I'd say I find the Universal DVD a bit brighter, almost like during the scan to MPEG for the DVD, Universal's home video department brightened the image slightly. In contrast, the blu-ray version, taken from the PAL master, is a bit darker and has less apparent shadow detail. My upscale looks better than the blu-ray, but I'm going to try upscaling the blu-ray's pilot tomorrow just to see what happens. I can't do it right now, unfortunately, as I am re-upscaling BIRDS OF PREY's pilot episode with the Artemis HQ preset.

2021-10-17 16:31:06

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.

2021-10-16 20:20:31

Well, it was a highly exclusive advanced class for "the brightest of the bright," as Arturo put it. Anyone there had a genius level intellect. Or the paperwork to say so.

2021-10-16 20:19:07

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

2021-10-15 13:42:53

I took some screencaps from my MKV backup of the blu-ray for you to review.

2021-10-15 05:35:52

RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:

Mmm, I'm talking about what looks like digital noise (it's very square) around the edges of lets say moving characters in wide shots (not on pilot). Perhaps it's an effect of my dvd player trying to keep up with the pal / ntsc conversion. I should prob try to buy a cheap pal player to check if they are avail in u.s.

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.

2021-10-14 22:15:50

RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:

On balance, i'm glad I got it. I'd rather own a copy with files that have the best resolution that we know in existence. Even though I find it inferior to your up-res samples, I think it's good to have on hand the best looking files from an official release. I was surprised at some of the pixelation at times, so I almost wonder if Turbine tried to do some sharpening or something, or maybe that's just how the PAL looks in HD.
It's really a beautiful release from a packaging / menu standpoint as well. Maybe one day we can push Turbine to do an "upconverted hd blu-ray" although they probably wouldn't bite.
I wish we could take a look at the image The Hub had again as they may have done upconverting on that. I do recall it looking good.

The pixelation is actually film grain. I don't believe it has anything to do with Turbine; it's the film stock. I don't think PAL is grainy in itself because the post-Pilot episodes don't have this graininess which means that Topaz AI can't properly upscale them.

2021-10-14 18:57:10

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.

2021-10-14 17:12:46

RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:

I'll check re: PAL frame rates on the xbox settings and then see if i can try it on a couple of other blu-ray players to see if they handle it any different (assuming they can play PAL).
Perhaps the solution would be to rip the discs, then somehow convert it to NTSC but I assume I'd have to do it as non-SD files or the 576 lines of resolution might be bumped down to 480?
It is interesting your blu-ray player seemed to handle the frame rate thing better (and obviously audio as well). Xbox's blu-ray player is supposedly really good for upscaling content but not sure about other aspects.

Well, I used MakeMKV (paid version) to create MKV files which I have played on my Android TV box as a test. The MKV files are encoded with the specific frame rate of 25 frames per second. The video player apps (VLC or the paid version of MX Player) will play the video at 25 frames per second; MKV files aren't decoded based on whether they fall into NTSC or PAL standard, but by the information stored within the codec regarding framerate, and an MKV file can be any resolution. However, I don't know how your devices will handle MKV; my blu-ray player can't even recognize them, so they aren't universal.

I'm not aware of any free software for creating blu-ray backups.

I am very, very, very sorry for recommending a home video release that I now see has issues in being enjoyed by North American fans with NTSC hardware. I did not realize this would be the case as I didn't experience these issues myself, but I clearly got lucky. I am going to re-update the information in the first post of this thread with warnings about the PAL format.

2021-10-14 14:20:13

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.

2021-10-13 22:12:43

So videotapes!

2021-10-12 10:32:43

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.

2021-10-11 15:53:56

In working on some other upscaling experiments, I've come to realize that Topaz is doing some more complicated things than I realized and Season 1 of SLIDERS might benefit from another effort at upscaling.

I was trying to upscale a Canadian show, SLINGS & ARROWS (2003 - 2006, 18 episodes). While released to 720p, the first six episodes were unfortunately not available in true HD; they had been filmed on a standard definition format that looks to me like 8mm film. (The next 12 were filmed in HD and what looks to me like DVCPro HD, a digital videotape format that can be set to record at 720p and 24 frames per second.) The first six episodes were, for blu-ray, stretched from SD to 720p and while they look okay, the entire picture is covered in these huge dot patterns obscuring every part of the image. These are (probably) the 8mm film grains inflated to 720p.

I ran one of these stretched episodes through Topaz with the preset for low quality video but with no change in resolution. Topaz smoothed out all the noise and rebuilt all the detail underneath, but there was a slightly painted look to the video. So I changed it to the preset for medium quality video. Now, a small portion of the noise remained, but much of it had been replaced with crisply rendered detail and it looked like the episodes that were actually shot in 720p. I ran this episode through the preset for high quality video and in this case, Topaz didn't seem to change the video at all, leaving all the video grain untouched.

I also ran the pilot for the TV show CHUCK through Topaz. CHUCK was shot on 16mm film and there's always this pattern of static that seems baked into every frame of every episode. Topaz on the low quality video pre-set totally denoised CHUCK but made it a little too blurry. The medium quality setting was a massive improvement: no grain and a very faint loss of texture sharpness. The high quality video setting, however, left the grain intact but faintly diminished to the point of being totally undistracting and the underlying details were left the same.

I don't think Topaz *has* to remove the grain; I think that the algorithms actually address two aspects of video in need of upscaling: compression artifacts (such as from DVD compression, which need to be lifted off) and grain (which the AI uses to work out what additional pixels should be added and where and how). The low quality preset will aggressively smooth out the image (and severely reduce the grain texture in the process) and this was the right preset for every episode of SLIDERS on DVD -- except for the Season 1 episodes where it smoothed out video that was already (too) smooth. The medium quality preset will reduce the degree to which it targets compression noise.

The high quality preset, however, doesn't seem to be trying to reduce flaws in the image, but is instead designed to scale good quality video to a larger size and not create any new flaws in the process. It's not meant to correct video (although it can), it's meant to be a highly forgiving way of stretching a video that is presumed to already be in good quality.

I'm trying this preset now on "Luck of the Draw," scaling the 576 image to 1080 this time -- the same resolution as my HDTV. It isn't going to make the video look dramatically better, but rather than having my Android TV box scale the video from 576 to 1080 on the fly, Topaz will produce the 1080 resolution in advance so it should at least look about the same as playing the file at the 576 resolution.

I'll see if it's better. I won't know for 22 hours, this upscaling preset is a lot slower than the low quality preset and I'm increasing the video to a higher resolution this time.

2021-10-11 12:59:11

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).

2021-10-11 12:28:34

RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:

shouldn't 35mm look better than 16mm? I am assuming you are saying s4 & 5 were shot on 16mm then. Wouldn't 35mm look better?
Or are you saying 16mm will up-res better in topez because the gain will give it something to "latch" onto?

The issue is that when film is transferred to videotape, there is a corresponding loss of resolution as a high resolution format is reduced to a small percentage of its full detail.

If projected to a screen or scanned for digital presentation to HDTV, then yes, 35mm produces a crisply detailed image while 16mm is less than half the resolution. In addition, the grain on 35mm film that forms the image is small enough to offer subtle texture while in contrast, the grain on 16mm film produces an image that is seemingly covered in noise (although that noise is actually forming the image).

However, what we are seeing when we watch SLIDERS is a videotape version of the film image. The film has been transferred to tape. When 35mm is transferred to tape, the image forming grain looks very fine and minute; the standard definition image can't render it fully because it's too small to show up entirely, and that means a loss of detail in going from film to tape.

The same thing happens with 16mm film. However, the image forming grains on a 16mm are more than twice the size 35mm film. That grain remains visible when reduced to a videotape resolution, which means that the details within those grains remain visible as well. The result is that while Seasons 4 - 5 are grainier and don't look as 'clean,' as Seasons 2 - 3, faces and clothing and surfaces in Seasons 4 - 5 have more detail and texture than than in Seasons 2 - 3.

2021-10-11 08:34:09

TemporalFlux wrote:

I always had a fascination with Montague:
When not in class, did he accidentally solve murder mysteries? I bet he did.

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.

2021-10-11 07:51:11

Got a message from Turbine on whether or not they received videotapes or digital files. "It was so long ago I honestly don't remember." Anyway. If RussianCabbie has further questions, he can message Turbine himself! I can't spend the rest of my life in the middle of this line of inquiry! :-)

**

Going from the Pilot into "Summer of Love," the level of resolution in the episodes clearly takes a drop with the sharpness falling from 40 to 50 per cent. This cannot be the result of a different 35mm film stock or a different cinematographer; that might result in differing depths of light and alternate grain patterns and new colour tones, but that's not what's on the videotape scans.

It looks to me less like a different style and more like the Season 1 episodes having fewer lines of resolution than the Pilot and Seasons 2 - 5. 35mm film doesn't suffer from this; the situation resulted during or after the film being transferred to videotape. Then Season 2 'suddenly' has at least double the sharpness of Season 1 episodes except it's not so sudden given the break between seasons.

The timing is incredibly striking with Season 1 being filmed in late 1994 and early 1995, just before the rise of digital video tape in 1995 through Sony and Panasonic releasing the new DV format, and the shift from analog videotape editing to digital videotape editing with 540 lines of resolution instead of the mid-range of 200 - 250 with U-Matic and Betamax and 8mm. Then we have Season 2 starting production in the fall of 1995, with film being transferred to videotape just after DV tape has become the new industry standard and Season 2 now looks at least twice as sharp as the Season 1 episodes before it.

2021-10-10 09:27:59

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.

2021-10-09 14:20:46

I wonder if the SLIDERS revival, should it come to pass, will bring about a second chance for one of SLIDERS' most underserved characters whose presence could have been a pivotal shift in SLIDERS' status in 1995 and could be equally vital now. I speak, of course, of Computer Boy.

Computer Boy, as diehard Slideheads know, was not merely a euphemism for Michael Hurley. In the original draft of the Pilot, the Doppler computer store was actually called "Top Flight" and the mascot was "Computer Boy," a handdrawn illustration, an artistic drawing of a character who had the body of a pudgy little boy and a computer monitor for a head.

Hurley regularly declared that "Computer Boy" would not tolerate unprofessionalism or tardiness. Quinn longed to tell Hurley where to stick Computer Boy. Also, Wade Welles had apparently been to Hurley's house (because a fortysomething manager had a vulnerable young college girl in his home for reasons so horrifying that Tracy Torme dared not type them into his script). Wade informed Quinn that Hurley had pictures of Computer Boy in his family photo albums.

Computer Boy was cut from the script, but my fascination with Computer Boy remains unabated even 26 years after the Pilot aired. In fact, I have come to believe that had Computer Boy featured in the Pilot, SLIDERS would have become a very different value proposition.

I believe that the imagery and appeal of Computer Boy would have stirred a slumbering country and united America as a people and a nation. I believe that the unpretentious charm of the Computer Boy design would have caused advertisers to leap to their feet, eager for Computer Boy to promote their wares, their fashions, their technologies, their gadgets, their foods, their toys.

I believe that the relentless popularity of Computer Boy would have radically altered SLIDERS in a small and subtle way: Doppler Computers would have been a core location of the show instead of, say, The Cave of Season 3 or the Chandler Hotel set or the Universal clocktower parkette. Doppler Computers would have come to the forefront as the most prominent place because it would be a central nexus point for advertising and product placement that would be both amusing and promotional and any and all brands and items on display would have been augmented by the presence of Computer Boy.

Imagine in the theatre of your beautiful minds the stirring image of a moderately overweight adolescent boy with a 90s era computer monitor for a head and a cheery expression on that screen. Is Computer Boy nothing if not a rendering if our innate optimism and the belief that technology will transform us into the people we want to be? For everyone who has ever found their lives enriched by a watch to help them keep appointments, a calculator to aid them in their bills, a flashlight to guide us in the dark of the night -- are we not all Computer Boy?

I believe that the high promotional and merchandising opportunities offered by Computer Boy in 1995 could have made SLIDERS a mainstream, widely popular dramedy series with impressive earning potential on top of deficit-financed syndication sales and commercial airtime. The presence of Computer Boy would have given SLIDERS tremendous leeway in storytelling so long as Computer Boy was there to sell cars and VCRs and TVs.

I believe that Computer Boy could have been the hero that we needed in the moment that we needed him and we need him once again.

I urge Tracy Torme to, this time in his potential revival, ensure that Computer Boy takes his rightful place in SLIDERS as a figure of merchandising, brand promotion and product placement with the eventual arc of joining the cast as the fifth slider and then assuming the point position as the lead character of SLIDERS.

Computer Boy Forever.

TLDR: I hope a new SLIDERS production uses the Doppler store for product placement.

2021-10-09 11:10:42

Voted also.

2021-10-09 08:39:21

I got a message from Turbine media.

Hi there,
this is SD on Blu-ray, so I am puzzled you find the quality differs from the DVDs. It's the sam data and stream. But we used the PAL masters for Europe of course...
Cheers!

I think it's safe to say that NBCUniversal has plenty of copies of the video masters.

**

Do you use your projector a lot? I imagine the Zoom function, while 'cinematic,' cuts off a lot of vital information from the frame of a 4:3 image.

I am pleased to report that while my upscales are superficially as good as the blu-ray, the blu-ray is better because of all the fine grain. It's interesting: Cez of LEGO SLIDERS has the blu-ray. But he told me that he prefers the look of my upscales (I sent him the clip of Sabrina singing in "Stoker") because they are "cleaner." However, that "cleaner" look is actually a lack of detail due to a lack of film grain; the graininess may seem unappealing in a screenshot, but on an HDTV screen, it gives the image far more physical reality.

The Season 1 blu-ray episodes look a bit muddy for wide shots and distant elements, but I honestly stop noticing it once I get into the episode and the lack of compression artifacts means that the image isn't constantly obscured with distractions.

2021-10-08 13:59:50

I'm going to the movies tonight to see NO TIME TO DIE.

I feel comfortable doing this: in my province, you need proof of vaccination to get into a movie screening. Seating is reserved and spaced out. I'm still going to wear my KF94 mask.

2021-10-07 18:36:31

Apparently, QUANTUM LEAP was a rarity for the first three seasons: it was edited on film and the effects were created optically on film. However, for Seasons 4 - 5, there was a switch to videotape effects and all the effects for the blu-ray version of 4 - 5 are upscaled SD shots.

2021-10-07 15:46:13

Jim_Hall wrote:

I'm still curious about how they did the Quantum Leap blu-ray.

Universal rescanned the film for a blu-ray release. The Mill Creek release is apparently somewhat overcompressed (shocker), but they're HD files, so there's margin for loss.

RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:

this is interesting...
also says resolution: 1080p (upconverted)
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Sliders- … ay/161702/
Altho, it actually may be 720x576, right?

Yes, it's 720x576. The claim about being upconverted is likely miscopied from an entry on a different TV show. The box art even says SD on blu-ray on the site.

No response (yet?), but the Turbine representative posting on the forum seems to speak very colloquial English, so I sent a message asking if Turbine did a new scan of the tapes. I also specified that it is a terrific blu-ray release.

**

Downscaling my AI upscales from 720p back to 546 pixels high didn't improve the image at all for Season 1 episodes.

Adding grain on top of the image isn't helpful for AI upscaling. AI upscaling works by seizing onto the grains that form the picture, not grains laid on top of the picture afterwards. That is simply a layer of dots that the AI dismisses. Season 1 of SLIDERS is way too denoised to upscale properly.

It's definitely not Turbine's fault and I don't even think it's Universal's fault. The 35mm film was transferred to tape in a very peculiar fashion that might have made sense in 1994 (creating a clean image for cathode ray tube TV) but is unfortunate in 2021 for an HDTV that renders that grain as detail.

Future upscaling technology may offer some gains.

**

However, regardless of all that, the Turbine release is an excellent home video release for SLIDERS. Turbine has shown the show some true respect and diligence. The packaging is effective and resilient; the episodes are presented in the correct order and in the highest possible quality from the video masters; the disc count is precisely what is needed to show the files at maximum fidelity while still being small enough to be priced reasonably ($80 for the whole show is great). And Season 1 looks okay. It just doesn't look great.

Considering how bad Season 1 on the Universal DVDs and how Season 1 is contemptibly awful on the Mill Creek discs, the fact that Turbine's files look okay is a massive achievement.

2021-10-06 07:38:52

I think there's been a miscommunication with Mr. Hunt. He says NBCUniversal would never have given Turbine the film for SLIDERS episodes. But SLIDERS' completed episodes do not exist on film. They exist on videotape. Possibly Betacam, U-Matic, DV or some other form of videotape, but tape nonetheless. No scan of videotape is going to be HD. There is no new film scans for SLIDERS because there is no film outside of the raw, unassembled material with no colour processing or effects. NBCUniversal may have given video cassettes to Turbine for a rescan (or yes, Turbine may have paid another company to do it, but Turbine has videotape and film scanning infrastructure and NBCUniversal isn't just going to have a single cassette of their archived shows).

Mr. Hunt seems to be responding with the impression that the completed SLIDERS episodes are stored on film negatives with the need to create release prints and with the master copy remaining under strict storage and preservation. But SLIDERS was made by transferring film to videotape, specifically because videotape was easier and cheaper to edit, duplicate and distribute and store.

It's the only format in which the completed episodes can exist and it would be insane for NBCUniversal to not have multiple copies and lossless duplication for all of their tape-stored shows. The ability for future resale in future formats is a high value proposition, admittedly not for SLIDERS alone, but for the totality of their standard definition catalog of properties.

2021-10-06 05:43:32

There is a pamphlet is bound to the disc case. It's just episode descriptions.

Before going to the office, I put my 720p AI upscales into Handbrake and set them to re-encode the files back to 720x576, but with a sharpening filter applied. Maybe that can add some of the gains while mitigating the losses. But what it comes down to: Topaz AI upselling upscaling is, currently, only effective at removing compression artifacts, and only if the image under that compression retains film grain. The Universal and Mill Creek DVDs had grain for S2 - 5, and after Topaz, those episodes looked broadly like the Turbine Blu-ray but without the fine grain and smaller details in that grain. Wide shots have a watercolour effect, medium and close up shots look good.

However, if the image isn't compressed and lacks grain, Topaz AI will make the image worse. Everything except closeups will have watercolour effect. In terms of the Blu-ray S2 - S5, there is a lot of grain, and AI upscaling the image will simply smooth out that grain in rebuilding that detail at a higher resolution. But the results wouldn't be worth the 24 hours in AI. S2 - S5 would technically be an HD or 4K resolution image that would look clean, but the fine detail would have a sheen over it and you'd get the same results with on the fly bicubic scaling and a noise reduction filter.

2021-10-05 19:37:18

So, I finished "Luck of the Draw." I'm reviewing all the upscaled blu-ray S1 episodes now and... honestly, I don't like the results at all.

Individual shots when frozen look really nice as still images for screencaps. Clear and smooth. But when in motion, the AI upscale has an odd plastic, plasticine, wax dummy look to everything despite more defined detail. The problem is that AI upscaling depends on grain to rebuild detail. The grain in the S1 episodes, as I said, has been severely filtered out. There's a small amount left that makes AI upscaled close-up shots look good. However, AI upscaled medium and wide shots just look terrible, like paintings where the ink has gone outside the outlines of the figure being drawn.

This was present in my Season 2 - 5 upscales for the wide shots, but for S1 SD blu-ray, it affects everything except close-ups of faces.

I think the videotape scan was best left alone and I've decided to delete my upscales and just go with the blu-ray versions as-is. The SD blu-ray of Season 1 is better than the DVDs and AI is only improving close-up shots of people's faces, the rest isn't working.

Also, I'm not going to upscale any more episodes from the blu-ray. It's clear that for these files, AI upscaling and bicubic scaling will produce the same results. The only reason upscaling was so dramatic with Universal and Mill Creek DVDs is because those DVDs were so badly riddled with compression artifacts and the AI could lift away those artifacts. With these blu-ray discs, there's nothing to lift.

The blu-ray is good. Everyone should buy it!

2021-10-05 17:05:59

Sooo, I'm finishing up my upscales on the S1 blu-ray files... but honestly, I'm not sure it was really worth it.

Stretched version on the left, AI upscaled version on the right:

The difference is so small that once the video is in motion, I honestly don't think it would make any difference. It started as decent DVD quality and so it remains.

2021-10-05 15:46:28

I've asked if they did a new scan, no response yet, but they may not have an English speaker reading customer messages. However, compression isn't an issue on their discs. They only have four discs because the files are not HD, just 20 percent bigger than SD. And their video scan can't be improved because their files for S2-5 have all the film grain. Once the film grain is present, the smallest aspect of the film image has been captured. There is no further level of detail to be scanned from the tapes.

2021-10-04 22:00:29

I think Turbine has clearly tapped into a market in Germany with audiences who want German audio tracks and want a premium product. If you look at their website, they're like a boutique version of Criterion. They're like Apple Computers: a small selection of high priced, high quality products with a devoted audience prepared to spend $80 USD on a box set of SLIDERS.

In contrast, Mill Creek is the equivalent of Walmart's laptop division, caring more about hitting a low price point with low to near non-existent levels of effort. Mill Creek will take what they're given; they don't care if their SLIDERS product is good, they just care about making it available, priced at $40 and discounted to $20.

Apple's executives once remarked during the netbook craze, "We don't know how to release a $200 computer that isn't a piece of junk and it's not in our DNA to do that." Turbine's website and their high quality, small selection lineup speaks to a company that wouldn't have tolerated 500 MB files for a SLIDERS DVD; they don't know how to release a $20 box set of SLIDERS that isn't a piece of junk and it's not in their DNA to do that. If that were their only option for SLIDERS, Turbine would have simply declined to license it and found some other project.

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